When he stood beside them once more on the ledge he told them what he had seen.
“It’s a fortress of rock up there, and nothing else,” he said. “We may have to climb at least a couple of hundred feet. Have any of you ever done any Alpine work?”
No; they knew nothing of the perils or delights of mountaineering.
“I’m in the same boat,” he confessed, “but I’ve read a lot about it, and I’ve noticed one thing in our favor—the pitch of the strata is downward towards the land, and that kind of rock face gives the best and safest foothold. Moreover, this cleft, or fault, seems to continue a long way up.
“Now, we haven’t a minute to spare. Each hour will find us weaker. The weather, too, is clear, and the rock fairly dry, but wind and rain, or fog, would prove our worst enemies. There is plenty of cordage down below. I’ll gather all within reach. It may prove useful.”
He seemed to have no more to say, and was stooping to begin the descent when Sturgess grabbed him by the shoulder.
“Wait a second, commodore!” he cried. “You’ve got your job cut out, and I’ll obey orders and keep a close tongue, you bet; but when it comes to collecting rope lengths, that is my particular stunt, as I sell hemp, among other things. You just rest up a while.”
Maseden nodded, and made way for a willing deputy. It was only fit and proper that he, too, should conserve his energies.
“’Round the corner to the left,” he said, “you’ll find a sloping rock. Some wreckage is lodged in an eddy alongside it. Secure the cordage, and any other odds and ends you think useful. Shin up here with a few rope lengths at once. I want them straight away. Have you a strong knife?”
Yes, Sturgess luckily did possess a serviceable knife. By the time he had handed over a number of rope strands Maseden, helped by the girls, had hauled back the mast, to which he began attaching short loops, or stirrups, about two feet apart. He did not expect that either Madge Forbes or her sister would be able to climb the mast, and it was almost a sheer impossibility that he and Sturgess should carry them time and again. So the mast, after serving twice as a bridge, was now to become a ladder.
Sturgess returned with a curiously mixed spoil—a good deal of rope, a sou’wester, a long, thin line—probably the whip used to establish the connection between bridge and forecastle while parts of the Southern Cross still held together—and the ship’s flag, the ensign which was flying at the poop when the ship struck.
Water was dripping off him. Evidently he had either been caught by a sea or had slipped off a rock.
“Accident?” inquired Maseden.
“Not quite. I had to risk something to get these,” and he produced from his pockets a dozen large oysters.
No party of gourmets ever sat down to a feast with greater zest than those four hungry people. Probably, in view of the labors and hardships they were yet fated to undergo, the oysters saved their lives. There is no knowing. Human endurance can be stretched to surprising limits, but, seeing that they were destined to taste no other food during twelve long hours of arduous exertion, the value of Sturgess’s find can hardly be overrated.
The oysters were of a really excellent species, though under the circumstances they were sure to be palatable, no matter what their actual qualities.
“I suppose I need hardly ask if there are any more to be had?” inquired Maseden, when the meal was dispatched.
“No, sir,” grinned Sturgess.
He left it at that, but the others realized that he had probably risked his life more than once in the effort to secure even that modest supply.
The meal, slight though it was, not only gave them a new strength—it brought hope. If only they could win a way to the interior, and reach the land-locked waters of the bay which opened up behind the frowning barrier they must yet scale, in all likelihood they would at least obtain a plentiful store of shell-fish.
Nina Forbes uttered a quaint little laugh as she threw the last empty shell on to the rocks beneath.
“Now,” she said, “I am quite ready for the soup and a joint.”
“Oh, don’t be horrid!” cried Madge. “You’ve gone and made me feel ravenous again.”
“He, or she, who would eat must first labor,” said Maseden. “Thanks to friend Sturgess, we’ve enjoyed a first-rate snack. I’ve never sampled manna, but I’ll back the proteids in three fat oysters against those in a pound of manna any day. Now, let’s get to business. If I’m not mistaken we’re going to tackle a stiff proposition.”
He knotted some stout cord around his own waist and that of each of the others, and slung the longest available coil over his shoulders. Then the mast was fixed in its place across the ravine, and he climbed to the opposite crest by straddling the pole, putting his feet in the loops, and pulling himself up by both hands.
Throwing back the rope, he told Sturgess to see that it was fastened securely to one of the girls on the belt already in position. He purposely refrained from specifying which one. By chance, Madge Forbes stood nearest, and it was she who came.
The crossing was awkward rather than dangerous, and rendered far more difficult by the fact that the unwilling acrobat was compelled to expose her naked limbs. But after the first shock common sense came to her aid, and she straightway abandoned any useless effort to observe the conventions.
Still, she blushed furiously, and was trembling when Maseden caught her hands and helped her to land.
