The change, when it came, came swiftly. It was as though the All-Powerful bade the waters cease their snarling and stilled the fury of the reef. During nearly an hour the sea lapped the very thighs of the four castaways, but the roar of battle between rocks and current had died down and it was possible to hear the spoken word.
Sturgess was the first to break the spell cast on the whole party by the seeming imminence of death.
“If ever I set foot in New York again I’ll be good and go to church Sundays,” he said. “This is Sunday, February 6, an’ I guess I’ve been as near Kingdom Come to-day as I’m likely to get on a round trip ticket.”
For a little while no one passed any comment. Sunday! The mere name of the day had a bizarre sound. What had God-given Sunday and its peaceful associations to do with this grim and savage wilderness?
Suddenly Nina Forbes began to recite the Lord’s Prayer. One by one the others joined in. The concluding petition had a peculiar appropriateness. If ever four Christian people might appeal to be delivered from evil, surely these four were in great need of heavenly succor.
“That’s fine!” said Sturgess, almost cheerfully, when a hearty “Amen” had relieved their surcharged feelings. “Me for the pine pew and the right sort of preacher when next I stroll out of West Fifty-seventh Street into Broadway of a Sabbath morning. Anyhow, to-day being Sunday, and the hour rather early, which way do we head for the nearest church when the tide falls, commodore?”
Maseden had already weighed that very question, but the utter collapse of the voyage on which he had founded such high hopes had chastened his pride.
“I think we had better put it to the vote,” he said. “I’ve led you into such a death-trap already that I don’t feel equal to a decision.”
He had been watching a big rock on the opposite shore. A little while ago it was awash; now it was submerged, yet the water was appreciably lower where they were standing.
The seeming contradiction was puzzling. He had yet to learn that the laws governing water in motion are extraordinarily complex—take to witness the varying levels of the whirlpool in the Niagara River and the almost phenomenal height of the central stream in the Niagara rapids.
“Guess we’re satisfied with your control so far,” said Sturgess. “What are you making a kick about? You prophesied just what would occur, and that’s more than the average wizard can do.”
“What do you mean?”
“Didn’t you tell us we might strike a score of reefs between Providence Beach and Smyth’s Channel, and that we should be lucky if we didn’t have to build ’steen rafts?”
Maseden smiled. The rock he had marked as an index was reappearing, and the water had sunk another inch below his knees. The tide had unquestionably turned; the water banked up on the opposite shore was also yielding to the new force.
“I never anticipated another complete shipwreck,” he said. “We have lost everything, ropes, skins, food—our chief supporter, the broken foremast—even our flag.”
“But we still have the rifle and cartridges, and we’re plus a fortnight’s experience. If we don’t start life again better fixed than when we climbed to the ledge in the dark from the forecastle of the Southern Cross, call me a Dutchman.”
“I agree with C. K.,” Nina chimed in. “Even here there must be some sort of a passage at low water. Which way shall we go—back or forward?”
“We gain nothing by going back,” said Maseden slowly. “For one thing, we are on the wrong side of the channel. For another, I have been taking stock of the peculiar vagaries of the tide during the past fifteen minutes, and I imagine that there is a slight difference in the water level between this point and that which we left this morning. Still water attains a dead level, of course, but strong tides have rules of their own.
“Now, supposing the tide from the Pacific runs into Providence Beach a few minutes earlier than it reaches Nelson Straits, that would account for the terrific rush in which we were caught. For the same cause, the falling tide should be far less strenuous here, but stronger there, and I do really believe that opposite our camp the ebb tide always developed a swifter current than the flood.”
“I’m sure of it,” agreed Sturgess. “They were both pretty hefty, but this morning’s flood didn’t begin to compare with last night’s ebb. You ought to know. You went through it alone on board the raft.”
“Then the answer is, ‘Go forward,’” said Madge.
“I think so. Let us be guided by events. We have the best part of the day before us. Surely we can find some safer lodgment than this before night falls.”
The others knew that Maseden’s voice had lost its confident ring, but the fact that they had so narrowly dodged death barred all other considerations.
In his heart of hearts he was deadly afraid that they might indeed be compelled to return to Hanover Island. The sheer barrenness of the islet on which they were now stranded was its vital defect. Probably they would still find shell-fish, still knock an occasional seal on the head, but wood they must have, both for fire and raft building, and it seemed to him that there were no trees nearer than the slopes facing Providence Beach.
However, having come so far, they might at least have a look at the conditions on the south side, where lay yet another island; and there was also the unalterable fact that if they must escape by using the tides, their first day’s experiences, though resulting in disaster, had brought them many miles in the right direction.
