Who found the boat? The question has not been answered to this day. Four people held and vehemently expressed different opinions; if they had not agreed ultimately to pool the credit, the foundations of six very firm friendships might have been endangered, because even the sisters were at logger-heads on the point.
No one could dispute the fact that it was Nina Forbes who, with outstretched hand and pointing finger, exclaimed dramatically:
“What is that?”
But the other three yielded her no prior right on that account. Were they not all looking at it, and thinking that which Nina said?
Each could establish a most reasonable claim if the matter were adjudicated by a prize court. Firstly, Maseden had ordered a close survey of the coast, and, if this very proper precaution had not been taken, the boat would be rotting yet on an uncharted beach. Secondly, if Sturgess had not slipped on a rock and scarified his chin rather badly there would, thirdly, have been no need for Madge to suggest that he should wash the wound in fresh water, and even insist that this should be done.
Lastly, there was Nina, who literally demanded an explanation of a long, low strip of taut canvas visible above a small sand hill on which tufts of coarse grass were struggling for life.
The simplest way out of the difficulty was to admit that sheer, unadulterated good luck brought about an incident which probably changed the whole course of events, though a white and shining patch of skin on Sturgess’s left leg testifies to this day that his accident was primarily responsible for it.
Two fair-sized streams ran from the hills into the straits on that side. Near the first was pitched the camp. Well hidden near the second was the boat.
Now, these rivulets, though fairly deep and swift, were not torrents; that is to say, they drained a watershed by no means so steep as Hanover Island. Their volume was more regular, inasmuch as they were not wholly the outcome of the latest downpour of rain. To avoid the necessity of fording them, one had to walk a long way seaward until their waters began to spread over the reef in a hundred little runnels, and one could leap from rock to rock.
Indeed, it was while Sturgess was so doing that he barked his shin, a most painful if not dangerous operation; in this instance, it evoked language which the girls pretended not to hear.
Having crossed the stream, however, Madge examined the damage, and would have it that the sufferer take off his boot and sock, and forthwith lave the wound in fresh water.
What he really wanted to do was to wander away out of earshot and relieve his feelings by the spoken word. He obeyed, however, and all four went up the right bank (which, as Sturgess and Madge jointly cited in their contention, they certainly would not have done otherwise) to a point where the river was free of salt-water.
In the result, curiously enough, Sturgess’s excoriated wound was left absolutely to its own devices. Both he and Madge, not to mention the other two, were startled out of any further thought of such a minor casualty by coming full tilt on to a ship’s boat, trimly sheeted in gray canvas, dry-docked, one might say, behind a sandhill.
After an incredulous stare, Maseden answered Nina’s eager question.
“It is one of the life-boats of the Southern Cross,” he said, and his voice was hushed, almost reverent. “There is her number, with the ship’s name. She was carried on the starboard side, just behind the forward rail on the promenade deck. I used to look up at her and admire her lines.”
By this time they had raced up alongside the craft. She appeared to be undamaged. Maseden unlaced a portion of the canvas cover. She was dry as a bone inside.
“Say, Alec, d’you know that every boat was stocked with provisions and water for twenty people for fourteen days? I heard the captain give the order.”
Sturgess was so excited that he almost yelped the words.
“I saw the stewards putting the stuff on board,” said Maseden.
“There’s tea, and coffee, and condensed milk, and butter, and tins of meat and jam,” cried Nina.
“And ship’s biscuits, and a spirit stove, and matches, and barrels of water,” chimed in Madge.
Maseden was tapping the planks and peering at so much of the keel as was visible, but he could find no sign of injury. The smart white paint had been badly scraped amidships and in the bows, but the wood was not splintered. To the best of his belief the craft was thoroughly seaworthy. She carried her full complement of oars, a mast, and lugsail. In fact, she was almost in the exact condition in which she had left the ship.
Two pulleys and a part of a broken davit showed how she had been wrenched bodily from her berth and flung into the sea by the first great wave that crashed over the Southern Cross when the steamship swung broadside on to the reef under the pull of the aft anchor.
“Come along, everybody!” shouted Maseden, and the ring of triumph in his voice revealed the depth of his feelings. “We start building a new camp at once. Within less than a fortnight the spring tides which brought her here will be with us again, and we must be ready for them.”
“Can’t we launch her on rollers?” demanded Sturgess.