“Thank Heaven we’ve kept our boots,” he said, unfastening the rope. “Just look at the ground we have to cover, and think what it would mean if our feet were bare.”
The comment was merely one of those matter-of-fact bits of philosophy which are most effective in the major crises of life. It was so true that a display of leg or ankle mattered little afterwards. Nevertheless, a similar ordeal caused Nina to blush, too, but she laughed when Madge cried ruefully:
“What in the world has happened to my ankles? They are scrubbed and bruised dreadfully.”
“That was last night’s treatment, my dear,” said her sister. “I escaped more lightly than you.”
“But what do you mean? I felt some soreness, but imagined I knocked myself in coming from the wreck.”
“You were in a dead faint, so Mr. Maseden and Mr. Sturgess massaged you unmercifully.”
Madge surveyed damages again.
“I must have been very bad if I stood that,” she said.
“You’ll be worse before we see the other side of this cliff,” murmured Nina, casting a critical eye over the precipitous ground in front.
It is not to be wondered at if the girls’ hearts quailed at the sight. They were standing on a sloping terrace, of no great depth, which ended abruptly at the foot of a towering cliff. A little to the right ran the line of the cleft, but so forbidding was its appearance, and so apparently unscalable its broken ledges, that the same thought occurred to each—what if they had but left a narrow, sheltered prison for a wider and more exposed one?
Maseden, however, allowed no time for reflection. He and Sturgess had already dragged the foremast after them, and were shouldering it in the direction of the first hump of rock which seemed to offer a way into the cleft. Any other route was absolutely impossible.
After one last glance at the reef which had slain a gallant ship and so many lives, they quitted the ledge which had proved their salvation. It was then five o’clock in the morning. At four o’clock that afternoon they flung themselves, utterly spent, on a carpet of thick moss which coated the landward slope of the most westerly point of Hanover Island.
Their hands and knees were torn and bleeding, their fingernails broken, their bones aching and their eyes bloodshot. But they had triumphed, though many a time it had seemed that if Providence meant to be kind, an avalanche of loose stones or a slip on treacherous shale would have hurled them to speedy death on the rocks beneath.
On five separate occasions they had found themselves strung out on a narrow ledge which merged to nothingness in the sheer wall of a precipice. Five times had they to go back and essay a different path, often beginning again fifty or even a hundred feet below the point they had reached. They were obliged to drag or carry the heavy topmast every inch of the way, because, without its aid, either as a bridge or a ladder, they could never have surmounted a tithe of the obstacles encountered.
In those eleven awful hours they had climbed not two, but five hundred feet, a distance which, on the level, a good runner would traverse in about twenty seconds, whereas it took them an average of a minute to climb one foot.
The marvel was that the women could have done it at all, even with the help which both men gave unstintedly. During the last weary hours no one uttered an unnecessary word. Each of the four was determined to go on, not for his or her own sake, but for the sake of the others. They were roped together. If one fell, it meant disaster to all. So, with splendid grit, each resolved not to fall so long as hand would hold or foot lodge on the tiniest projection.
But, with final success, came utter collapse. Even Maseden, far stronger physically than Sturgess, fell like a log. True, he had borne far more than his share of the day’s toil. No matter what his inmost thoughts, he had never, to outward seeming, lost heart. It was he who always found the new line, he who earliest decided to turn back and try again.
It was he, too, who called now for renewed exertion after some minutes of complete and blissful repose.
“Sorry to disturb your siesta,” he cried, with a woful assumption of cheery confidence, “but we must reach the shore, if possible, before night falls. Oysters and Chablis await us there. En avant, messieurs et ’dames!”
Nina Forbes sat up and brushed the hair from her eyes.
“I don’t think I can walk another yard. Won’t you leave me here?” she demanded.
“No.”
“Are we to carry that mast with us?”
“Why not? We may need it.”
Her eyes followed Maseden’s down the slope. Compared with the sullen, frowning realm of rock they had quitted, this eastern side of the island resembled a Paradise. The moss on which they were resting was thick and wiry. A hundred feet beneath were fir-trees, sparse and stunted at first, but soon growing luxuriantly, yet promising, to Maseden’s weighing eye, a barrier nearly as formidable as the fearsome wall of rock they had just surmounted.
He knew that which was happily hidden from the others. In this wild land, seldom, if ever, trodden by the foot of man, the forests throve on the bones of their own dead progenitors. Aged trees fell and rotted where they lay, and the roots of newcomers found substance among the heaped-up logs. Gales and landslides helped to swell the mad jumble of decaying trunks, which formed an impassable layer hardly ever less than fifteen feet in depth and often going beyond thirty feet.
Of the two, Maseden believed he would sooner tackle another wall of rock rather than essay to cross that belt of fantastic growths.
