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"Maybe they're still in the hut," murmured Maeve

Pitt so in and see?"

She shook her head "Notdark and creepy places is man's work"

Woht After all the dangers Maeve had encountered in the past feeeks, she couldn't bring herself to walk into the hut He bent under the low doorway and stepped inside

After being exposed to bright light for days on end, Pitt's eyes took a minute or two to become accustomed to the interior darkness of the hut Except for the shaft of sun through the doorway, the only illuh the cracks between the logs The air was heavy and das

There were no ghosts or phanto into the empty eye sockets of a skull attached to a skeleton

It lay on its back in a berth salvaged from the sailboat Pitt identified the remains as a male from the heavy brow' above the eye sockets The deadBut rather than having been knocked out of their sockets, they appeared to have' fallen out

A tattered pair of shorts covered the pelvis, and the bony feet still wore a pair of rubber-soled deck shoes There was no flesh evident The tiny creatures that crawled out of the dampness had left a clean set of bones

The only indication of the dead man's former appearance was a tuft of red hair that lay beneath the skull The skeletal hands were crossed above the rib cage and clutched a leather logbook

A quick look around the interior of the hut showed that the proprietor had set up housekeeping in an efficientthe fixtures fro Dorothy had been spread across the ceiling to keep out any wind and rain that penetrated the branches laced in the roof A writing desk held British Ad, tide tables, navigation lights, radio signals and a nautical al shelf stuffed with brochures and books filled with technical instructions on how to operate the boat's electronic instruany box containing a chronometer and a sextant sat on a s beneath the table was a hind bearing co co hel table, and a pair of binoculars was tied to a spoke

Pitt leaned over the skeleton, gently rebook and left the hut

"What did you find?" asked Maeve with burning curiosity

"Let ous chest full of pirate treasure"

Pitt shook his head' "Not this trip What I found was theDorothy onto the rocks He never made it off the island"

"He's dead?" queried Maeve