“I doubt it. She was docked here by a backwash which does not occur very often, judging by the herbage growing among the sand. She is a heavy craft, too. I don’t think the four of us could move her. We’ll have rollers in readiness, of course, but we must cut a channel for the tide, and so make sure of floating her.... By Jove! What a piece of luck!”
It took them an hour or more to sober down. For once, Maseden’s orders were tacitly ignored, even by himself. Instead of helping in the construction of another hut the girls were busy with the lashings of the canvas cover. Every true woman has the instinct of the good housewife, and these two could not rest content until they had examined and classified the stores.
None of them could resist the temptation of a bottle of coffee extract, some condensed milk and a tin of biscuits. The spirit-stove was lighted, some water boiled and they drank hot coffee and ate wheat for the first time in seventeen days.
Their greatest surprise was the quantity and variety of stores on board. There were knives and forks, enameled plates and cups, even such minor requisites as salt, pepper and mustard.
Of course, the chief steward of the Southern Cross had been given many hours in which to make preparations. Being a resourceful man, when the lockers were packed with their regulation supplies he stuffed “extras” into odd corners.
Poor fellow! The pity was that an adverse fate had denied him any benefit from his own foresight.
Although the castaways entered with good heart upon their second campaign against the forces of nature, the immense advantages now enjoyed as compared with their condition on Hanover Island did not blind them to the difficulties yet to be faced and conquered ere the haunts of civilized man might be reached. There was no gainsaying the cogency of Maseden’s logic; the absence of aborigines from a spot so favored as Rotunda Bay (the name allotted to their new location), supplied positive proof of the impracticable nature of all approaches by sea.
How far the barriers might extend they had no means of knowing. They could guess how forbidding they were from the character of the northerly channel, and it was easy to believe that one such dangerous passage alone would not have deterred tribesmen accustomed to navigate these perilous waters.
So, in the intervals of labor, they gave close heed to the tides and their action. For instance, Maseden would knock together a small raft, launch it at high water and watch its subsequent course. He found, at first, that it stranded invariably. Then he took it to the tiny estuary of the second river, waited until the ebb was well established, and let it swing out with the current.
This time, as he anticipated, it was carried swiftly southward, and was seen no more, thus confirming his belief that the rise and fall of the tide set up a circular movement of an immense body of water always tending in the same southerly direction, retarded during the flow, with resultant acceleration during the ebb.
One day, when observation farther afield was desired, they all four set off soon after dawn, and were close to the southern narrows at high water. Then, as the shore gradually became practicable, they followed the receding tide until farther advance became dangerous. Seen from a distance, one of the cliffs offered a not impossible climb, and closer inspection showed that, by hard work, and some roping, they could reach the summit.
The girls, who had positively refused to be left “at home,” were now equally determined to make the ascent. The soles of their light boots had long since given out, but each and all now wore moccasins of sealskin, and very serviceable and comfortable footgear these proved, being impervious to the jars of the roughest rock surface, and most excellent for climbing.
After an hour’s hard work they stood on a narrow saddle overlooking a seaward precipice, and the vista before their eyes was at once awe-inspiring and disheartening. Mile after mile, nothing but broken water met the eye. The reefs were countless. In fact, the resistance they offered to the incoming tide direct from the Pacific was such that, in all likelihood, it accounted for the delay which set up the extraordinary race past Hell Gate.
Even Sturgess was upset by the far-flung chaos. A strong wind was blowing up there, and he sank his voice in the hope that his words would reach Maseden only.
“Rotten!” he said. “It would knock the stuffing out of a brass dog.”
“No secrets, please,” cried Madge promptly. “What did you say, C. K.? Are you telling Alec that there is no way out?”
“Yep,” was the disconsolate reply.
“We have not quite determined that fact yet,” said Maseden coolly. “Having done a stiff climb, suppose we get our money’s worth, and sit down? Never mind the unpleasant prospect in front. Let’s keep a sharp look-out for a log traveling in mid-stream, and watch it as long as possible.”
Nina, who was endowed with excellent good sight, was the first to detect a nearly submerged tree-trunk bobbing about in the channel, nearly a mile distant. The atmosphere happened, however, to be unusually clear that day, so they could follow the progress of the derelict for another mile or more. As soon as it emerged from the actual channel between the two headlands, it swung away to the left, or eastward, and kept on that course until lost in the waste of waters.
Maseden whistled in sheer vexation when he gave up the attempt to follow this floating index any longer.
“What is it now, son?” inquired Sturgess.
“The worst,” snapped the other vindictively.