But, down there was water—perhaps food—certainly shelter. He guessed that at an altitude where hardy Alpine mosses alone flourished the cold would be intense at night. Already there was a shrewd nip in the breeze. They must not dawdle another instant.
He made up his mind to head for a gap in the trees which seemed to mark a recent land-slip, and trust to fortune that the gradient might not be too steep. Better any open risk than the fall of perhaps the whole party into a pit of dead wood choked with fœtid and noisome fungus growths. Once caught in such a trap, they might never emerge.
And now they met with their greatest among many pieces of luck that day. The opening Maseden had noticed was not the track of an avalanche, but a rough water-course, through which the torrential rain-storms of the coast tumbled headlong to the sea.
Notwithstanding the long-continued gale, the descent was so steep that only a vestige of a stream trickled down the main gully. Here and there lay a pool. Though the water was brackish, it was strongly pigmented with iron, and the roots of vigorous young trees seemed to find sustenance in it.
At any rate, they must drink or die, so they drank, though Maseden warned them to be moderate. They laved their wounds, which were intensely sore at first, owing to the encrustation of salt on their skins. But here, again, nature’s surgery, if painful, was effective. Salt is a rough and ready antiseptic. None of them owned any real medical knowledge. In their hard case ignorance was surely bliss, because they must have had the narrowest of escapes from tetanus.
The descent, though trying, was not specially perilous. Three times did the mast bring them down small cataracts, and many times across extraordinarily ingenious log barriers, set up against the stress of falling water by nature’s own engineering methods.
Once, indeed, a heavy boulder, poised in unexpected balance, toppled over just as they had reached the base of a waterfall. It would have crushed Nina Forbes to a pulp had not Maseden seen the stone move. As it was, he snatched her aside, and a ton of rock crashed harmlessly on to the very spot where she had been standing the fifth part of a second earlier.
Such an incident, happening in civilized surroundings, would have been regarded as phenomenal, something akin to an escape from a train wreck. Here it passed as a mere item in the day’s trials. It did not even shake the girl’s nerve.
“I suppose I ought to say ‘thank you,’ but I’m not quite sure you have done me a service,” she murmured wearily.
Hitherto both she and her sister had been so brave, so uncomplaining, that Maseden took warning from the words. The two girls were at the extreme limit of their powers of endurance, mentally and physically. It was five o’clock in the evening. After a day and a night of passive misery they had been subjected to every sort of muscular strain during nearly twelve hours, and might collapse at any moment now.
“Courage!” he said, with a gentleness curiously in contrast with the rather gruff and hectoring manner he had adopted all day. “You haven’t noticed how near the sea is. We shall be on shore in a few minutes.”
The girl’s lips parted in a wan smile.
“You are wonderful,” was all she said, but the pathos underlying the tribute wrung his heart.
Somehow, anyhow, they slithered and dropped down the remaining steps of their Calvary. During the last few feet they were able to leave behind the friendly topmast, but the shadows were falling when they stood, forlornly triumphant, on the flat rocks which served as the beach of the estuary.
The two girls sank at once to a moss-covered boulder. They looked so deathly white beneath the tan of exposure and the crust of dirt and blood not altogether removed when they bathed their faces in the pool, that Maseden unstrapped the poncho which he carried slung to his shoulders and produced from its folds that thrice-precious bottle of brandy.
The patients weakly resisted his demand that they should share nearly the whole of the mouthful of spirit which remained; but he was firm, and they drank. Sturgess, who staggered and nearly fell when he tried to move after the brief halt, was given a few drops; Maseden himself had what was left. Then he filled the bottle with water, and each took a long drink.
There is this supreme virtue in water, that, while slaking thirst, it stays the worst pangs of hunger, and Maseden had enough strength in reserve to hurry off in search of oysters, or any sort of shell-fish, before daylight failed wholly. He was fortunate in finding a well-stocked bed almost at once.
He alone knew what agony he endured when his bruised and torn fingers were plunged into ice-cold salt water. But he persevered, and gathered such a quantity that in ten minutes he and his companions were enjoying a really satisfying meal.
While they ate, they examined their surroundings. It was half tide. A bleak, rocky foreshore provided at least an ideal breeding-ground for oysters. Behind them rose the solemn bank of pine-trees through which they had come. On the right, only half a mile away, stood the great shoulder of rock which shut out the Pacific on that northern side of the estuary. In front, two miles or more distant, lay a jumble of forests and wild hills, and a similar vista spread far to the left, because the estuary widened to a span of several miles.
It was, indeed, a wild, desolate, awe-inspiring land, a territory abandoned of mankind! In such regions old-time sailors found fearsome monsters, amphibious reptiles larger than ships, and gnomes of demoniac aspect.
Such visions were easy to conjure up. Nina Forbes saw one now in the dusk.