Perhaps they had met and conquered their greatest danger. They had paid a dear price for victory, but that was nothing new in war.
Of course there was a long and wearisome wait before they could do other than sit on the slowly emerging rocks. But it was something gained when they were free to climb out into the open and see the sky over their heads. The silent, nerve-racking menace of the canopied rock was quite as unbearable as the loud-mouthed threats of sea and reef.
Madge, slightly less self-contained than her sister, promptly voiced her relief.
“If I live to be older than I want to be I shall never forget one awful crack in the roof just above us,” she said. “I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. It seemed to be opening and shutting all the time with a horrible slowness.”
“How old do you want to be?” demanded Sturgess, readily seizing the chance to divert her thoughts from a nightmare memory.
“Forty-five,” she answered without any hesitation.
“Gee! That leaves me less than eighteen years to live!”
“I wasn’t thinking of you, C. K.”
“But your limit rouses one’s curiosity. Why forty-five, any more than fifty or sixty? Granted good health, heaps of people enjoy life at sixty.”
“At forty-five a woman begins to fade and men grow horrid,” she announced calmly, as though stating an incontrovertible thesis.
“Please don’t talk rubbish, either of you,” interrupted Nina sharply. “Alec, can’t we dodge along from rock to rock? It seems to be ever so much more open half a mile ahead.”
“Let’s try,” said Maseden.
He wondered vaguely why Nina broke in on her sister’s quaint theorizing. Any nonsense which took their minds off the troubles of the hour was a good thing in itself.
They scrambled and slithered through the passage, which resembled the moraine of a glacier, save that the rocks were on the same plane, and the central stream was clear and greenish instead of being nearly milk white. Once they were held up fully fifteen minutes because the channel ran close to an overhanging rock which really looked as though it might be brought down by the disturbance of a pebble.
Then Maseden was moved to make investigations, and discovered that the main waterway was extraordinarily deep. In other words, the sea had preferred to scoop out a ditch rather than flow through the ample space bordering Hanover Island. Even at low tide there was deep water here.
“We must go on, one at a time,” he said, and led the way.
He found that Nina Forbes was close behind.
“Remain where you are!” he said gruffly. “I’ll tell you when to follow and indicate the best track.”
She frowned, and her eyes sparkled, but she obeyed. Sturgess, too, growled a protest.
“He ought to give me that kind of try-out,” he said. “If there’s trouble, and I go under, it won’t matter so much. But you girls can’t spare Alec. He’s worth twenty of me when it comes to a show-down.”
However, they all crossed the danger point safely, and each in turn noticed that which Maseden alone had been able to see at first—that a huge buttress had fallen quite recently, probably during the preceding tide, so the whole mass might crumble into ruin at any moment. As was their way, once a danger had passed they did not discuss it again. Sturgess, of course, had something to say, though it only bore inferentially on this latest risk.
“I always had a notion that the New York Fire Department was a pretty nervy proposition,” he informed all and sundry during a halt on the only strip of open beach yet encountered in their new exploration, “but I guess I can show the chief a few fresh stunts first time I blow into headquarters on East Sixty-seventh Street.”
Sturgess’s airy references to New York were excellent tonics. He refused to regard that great city and its ordered life as dreamlike figments of the imagination. To him the flaring lights of Broadway ever glimmered above the horizon. Had he sighted the Statue of Liberty around the next bend that would mean reality; this, the dreary expanse of dead hills, water and black rock, would have been the dream.
Maseden, recovering his poise, had resumed his everyday air of well-grounded optimism. At any rate, he argued, the four of them were living and uninjured. They still owned those thrice-precious cartridges, the rifle and the poncho. They had many hours of daylight before them, and would surely find drinkable water and food before dark.
Happily the weather was fine, though clouds banking up in the west told of a possible gale, which might blow itself out in a few hours, or last as many days, or weeks. In that climate there was no knowing. The almanac declared that it was high summer, yet it would be no uncommon event if a snowstorm came from the southwest and mantled all the land a foot deep.
As for their clothes being wet, these young people thought little of such a trifle. Their skins were becoming, in the expressive Indian phrase, “all face.”
So they trudged on, heading for the mouth of the defile. In the far distance they discerned the broken line of another mountainous island, the lower slopes black with forests.
“That’s a good sign, folk,” said Maseden, smiling cheerfully once more. “We’re making for a timber belt. When you come to think of it, trees simply couldn’t grow on these rocks, and the watershed seems to fall away on both sides of the gorge, which must have been cut by an earthquake.”
His eyes had been searching constantly for signs of the raft’s wreckage, but never so much as a splintered log could he see. Nina, not so preoccupied, was gazing farther afield.