“Great Scott! Didn’t you like the look of that log. I thought it lolloped along in a devil-may-care style that was rather attractive.”
“But it turned towards the land, and not towards the sea.”
“I guess that’s so.”
“And doesn’t that convey any meaning to you?”
“Sure. The tides hereabouts go all ways for Sundays. Before that thing reaches Nelson Straits it has to round the eastern end of the island opposite.... Yes, yes, Alec. You’ve wised me up on heaps of things I didn’t give a hooraw in Hades for at one time. I can tell the time by the sun, skin an eel, or a seal, or a teal, open oysters like a bar-keep, and read an eddy like a Mississippi pilot. And, to my reckoning, our boat, or any boat, has as much chance of winning through that proposition out there as a lump of butter in a fiery furnace. I never did hold very strongly by that story about Shadrack, Mesack and Abednego. I’ve a notion we haven’t got the complete facts. One day in Pittsburg—”
“Silence, please, for the passing of the next log, which happens to be a boat!”
Nina’s voice rang out clearly. She well knew the astounding significance of the words, but the daily round of hardship and adventure were molding her character on new and stronger lines. She was not, nor ever could be again, the somewhat conventional young lady who had sailed from San Juan little more than a month ago. She could face now, with an unflinching and critical eye, perils which then would have blanched her cheek and set the blood pulsing in her veins.
Even her sister, who had not made out the object to which Nina had called attention, put an alarming question quite calmly.
“A boat!” she cried. “Oh, Nina, not our boat?”
So many seemingly impossible things had occurred that the stout life-boat they left tied securely in a small dock which was flooded by each tide might conceivably have broken loose.
“No,” came the reassuring answer. “Not our boat. It looks like one of the native coracles Alec has told us of. But it is empty. At any rate, there is no one sitting upright in it.”
By this time the others had seen the craft, which she was the first to detect. In their anxiety and excitement they stood up, one by one, as though the couple of feet thus gained would give a better view-point. There could not be the least doubt that they were looking at a roughly-fashioned but distinctly seaworthy boat, which danced along on the crest of a rapid current, and whirled around, as though in sport, when some black rock thrust its obstructing fangs into the tide-way. Apparently, it was traveling quite safely.
Then, as if to give them a really useful object lesson, it was caught between two rocks and turned clean over. A second somersault righted it, and, like the log, it sped away to the east.
Maseden brought back the dazed and troubled wits of his companions to the particular business in hand.
“See that you are properly roped,” he said. “We’re heading for camp, as quickly as we can get there. Don’t hurry over the first part of the descent, however. There are two bad places on the rock face.”
They reached the shore safely, unroped, and set off to walk three hard miles in record time. As they neared their refuge they saw the boat, now aground in its tiny canal. Near at hand were the white embers of their fire, which would soon be ablaze when fresh logs were added. Some washing, stretched on a line, lent a strangely domestic touch to the encampment.
But the one profoundly relieving fact was self-evident. No party of marauding Indians had swooped down on their ark and its stores. Wherever the derelict boat had come from, its occupants were not to be seen in any part of Rotunda Bay. As Maseden put it tersely:
“We found it hard enough to get here. Others seemed to have tried and failed.”
Still he and Sturgess decided to mount guard that night. The girls were not supposed to know of this new arrangement, until Maseden was about to awaken Sturgess for his second spell of sentry-go. Then Nina emerged from the rear portion of the shack.
“Lend me your watch, Alec,” she said pleasantly. “I’ll take these two hours.... No, you mustn’t argue, there’s a dear—fellow—” the concluding word was added rather hurriedly, being an obvious afterthought. “I’ll call Madge next, and it will be broad daylight by the time her spell is ended.”
“I’m not sleepy,” he murmured, sinking his voice so as not to disturb the others. “I was only going to rouse C. K. because he will be annoyed if I don’t stick to schedule.”
“I haven’t slept at all,” the girl confessed. “If you’re not going to rest, let us talk. Or, perhaps, that is not quite the right thing to do.”
“Not if there was any real fear of an attack,” said Maseden, leading her to the small sand hillock near the boat. “I am convinced we are safe enough, but I should never forgive myself if the camp were rushed owing to our negligence.... Sit here. The tide is rising. We can distinguish the water-line, and remain unseen ourselves. Of course, we should speak hardly above a whisper.”
Some inequality in the sloping surface brought them rather close together when they sat down. Nina moved, with a little laugh of apology. Her action was quite involuntary, but it nettled Maseden.
