“Sakes alive!” cried Turnbull, with rolling eyes; “this ain’t an island in the Atlantic.  We’ve butted the bally continent of America.”

MacIan turned his head, and his face, already pale, grew a shade paler.  He was by this time walking in a world of omens and hieroglyphics, and he could not read anything but what was baffling or menacing in this brown gigantic arm of the earth stretched out into the sea to seize him.

“MacIan,” said Turnbull, in his temperate way, “whatever our eternal interrupted tete-a-tetes have taught us or not taught us, at least we need not fear the charge of fear.  If it is essential to your emotions, I will cheerfully finish the fight here and now; but I must confess that if you kill me here I shall die with my curiosity highly excited and unsatisfied upon a minor point of geography.”

“I do not want to stop now,” said the other, in his elephantine simplicity, “but we must stop for a moment, because it is a sign—­perhaps it is a miracle.  We must see what is at the end of the road of sand; it may be a bridge built across the gulf by God.”

“So long as you gratify my query,” said Turnbull, laughing and letting back his blade into the sheath, “I do not care for what reason you choose to stop.”

They clambered down the rocky peninsula and trudged along the sandy isthmus with the plodding resolution of men who seemed almost to have made up their minds to be wanderers on the face of the earth.  Despite Turnbull’s air of scientific eagerness, he was really the less impatient of the two; and the Highlander went on well ahead of him with passionate strides.  By the time they had walked for about half an hour in the ups and downs of those dreary sands, the distance between the two had lengthened and MacIan was only a tall figure silhouetted for an instant upon the crest of some sand-dune and then disappearing behind it.  This rather increased the Robinson Crusoe feeling in Mr. Turnbull, and he looked about almost disconsolately for some sign of life.  What sort of life he expected it to be if it appeared, he did not very clearly know.  He has since confessed that he thinks that in his subconsciousness he expected an alligator.

The first sign of life that he did see, however, was something more extraordinary than the largest alligator.  It was nothing less than the notorious Mr. Evan MacIan coming bounding back across the sand-heaps breathless, without his cap and keeping the sword in his hand only by a habit now quite hardened.

“Take care, Turnbull,” he cried out from a good distance as he ran, “I’ve seen a native.”

“A native?” repeated his companion, whose scenery had of late been chiefly of shellfish, “what the deuce!  Do you mean an oyster?”

“No,” said MacIan, stopping and breathing hard, “I mean a savage.  A black man.”

“Why, where did you see him?” asked the staring editor.

“Over there—­behind that hill,” said the gasping MacIan.  “He put up his black head and grinned at me.”