With the
fading out of that last vestige, the NORAH CREINA,
passed again into the empty world of cloud and water by
which she had approached; and the next features that
appeared, eleven days later, to break the line of sky,
were the arid mountains of Oahu.
It has often since been a comfortable thought to me
that we had thus destroyed the tell-tale remnants of
the FLYING SCUD; and often a strange one that my
last sight and reminiscence of that fatal ship should
be a pillar of smoke on the horizon. To so many others
besides myself the same appearance had played a part in
the various stages of that business; luring some to
what they little imagined, filling some with
unimaginable terrors. But ours was the last smoke
raised in the story; and with its dying away the secret
of the FLYING SCUD became a private property.
It was by the first light of dawn that we saw, close on
board, the metropolitan island of Hawaii. We held
along the coast, as near as we could venture, with a
fresh breeze and under an unclouded heaven; beholding,
as we went, the arid mountain sides and scrubby cocoa-
palms of that somewhat melancholy archipelago.
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