A TURTLE POACHER. 29> 



covered with palm fronds. It had been made, we after- 

 wards found out, by a solitary, self-invited guest from 

 the Cayman Islands, who had sailed over here to catch 

 turtles. All sorts of odds and ends had been left lying 

 about it, both inside and outside, denoting, apparently, 

 a very hurried departure. A sort of shackle bed in one 

 corner was covered with some very dirty sacking ; there 

 was a rather ingenious open-air fireplace, where the man 

 had done his cooking ; some torn magazines strewed 

 the floor, and a melancholy look pervaded the whole place^ 

 suggestive of a shipwrecked mariner. They told us that 

 the man had been given leave to fish there on certain 

 conditions, but had transgressed some unwritten law or 

 other, and so had had to "up and git." These people 

 stood no nonsense with poachers, and the " laird's " 

 eldest son, who acted as deputy-governor, ruled the island 

 with a rod of iron, backed up when necessary with a 

 revolver. 



Our poaching friend who had occupied this deserted 

 hut must have had a lonely time of it, sleeping, no doubt, 

 through a good part of the daytime, and watching the beach 

 from the door of his hut for the turtle as they came 

 ashore at night. We could picture him sitting there 

 through the long dark tropical hours with the ghostly 

 rusthng of the palm -fronds above his head, and the moan- 

 ing of the surf upon the distant reef in his ears. From 

 where he sat he could see the creeper-covered breastworks 

 of the buccaneers, and the opening in the reef through 

 which they used to "con" their vessels. 



Did he, we wondered, when he kept his lonely vigils, 

 ever conjure up visions of those bygone days, nearly three 

 hundred years ago, when the sturdy, dare-devil adventurers^ 

 were busy scraping away at their grass-grown ships, lying 

 canted over on their sides in the shallow water ; or 

 did their ghostly forms occasionally throw down their 

 ghostly tools with a ghostly oath, and come ghding up 

 among the trees and undergrowth to throw themselves 

 down and loll upon the sand by his side ? Perhaps they^ 



