[Illustration: LANYARD WALKS COMPLACENTLY FROM UNDER THE VERY NOSE OF THE POLICE.]
Lanyard paused to puff his cigar into a glow, and chuckled. "That was a sorry shift, out of the frying-pan into the fire for the poor old Lone Wolf. . . . The schooner turned out to be a rum-runner. Her owners had put into Nassau for a night's carouse. In the morning they came aboard, weighed anchor, and set sail. When I reckoned the time ripe to declare myself, a jury of noble headaches sat on my case, decided that a stowaway with so lame a story could be nothing but a spy of the United States Internal Revenue Service; and, true to piratical tradition, sentenced me to be marooned on a desert isle. That very night the foul deed was done: the next sun rose to shine upon an outcast from humankind squatting forlornly on the beach of a desolate cay, God only knew where, and trying to recall his Robinson Crusoe . . .
"I had a thin time of it for several days, my friend! I lived frugally on the fruits of the land, when and if found, and such creatures of the shallow sea as I was able to snare with naked hands. The fruits were not sustaining, and the raw seafood made me wretchedly sick.
"The cay was one of an endless chain--little islets, some nothing more than rocks, some mere sandbanks dry only at low tide, separated by narrow channels of no great depth. I made my laborious way from one to another; but when at length I did stumble across a settlement it was only a huddle of wattled huts inhabited by negro sponge-fishers, their wives and progeny, who spoke a patois unintelligible to my ears, lived in squalour indescribable, and discovered boundless contempt for a white man in such plight. For all that, they gave me cooked food of a kind into which I did not care to enquire too closely, being contented enough to have it stay on my stomach.
"Their headman had enough English to strike a bargain with me. . . . I had fled in my shirt and trousers, the only valuable I possessed was a wrist-watch in a gold case. Sea-water had put it out of service, but the negro coveted it with great lust, and agreed in exchange for it to convey me in his boat to another island on which there were white men. Thus it fell out that, some ten days after my dive into the harbour of Nassau, I found myself on a cay of good size which served one particular band of rum-runners as a secret rendezvous and dépôt.