CHAPTER V.
DEVILRY.
When the cart and its little company had travelled for almost another hour, a dark object in the midst of the line of foam caught their sight.
It was the boy who first saw it, and he suddenly leaned forward, clutching O'Shea's arm as if in fear.
The man looked steadily.
"She's come in since we passed here before." The boy apparently said something, although Caius could not catch the voice.
"No," said O'Shea; "there's cargo aboard of her yit, but the men are off of her." It was a black ship that, sailless and with masts pitifully aslant, was fixed on the sand among the surf, and the movement of the water made her appear to labour forward as if in dying throes making effort to reach the shore.
The boy seemed to scan the prospect before him now far more eagerly than before; but the wreck, which was, as O'Shea said, deserted, seemed to be the only external object in all that gleaming waste.

They passed on, drawing up for a minute near her at the boy's instigation, and scanning her decks narrowly as they were washed by the waves, but there was no sign of life.

Before they had gone further Caius caught sight of the dark outline of another wreck; but this one was evidently of some weeks' standing, for the masts were gone and the hulk half broken through.
There was still another further out.

The mere repetition of the sad story had effect to make the scene seem more desolate.

It seemed as if the sands on which they trod must be strewed with the bleached skeletons of sailors, and as if they embedded newly-buried corpses in their breast.