And Frank _did_ try hard not to grumble; but, with the sea beating eternally around his rocky home, and no change anywhere, day after day, save in the scudding clouds and the waning of the old and the rising of the new moon, he grew very weary of his utter loneliness, and there came a time when he would have given his life to hear again a human voice and see again a human face.
Every hour in the day Frank scanned the horizon in hopes of seeing a sail. He felt that he could not be more than a hundred miles from the Bay Islands, and not altogether out of the track of sailing vessels.
Once he saw what appeared to be a long, low cloud hovering midway between the sky and water, and which he knew to be the smoke from a steamer; but it was so far off that, even with the glass, he could only make out the slow-moving line of smoke that marked her course.
His boat he kept in the channel forming the water entrance to the grotto, and during the roughest weather he had yet experienced on the island the tide never once rose higher than from four to six inches, and its ebb and flow was so silent that it was never heard, no matter how loud and tempestuously the surf was roaring without.
The rainfalls, though light, were more frequent, denoting the near approach of the dreaded wet season, when for days together he might be kept a prisoner in the cave, so he wisely took advantage of what remained to him of fair weather, and was out on the reef every morning as soon as it was light, looking, with longing eyes, for the hoped-for sail.
What wonder, then, after all this patient watching and waiting, that his heart leaped with indescribable joy when he saw a sail, not three miles away, and heading directly for the island!
At first he thought it was a turtle-sloop, by its size and rig, but, as it came nearer, it looked more like a pilot-boat, and somehow the sight of it strongly reminded him of his old enemy, Juan Montes, the wrecker.
They were beating up toward the point where the schooner lay, and their object evidently was to land and take a look at the stranded vessel.
A sudden fear seized Frank. It might be wreckers in search of spoils, and, in that case, from the recent experience he had had among them, it were better perhaps for him to retire to his cave until he knew something more of their intentions.