“Oh, forget it!” cried Maseden, more angry now with himself than with the youngster whose candor had provoked this outburst. “I didn’t intend to be offensive. My mind was running on the day’s worries. We’re in a deuce of a fix, and I can see no way out of it. If I annoyed you by a careless expression, I apologize.”
“Rub it off the slate, friend. I only want to put in a first bid for Madge, so to speak.”
“But, for all you know, she may be—engaged to some other man,” Maseden could not help retorting.
“Nix on the other fellow. He’s not on in this film. I’ll have him beaten to a frazzle long before I see good old New York again.”
Then Maseden did contrive to choke back the very obvious comment that Madge Forbes might even be married already. Sufficient for the day was the problem thereof. It was not matrimony that was bothering him, though the queer marriage tie contracted in San Juan seemed fated to make its fetters felt even in the wilderness. He was wondering what would happen if, as was highly probable, they were marooned on an island rarely if ever visited by man.
He laughed grimly.
“New York is away below the horizon this morning,” he said. “Let’s go and hunt more oysters!”
Still, for the life of him he could not altogether get rid of the spectre raised by Sturgess’s almost banal candor. The New Yorker was unmistakably a good fellow. He had behaved like a man during twenty-four hours which tested one’s moral fibre as pure metal is separated from dross in a furnace. Was it quite fair that he should be kept in ignorance of the astounding fact that Madge Forbes, and none other, was the heroine of that extraordinary ceremony in the Castle of San Juan?
Why not tell him? There was every reason to believe that he had indulged in no overt love-making as yet. Why not emulate his outspokenness, and thus spare him the certain shock of discovery?
Moreover, when the truth came out, would he not feel with justice that he had been very badly treated both by Maseden and the woman whom he professed to love?
Maseden squirmed under the thought. Such a discussion, at such a moment, savored of rank lunacy, but it was better to act crazily than dishonorably.
Then came a reflection that hurt like a cut from a jagged knife. Sturgess was an impressionable youngster. He might easily transfer his wooing from Madge to Nina.
Maseden could not help asking himself why a torturing question of that kind should come to plague him at a time when their lives were in dire jeopardy. They might, by chance, exist a week, a month—several months in that dreadful fastness of rock, forest and sea, but the briefest glance towards the interior showed how desperate was their case, and he knew only too well that the absence of proper food, of fire, of clothing, of everything that renders life tolerable and joyous, would soon bring mortal sickness in its train, even though they ran the gantlet of other perils like unto those of yesterday.
Why, he wondered, in addition to ending these present evils, should he be called on to solve a fine point in ethics?
He did not realize how clearly the torment in his soul was revealed in his face until Sturgess demanded cheerfully:
“What’s worrying you now, boss? You ain’t chewing on that little misunderstanding of a minute ago, are you?”
Maseden smiled dourly. Here was an opening, and he would take it, no matter what the personal cost.
“No. That is not my way,” he said. “I was merely turning over in my mind a somewhat ticklish problem. Sometimes, when a man does not know how to act for the best, it is not a bad plan to run counter to one’s own inclinations. Then, at any rate, there is no fear of selfishness warping one’s judgment. In this instance—”
“Is the tide rising or falling?” interrupted Sturgess excitedly.
“Falling.”
“Good.... What’s that?”
They were walking in the direction of the oyster bed which Maseden had found overnight. The beach was strewn with boulders, the surface of each a mosaic of myriads of tiny mussels. The rock floor was not quite flat, but dipped slightly eastward, and the outcrop of every stratum, worn smooth by countless tides, offered a number of irregular paths by which it was possible to walk dry-shod a mile or more towards mid-channel.
Between these tracks, so to speak, the water lodged in pools, and here, too, as might be expected, the smaller rocks gathered, mostly in groups.
Among one such pile Sturgess’s sharp eyes had detected some wreckage.
Now, any sort of flotsam or jetsam might be peculiarly useful to folk whose belongings had been reduced to a cloak, a ship’s flag, a few oilskins, and, in the case of the women, little else. The sight of a cabin trunk, up-ended among a litter of woodwork and tangled iron, drove into the special Limbo provided for all vain and foolish things the personal difficulty which was perplexing Maseden.