Suddenly she stopped, and something in her manner arrested the others.
“I don’t think I’m mistaken,” she said, “but are not those two points the flanks of these islands?”
“There can be little doubt of that,” agreed Maseden, following her glance towards the gap some three or four miles in front. It was difficult to estimate distance accurately in that region of vast solitudes.
“Then, if that is so,” she went on in a puzzled tone, “where does the remainder of the land go to? The cliffs end not so very far away. Why don’t we see other bits sticking out?”
The underlying sense of the question was clearer than its form. For some undetermined cause the passage between the islands evidently widened considerably before it closed in at the ultimate southern exit. Hopefulness is often a close blend of curiosity and expectation. They pressed on more rapidly, eager as children to see what lay around the corner.
They were soon enlightened, and most agreeably so. They entered a spacious amphitheatre—in its way, almost a place of beauty. Not only were the hillsides clothed with pines and other trees, but, rarest sight of all along that stark coast, strips of white sand bordered the foreshore.
The tidal water, now near the lowest ebb, was placid as a lake, and on its surface disported flocks of many varieties of wild fowl. Moreover, wreckage began to line the beach at high-water mark. They found the planks and spars of many ships, some quite fresh, and evidently the remains of the Southern Cross; others weather-beaten, even crumbling with age.
Remains of the raft were discovered, and Nina shrieked with joy at sight of the ship’s flag, hardly damaged, lying on its halliard alongside the broken topmast.
Madge claimed the most remarkable bit of flotsam—nothing less than the brandy bottle, unbroken, but nearly full of salt water, half buried in sand.
It was their only drinking utensil, and therefore prized very highly. How it had passed through the turmoil of the rapids was one of those mysteries which voyaging bottles alone can solve; and they, if sometimes eloquent of humanity’s adventures, are invariably silent as to their own.
The skins of the sea-lion and seals had vanished. Indeed, a very close search of a three-mile semi-circular beach, conducted for reasons which shall presently appear, yielded no trace of them.
There was a dramatic fitness in thus reaching a land of plenty after enduring the horrors of the pass.
“It’s like a fairy tale,” cried Nina joyously. “This is the enchanted realm, guarded by dragons which must be slain ere the prince can enter.”
“Gosh!” grinned Sturgess, “she’s calling you a prince now, Alec. Say, Madge, can’t you invent a name for me?”
“Yes, you’re the Ugly Duckling which grew into a Swan.”
“Huh! I’ll think that over. Far be it from me, fair maid, to dispute your views as to my future plumage. Now, Alec, your turn. It’s up to you to christen Nina.”
“Cinderella, maid of all work,” said Maseden promptly. “So, let’s get busy, the lot of us. Girls, you’ll probably find an oyster-bed on that reef over there. Sturgess and I will hunt for water, and bring you a bottleful. Then we must set to work and build a shack above high-water mark before night. We’re going to stop here and launch a more navigable craft next time.”
“Your highness has forgotten one thing,” said Nina, with sudden gravity.
“What is that?”
“It is still Sunday.”
With one accord they dropped to their knees and thanked Providence for the mercy which had been shown them. Such prayers are the spontaneous tribute of the overflowing heart. They are not to be uttered aloud or recorded in the written word.
The men had no difficulty in locating a stream, owing to the “creek,” as Madge had phrased it, which marked the approach of each torrent to the sea. Here, too, were oysters in abundance. Whether or not the bivalves liked a certain admixture of fresh water and brine, their enthusiastic admirers did not know; but certainly the best-stocked beds were invariably situated near the mouth of a mountain stream.
With a plentiful supply of shaped planks, cordage, even rusty nails, they soon knocked together a low hut, not more than breast high, and closed at one end. The ship’s flag curtained off the inner section, which was allotted to the two girls, while the men could sleep, on guard, as it were, in the outer part.
As night came on they started a fire and cooked two birds of the penguin type, which allowed themselves to be chased and captured. The flesh was tough and none too well flavored, but the feasters were not hard to please. When the repast was ended, and they sat on piles of soft sand looking out over the darkening expanse of waters, for the tide was high again, Maseden electrified Sturgess by saying:
“Do you smoke, C. K.?”
“Does a duck swim?” was the prompt reply.
Maseden produced from his coat pocket a pipe and tin of tobacco.
The other eyed them with downright amazement.
“Well, can you beat it?” he cried. “What else have you got in your pocket, old scout? A bottle of rye whisky and a box of chocolates for the girls, or what?”