“Oh, what is that?” she cried, in genuine alarm, gazing seaward with terror-laden eyes.
It took some time to unmask the strange denizen of the deep which she had discovered. Three seals, lying in a row on a flat rock, looked remarkably like the accepted pictures of a sea-serpent, but the illusion was destroyed when one of the creatures dived, followed, in turn, by each of the others, in one, two, three order.
“We must rise before dawn to-morrow,” said Maseden. “Seals are good to eat. You and I, Sturgess, can cut one off when the pack comes on shore.”
“Seals may be good to eat, but they will also be hard to eat if we are unable to cook them,” put in Madge.
“There were times to-day when I could have eaten seal cooked or uncooked,” admitted Nina.
“Probably such times will recur to-morrow,” said Maseden. “You will soon grow tired of oysters for every meal. Did you ever hear of the sailing ship which took a cargo of bottled porter from Dublin to Cape Town? After crossing the line she was caught in a gale, disabled, and carried hundreds of miles out of her course. She ran short of water, so, during three wretched weeks, officers and crew drank stout for breakfast, dinner and supper. When, at last, the vessel reached Table Bay, if porter was suggested as a beverage to any member of the ship’s company there was instant trouble.”
“Still,” said Madge thoughtfully, “I don’t think I shall like raw seal.... You are very clever, Mr. Maseden. You must find some means of making a fire.”
Maseden glanced up at the darkening sky.
“At present the pressing problem is where are we to sleep,” he said.
“Under the deodars,” suggested Sturgess promptly.
“Yes, I suppose so. But we must make haste.”
“If you ask me to put up any sort of hustle, I’ll crack into small fragments,” said Sturgess, rising to his feet slowly and stiffly.
But this young American—a typical New Yorker in every inch—was blessed with a valiant heart. He helped Maseden to break and cut small branches of the fragrant pines, and pile them beneath the largest tree they could find on a comparatively level piece of ground above high-water mark. The two girls were half carried to this soft couch, which invited sharp comparison with the wet, slimy rock of the previous night.
Despite their protests, they were wrapped in the now dry ship’s flag and the poncho, while the men covered themselves with the oilskins, the coat which Sturgess had found on the reef coming in very useful for Maseden.
Then they slept. And how they slept! The mere fact that they had eaten a quantity of good food induced utter weariness and exhaustion.
During the night it rained heavily, and the tide pounded fiercely on the boulders only a few feet below their resting-place. But they hardly moved, and certainly paid no heed.
Maseden was awakened by a veritable cascade of water on his face; the tree, after the manner of its kind, though shooting the rain generally off its layers of branches, now in full summer foliage, provided occasional channels through which the torrent poured as from a spout, and he was stretched beneath one. He swore softly, saw that the others were undisturbed, moved his position slightly, and fell sound asleep again.
As for rising betimes to catch a seal, it was broad daylight when he shook off the almost overpowering desire to go on sleeping.
Nina and Madge were lying in each other’s arms, breathing easily, and looking extraordinarily well. Beyond them, Sturgess lay like a log, his clean-cut, somewhat cynical features relaxed in a smile. It was a pity to rouse him, but Maseden saw by his watch that they had enjoyed nine hours of real repose, and, as the weather was fine again and there was a promise of sunshine, it behooved them to be up and doing.
So he shook his compatriot gently by the shoulder, and Sturgess was awake instantly.
“Gosh!” he said, gazing at a patch of blue sky overhead. “I was just ordering clams on ice in Louis Martin’s. It must have been a memory of those oysters.”
Maseden, by a gesture, warned him not to speak loudly, whereupon Sturgess sat up, saw the two girls, grinned, and stole quietly after his companion.
“Say,” he confided, when at a safe distance, “they’re the limit, aren’t they?”
“They’re all right, so far as girls go,” agreed Maseden.
“Oh, come off your perch! Who ever loved that loved not at first sight? If we win through I’m going to marry Madge, or I’ll know the reason why, and if you have half the gumption we credit you with you’ll tack on to sister Nina as soon as you’ve shunted that sporty young person who grabbed you at the cannon’s mouth in Cartagena.”
“Will you oblige me by not talking such damn nonsense?” growled Maseden, blazing into sudden and incomprehensible wrath.
“Calm yourself, hidalgo!” came the quiet answer. “Sorry if I’ve butted in on your private affairs. Having fixed things for myself, I thought I’d do you a good turn, too. That’s all.”
“Don’t you realize that you are hardly playing the game by even hinting at such possibilities in present conditions?”
Maseden regretted the words the instant they were uttered. Sturgess stopped as though he had been struck, and his somewhat sallow face flushed darkly.
“It will be a pretty mean business if you and I manage to quarrel, won’t it?” he said thickly.