He hurried on, and soon was aware of an oddly familiar aspect about the trunk, battered though it was, and discolored by long immersion in salt water.
“Well, if this isn’t something like a miracle!” he cried when he could believe his senses. “Here is my own trunk! The last time I saw it, it was wedged between the forecastle deck and the iron frame of a bunk.”
“The court accepts the evidence,” chortled Sturgess. “We find in close conjunction the remains of a bunk and a deck. If you produce a key, and unlock the aforesaid trunk, it will be declared yours without further inquiry.”
“There is no key. It is only strapped.”
“What’s inside?”
“Some underclothing, socks and shirts.... By Jove! When dried, they will be invaluable to those two girls.... How in the world did they contrive to lose most of their clothing? You were all fully dressed when the ship struck, I suppose?”
“I guess your college class didn’t include a course of heavy seas washing through a deck-house every half minute during a whole day. What sort of feminine rig would stand the tearing rush of tons of water hour after hour? Man alive, I had the devil’s own job to keep any of my own clothes on, and would never have succeeded if I wasn’t well buttoned up in an oilskin. As for the girls’ skirts and things, they simply fell off ’em. At first they made frantic efforts to save a few rags, but they had to give up. I saw Madge’s skirt washed overboard in strips. All the seams parted. I’m in pretty bad shape myself. Look here.”
Sturgess opened his oilskin coat, and showed how the lining had fallen out of his coat and the back had parted from the front of his waistcoat.
“If it hadn’t been for the oilskins we would all have been stripped stark naked,” he went on. “Gee! It’s marvelous what one can withstand in the shape of exposure when one is pushed to it good and hard. I should have said that those two girls would have died fourteen times on the wreck, let alone the hour before dawn yesterday.”
Maseden, meanwhile, was pulling the trunk free from the twisted frame of the bunk, which, screwed to the deck, had carried a precious argosy nearly a mile from the reef; then, most luckily, it had caught in a clump of seaweed, and remained anchored during two ebbs.
“We needn’t bother to open it here,” he said. “I know exactly what is inside—rough stuff, bought to maintain my disguise as a vaquero, but all the better for present purposes.”
He paused dramatically, and said something which might, perhaps, sound better in Spanish. When a man who has not been perturbed in the least degree by grave and imminent danger shows signs of real excitement, his emotion is apt to be contagious, and his companion’s eyes sparkled.
“Holy gee! What is it?” he almost yelped. “Spit it out! Don’t mind me!”
“This trunk contains a gun and cartridges!”
“Gosh! I thought it must be either a steam launch or an aëroplane! What is there to shoot, anyhow?”
“Don’t you understand? Waterproof cartridges mean fire. We’ll have a roaring fire within five minutes.”
“Put it there!” shouted Sturgess, holding out his right hand. “There’s millions of tons of iron-stone in that hill above the wood. Let’s start a ship-yard!”
They were so elated that they forgot to gather any oysters, and even neglected to take away the iron and wires of the bunk, scraps of metal which might prove of inestimable worth in the days to come. Luckily, however, they had plenty of time, because the tide would fall during another couple of hours.
Maseden’s hands almost trembled as he undid the straps. Now that fortune had proved so kind he feared lest the cartridges might be spoiled. But a bullet torn from a brass case was followed by grains of dry, black powder.
Soon he had manufactured a squib. Dead branches off the pines—always the best of fire-wood, and far preferable to dead wood lying on the ground—were heaped in a suitable place, and, in less than the specified five minutes, a good fire was crackling merrily.
There were logs in plenty. Had they chosen, the two men could have built a furnace fierce enough to roast an ox whole.
It was good to see the wonderment on the faces of Madge and Nina when they awoke to find an array of coarse flax and woolen garments steaming in front of the blaze, and a dozen big oysters, cooked in the shells, awaiting each of them. About that time, too, the sun appeared, and his first rays changed the temperature of the land-locked estuary from biting cold to an agreeable warmth.
