shoreward to relieve the monotony of the succeeding days. He and
Moran were left a good deal to their own devices. Charlie was the
master of the men now. "Mate," said Moran to Wilbur one day,
after a dinner of turtle steaks and fish, eaten in the open air on
the quarterdeck; "mate, this is slow work, and the schooner smells
terribly foul. We'll have the dory out and go ashore. We can
tumble a cask into her and get some water. The butt's three-
quarters empty. Let's see how it feels to be in Mexico."

"Mexico?" said Wilbur. "That's so--Lower California is Mexico.
I'd forgotten that!"

They went ashore and spent the afternoon in filling the water-cask
from the fresh-water stream and in gathering abalones, which Moran
declared were delicious eating, from the rocks left bare by the
tide. But nothing could have exceeded the loneliness of that
shore and backland, palpitating under the flogging of a tropical
sun. Low hills of sand, covered with brush, stretched back from
the shore. On the eastern horizon, leagues distant, blue masses
of mountain striated with mirages swam in the scorching air.

The sand was like fire to the touch. Far out in the bay the
schooner hung motionless under bare sticks, resting apparently
upon her inverted shadow only. And that was all--the flat, heat-
ridden land, the sheen of the open Pacific, and the lonely
schooner.

"Quiet enough," said Wilbur, in a low voice, wondering if there
was such a place as San Francisco, with its paved streets and
cable cars, and if people who had been his friends there had ever