“I’ve reached the end of my resources now,” laughed Maseden. “I resolved to keep this small stock of tobacco till the time came when we might regard half our troubles as ended. I think we’ve reached that stage to-night. After this morning’s escape I shall never again lose hope until the light goes out forever.”
“Oh, please, don’t put it that way,” said Nina.
“I mean it as an optimist,” he exclaimed. “If I have to swim in the open sea, or am buried under a landslide, I shall still believe, while my senses last, that Providence will see me through. Do you know why? You might supply many good reasons, but not the reason. Ten minutes after we climbed under that overhanging rock, it fell. I happened to look back, and saw it collapse. None of us heard the crash, because we were close to a rather noisy rapid at the moment. But I actually saw the thing happen.”
“Why didn’t you tell us at the time?” inquired Madge.
“I thought our nervous systems, collectively, had borne enough strain just then.... Here you are, C. K. I give you first turn with the pipe.”
“Not on your life!” vowed Sturgess, flaming into volcanic energy. “If I never smoke again, I’ll not touch that pipe until you’ve gone right through a packed bowl-full.”
Maseden knew that his friend meant what he said, so filled and lighted the pipe immediately.
“It’s a moot point,” he commented philosophically, “whether you don’t enjoy smoking more in anticipation than I in actuality. I haven’t smoked now during sixteen days, and I believe I could give it up for sixteen years if need be.”
“Good gracious!” tittered Madge. “Poor C. K. will have only two years of his beloved New York.”
It was a subtle thrust. Sturgess himself was the first to see its point.
“Gosh!” he said. “S’pose we four had to live here straight on for sixteen years!”
Nina Forbes seemed to have a keener sense of the dangerous trend of such careless talk than her sister.
“I do wish you two wouldn’t babble,” she broke in sharply. “Alec is simply chock full of information. I can see it in his calculating eye. For instance—”
Maseden took the cue readily.
“For instance,” he said. “This inland lagoon explains the rush of the tide this morning. The greater part of the water which runs through the pass never goes back. It floods this immense area, is held up by the tide from the south, but goes out that way, because, by some irregular tidal action, the ebb begins in that direction. Therefore, an ideal backwash is set up, which accounts for all the wreckage strewed on the beach. Parts of ships which were lost a century ago will be stored here. The place is a maritime museum.”
“We may find a whole ship,” exclaimed Madge.
“What? After coming through the hell-gate we have left behind?”
“The bottle came through,” she persisted.
“Though it’s a black bottle it must have been white with fear many a score of times. Have you noticed the way in which the logs of our own raft were battered and bruised?... No, the way in was vile, and, I had better warn you now, the way out may be worse.”
“Oh, why?” cried both girls.
“Because of the absence of Indians. Consider what an ideal site this would be for a colony of savages. Plenty of fish, birds and oysters—sand—even a few level strips which might be cultivated—if the South American Indian ever does till the land. The logic of the situation is clear. Our refuge is inaccessible. That is just the difference between romance and reality. In the fairy tale, once you slay the dragons guarding the enchanted palace the remainder is a compound of nectar and kisses. In real life, having stormed the fortress, you find yourself besieged.”
None disputed his conclusions. They were learning to think like him, and each had been struck by the virgin solitude of this land-locked sea-lake, which must compare favorably with the most fertile and exceedingly scarce localities of the kind in an area of many scores of thousands of square miles.
“Anyhow, while you finish your pipe, it’s up to me to fix the fire,” said Sturgess blithely, leaping to his feet, and beginning to arrange a number of big flat stones around and above a pile of glowing charcoal in such wise that rain could not extinguish it, and a few twigs placed among the embers next morning would quickly burst into a blaze.
They had taught themselves these minor aids to comfort. Madge had constructed a very creditable field oven, and Nina, with a bit of sharpened wire and a supply of dried sinews, could sew a skin as a cobbler stitches the sole on to a boot. Physically all four were in splendid condition, so it was a sheer impossibility that they should remain downcast in spirit. Maseden knew that quite well when he recited the trials they must yet face and conquer. He addressed them as co-workers, not as pampered young people who must be humored into putting forth the necessary efforts if they would win through finally.
They slept that night as soundly as though the morning’s tribulation was something they had read in a book. Rain pounded on their shelter, but it was roofed with pine branches above the planks, and not a drop entered. They awoke into a world of blue sky and sunshine, and, after breakfasting on oysters, cold fowl, and good water, spent an idle hour in watching the tidal race from the north.
Then, after tending the fire, they set off on a tour of the shore, meaning to note every scrap of wreckage which might be of value. Moreover, Maseden was specially anxious to have a peep at the southern exit.
And thus they made the great discovery.