So the four breakfasted, and, at the close of the meal, held a council of war. With a charred stick, Maseden drew on a rock a rough map of Hanover Island.
“I overheard from one of the crew of the Southern Cross,” he said, “that the ship was supposed to be drifting towards Nelson Straits, which is the only opening into Smyth’s Channel ever attempted hereabouts, even in fine weather, by small sealers and guano-boats. Now, it happens,” he went on reflectively, “that this coast has always had a strange fascination for me.”
“It was a treat to see you clinging to it lovingly for hours at a time yesterday,” put in Sturgess.
“We want to hear what Mr. Maseden has to say,” cried Madge sharply.
“Sorry. I shan’t interrupt again. But, before the court resumes may I throw in a small suggestion? How about dropping these formal Misters and Misses? My front names are Charles Knight, usually shorted by my friends and admirers into C. K. What’s yours, Maseden?”
“Philip Alexander, otherwise ‘Alec.’”
“Got you. Now, girls, what do Nina and Madge stand for?”
He little guessed the explosive quality of that harmless question, but he did wonder why both Nina and Madge should blush furiously, and why their eyes should flash a species of appeal to Maseden.
Nina was the first to recover her composure.
“Nina and Madge should serve all ordinary purposes, C. K.,” she said with a rather nervous laugh.
“They’ll do fine,” agreed Sturgess. But he did not forget his own surprise—and the cause of it.
Maseden, quite unprepared for this verbal bombshell, plunged into generalities somewhat hurriedly.
“Barring the polar regions, the southern part of Chile is the wildest and least known part of the world,” he said. “It is extraordinary in the fact that every ship which sails to the west coast of both the Americas from Europe, and vice versâ, either passes it in the Pacific or winds among its islands for hundreds of miles along Smyth’s Channel; yet it remains, for the greater part, unexplored and almost uncharted. Darwin came here in the Beagle, and the sailor to-day depends on observations made during that voyage, taken nearly three-quarters of a century ago. Darwin’s Journal, and other of his works containing references to South America, shortened many an evening for me on the ranch.”
He paused a moment, before adding, in an explanatory way:
“My place, Los Andes, was a good twelve miles from Cartagena, and I had no English-speaking neighbors. I told you last night, if you remember, how I came to settle down there?”
Sturgess, though evidently burning to ask a question, merely nodded, grinning cheerfully when he caught Nina’s eye.
“I only want you to understand why I claim some knowledge, such as it is, of this locality,” continued Maseden. “At the southwest corner of Hanover Island is a ten-mile patch called Cambridge Island, and the two form the northern boundary of Nelson Straits. But in the channel between them are two smaller islands, and, unless I am greatly mistaken, there they are.”
He pointed across the estuary, and indicated a break in the coast-line, beyond which other more distant hills were visible.
“It follows,” he went on, “that when we sail up this channel to the left, we shall find ourselves in Nelson Straits, and, after covering fifty or sixty miles of fairly open water—open, that is, in the sense that there is plenty of it—we shall be in Smyth’s Channel, and in the track of passing ships.”
He paused, but did not try to ignore the plain demand legible on three intent faces.
“Yes; that is the only way,” he said quietly. “We are here. We are alive. There is plenty of wood, and we have brains, hands, and fire. We must construct some sort of a raft, something in the style of the lumber-rafts built on big rivers, and take advantage of the tides. Our present position is quite inaccessible by land, and, I fear, equally unapproachable by water.
“And I’ll tell you why I think so. Within quarter of a mile of us are some splendid oyster-beds. The coastal aborigines live mainly on shell-fish, and this store would have been visited by them times out of number if they could get at it. But I have seen no heaps of shells, such as must have remained if the savages came here.
“What has stopped them? Impassable forests, glaciers, and precipices on land, dangerous reefs and fierce tidal currents by sea. The geological feature which helped our climb yesterday must create reef after reef across the track of the channel.
“You see those pathways there?” and he stretched a hand towards the series of rock outcrops lining the shore like groins. “They have been almost leveled by the storms of centuries. But the Southern Cross was lost on one of them, and there must be scores of others between here and Smyth’s Channel. There may be passages between many if not all, but it is self-evident that navigation is far too risky for the small coracles of the natives. We must go slowly and safely, if possible. If our raft will not cross a reef, we must abandon it, and build another on the far side. We may have to do that six times, a dozen times, even in sixty miles. There is no other means of escape. We may be weeks, months, in winning through, but that is our only practicable plan.”
“Gee!” murmured Sturgess. “And I’m due in New York on February 10!”
The sheer absurdity of naming a date relaxed the tension. They all laughed, though not with the light-hearted mirth which four young people might reasonably display after dodging death continuously during twenty-four hours.
“By the way, what day is it?” inquired Nina Forbes wistfully.
“Sunday, January 23,” said Sturgess. “I know, because it was my birthday yesterday. Somewhere about eleven o’clock a. m., I was twenty-seven. I didn’t make a fuss about it. Just at that time, wise Alec here was holding on to a rock by his teeth and one toe, and telling us we had to go back carefully after a beastly difficult climb.”
“Sunday!” repeated the girl.
Her thoughts traveled many a thousand miles to the quiet little New Jersey township where her mother was living during the absence of husband and daughters in South America. It was winter in the North, and there might be snow on the fields and ice on the streams, but snow and ice conforming to New Jersey notions of order and seemliness.
What a contrast between the white mantle marked out in rectangles by the country roads and ditches, with here and there a group of trees, a trim shrubbery, a red-roofed farm or dwelling house, and this chaos of rock, forest, cliff and ocean!
“Will the loss of the Southern Cross be reported?” she asked suddenly. The query was addressed to no one in particular, but Maseden answered.
“Her non-arrival will be noted at Punta Arenas,” he said. “After a time the insurance people will post her as ‘missing.’ Then she will be assumed to be lost. Possibly some of the wreckage may be picked up. Or a boat. What became of all the boats?”
“Some of ’em were stove in, others washed clean off their davits,” said Sturgess. “It was absolutely impossible to lower one. No one who did not witness it would have believed that a fine ship could break to pieces so quickly. Gee whiz! One minute I was standing near the fore-rail, looking at the narrowing entrance in full confidence that we should win through, and the next I was fighting for my life in the smoking-room, up to my waist in water.”
“You are not quite doing yourself justice, C. K.,” said Madge. “You were fighting for other people’s lives as well. I have the clearest recollection of being hauled up the companion ladder to the bridge by you and one of the ship’s officers. Then you went back and helped Nina and Mr. Gray.”
“That is what I was there for,” was the prompt reply.
“This being Sunday, do we labor or rest, Alec?” inquired Nina.
It was the first time either girl had used Maseden’s Christian name, and the sound on a woman’s lips was like a caress. He reddened, and smiled. Nina’s eyes met his, and dropped confusedly.
“We rest,” he said. “We need rest. At least, I am free to confess that I do. You energetic people are inclined to forget that I began a really strenuous life by receiving a rap on the head that put me out of commission during several hours.... Now, Mr. Sturgess—sorry, C. K.—and I are going on a little tour along the coast. We shall be away an hour or more. I advise you two to rig yourselves as best you can in my superfluous garments. Make sure they are quite dry. It may seem rather absurd, but putting on damp clothing is an altogether different thing from allowing wet clothes to dry on your body. Keep a good fire. There is nothing to be afraid of. In this strange land there are neither animals nor reptiles.”
“Nor birds,” said Nina.
“Yes, plenty of birds, but the nesting season is long over, and many of the sea-birds have gone south. As we progress further inland we shall come across great colonies of puffins, ducks and swans. Curiously enough, there are plenty of humming-birds, which is about the last species one would expect off-hand to find in these wastes.... Come along, C. K. Let us try and circumvent the wily seal.”
“Why not shoot one?” said Sturgess.
“Because I have only twenty-four cartridges, and each one may yet be worth its weight in diamonds. Remember, everybody!—we only use the rifle in the last extremity, either for food, or fire, or actual self-preservation. Once lighted, on no account must the fire be allowed to die out. Even when we build a raft, we can imitate the natives, and carry a fire with us. To save us men from temptation to-day, should we find a seal, we’ll leave the gun with the ladies.
“A couple of cudgels, with ends sharpened and hardened in the fire, should serve our needs, and do the seal’s business as well. If not, we must try again, and exist on oysters until we become more expert.... I’ll put five cartridges in the magazine, and show you girls how it works. If you regard each shell as worth, say, five thousand dollars, you’ll appreciate the net value of the whole twenty-four.”
Within a few minutes Maseden and Sturgess set off. The tide was now at its lowest point, so they had no difficulty in walking in almost any direction. Their first act was to drag ashore the remains of the bunk. Given a quantity of malleable iron and a fire, it would not be an impossible task to construct some rough tools.
While placing this treasure-trove above high-water mark they saw the two girls examining the stock of underclothes which Providence had literally provided for their needs.
“Gosh!” said Sturgess, almost reverently. “It beats me to know how a couple of delicate women could endure the hardships we have gone through.”
“But women are not delicate. I don’t understand why men invariably harbor that delusion. In passive resistance women are more steadfast, even hardier, than men. That is an essential, don’t you see? The continuance of the race depends far more on the female than on the male. Civilization tries to upset the great principles of life, but fails, luckily. Savage tribes are aware of that elementary fact. Low down in the social scale the women do all the work, while the men loaf around, and only get busy when hunting or fighting.”
“Tell you what, Alec,” said Sturgess admiringly, “once fairly started, you talk like a book.”
Such a remark could hardly fail to act as a gag on one of Maseden’s temperament. By habit a silent man, he shrank from even the semblance of loquacity. Sturgess could extract no further information from him. He in his turn soon learned to guard his tongue when the Vermonter was in the talking vein, and unconsciously pouring out the stock of knowledge and philosophy garnered during those peaceful years on the ranch.
“We had better go this way,” said Maseden, pointing towards the west. “Don’t you think it advisable to search the coast seaward? There have been three tides since the ship struck, and anything likely to come ashore should have shown up by this time.”
“Go right ahead, Alec. What you say goes.”
Their search was fruitless. Indeed, the position in which the leather trunk was found proved that the set of the current on a rising tide was in the direction of the channel between the two small islands.
Maseden had little or no experience of the sea and its vagaries, or he would have noticed this highly significant fact, and thus saved himself and his companions much hardship and a good deal of needless risk.
Of course, he saw quickly that there was a remarkable absence of wreckage on the north side of the estuary, but he attributed it to the fury of the gale, which must have driven a great body of water far into the network of channels which stretched inland, with a resultant outpouring when the wind pressure was relaxed.
The only satisfactory outcome of a close visit to the bar was the complete vindication of their means of escape from the ledge. It would have been a sheer impossibility to round the point at or slightly above sea-level. The tides of untold ages had literally scooped a chasm out of the cliff, and perversely chosen to batter a passage through the rock rather than take the open path farther south.
They could not see the reef which had destroyed the Southern Cross. But they could hear it. Ever above the clatter of the rollers on the nearer rocks they caught the sullen roar of the outer fury.
“Let’s clear out of this,” said Sturgess suddenly. “That noise sends a chill right down my backbone.”
Maseden turned at once. In any case, they could not have remained there much longer, because the tide was on the flow, and they had yet to discover how swiftly it covered the rock-paved foreshore.
They did not hurry, but kept a sharp look-out for seals, seeing several, but at a great distance. While they were yet nearly a quarter of a mile from the camping ground, from which came a pillar of smoke, showing that the fire was not being neglected, they were startled by a gun-shot.
It smote the air with a sound that was all the more insistent in that it was wholly unexpected. It drove into the sea, with a loud splash, a seal close at hand which had been hidden by a rock, and even brought a pair of circling bustards from some eyrie high up on the hills.
With never a word to one another, both men began to run.