“I don’t want to flirt with you, if that is what you are afraid of,” he grunted. “In present conditions spooning would be rather absurd. Not that my particular sort of marriage tie would restrain me. Don’t think it. Enforced obedience of that sort is foreign to my nature.”
“I gather that you really want to quarrel with me,” was the glib answer.
Of course, any woman of average wit could have put a man in the wrong at once with equal readiness though given a far less vulnerable opening, but Maseden realized his blunder and drew back.
“A too strenuous life seems to have spoiled my temper,” he said. “I used to be regarded as a somewhat easy-going person.”
“Probably that was because you had things all your own way.”
“You may be right. A man is the poorest judge of his own virtues or faults. For instance, I have always prided myself on a certain quality of quick decision, once my mind was made up. But of late I find myself lacking even in that respect.”
“Isn’t it possible you are not actually sure of your own mind?”
“Shall I submit the case to you?”
“Would that be wise? I would remind you of your own phrase—in present conditions.”
“But I think you ought to know,” he persisted. “Weeks ago, on the day you shot the sea-lion, in fact, C. K. told me he meant to marry Madge, if the lady is willing, that is. The statement startled me, to put it mildly. I rather scoffed at it, which nettled him, naturally. I was on the point of acquainting him with the facts, but was stopped by the gun-shot. Since then he has never mentioned the matter again, and I have been averse from pulling it in by the scruff of the neck—”
“Why do so now?” put in the girl quickly.
He could not see her face, but the note of alarm in her voice was not even disguised.
“Because, day by day, I see more and more clearly that our friend’s love of your sister is a very real thing. I see, too, or think that I see, a response on her part. From a common sense point of view, what else could one expect? Two young people, each eminently agreeable, are thrown together by fate in circumstances of great and continuous personal danger. The artificial intercourse of civilized life is impossible from the outset. They see each other as they really are. Each has to depend on real characteristics, not on shams. Can one imagine a more ideal method of choosing one’s future partner than those in which we have lived during the past month?”
This was what lawyers call a leading question, and Nina shied at it instantly.
“Everything you have said may be true, Alec,” she said, “but you have advanced no reason whatever for disturbing our pleasant relations. Surely all these problems may be allowed to settle themselves when, if ever, we re-enter the everyday world?”
“That is just my difficulty,” continued Maseden doggedly; he was resolved now to have an irritating hindrance to pleasant relations settled once and for all. “Is it fair to Sturgess to let him believe there is no bar to his wooing? Of course, my marriage was a farce, and can be dismissed as such. But what will C. K. think, what will he say, when he hears of it? Won’t our silence—yes, our silence—you cannot shirk a part of the responsibility—be open to misinterpretation? May it not bring about the very catastrophe we want to avoid?”
“I really don’t understand,” said the girl in a frightened way.
“Then I must make my meaning clear, even though it hurts,” he said determinedly. “If I tell Sturgess now about the Cartagena ceremony, though rather late in the day, it is not too late; whereas, if I wait till we reach New York, how astounded and mystified he will be by the legal process which I must set on foot to secure your sister’s freedom and my own! Why, the result might be tragic. If C. K. knows now, he can, if he chooses, seek from Madge an explanation of the whole mad business. She may give or withhold it—that is for her to decide. But at least we shall all be acting squarely and above-board. I put it to you strongly, for the sake of each one of us, that Sturgess should be told the whole truth.”
For a little while there was silence. Nina seemed to be weighing the pros and cons of the matter with much care.
“I think you are right,” she said at last. “I differ from you only in a small but—to a woman—very important particular. Madge, not you, should tell C. K. what happened in Cartagena. It is her privilege. It will come better from her. In the morning, when opportunity offers, she and I will talk things over. I am sure I can persuade her as to the course she should adopt.
“Leave it to me, Alec. Before to-morrow evening C. K. shall have heard the full story of that unfortunate marriage. He will tell you so himself. After that, I suppose, your troubled conscience will be at rest, and the matter need not be discussed further until it comes before the courts.”
“I seem to have annoyed you pretty badly by raising the point now,” said Maseden.
“No, indeed! It is not so. In a sense, I am glad. My sister and I are very dear to one another, Alec, and no one likes to parade the family skeleton, even in such a remote place as Rotunda Bay.”
Maseden felt that he had bungled the whole business rather badly, but he saw no advantage in leaving anything unsaid.
“What I cannot make out,” he muttered savagely, “is how I ever came to regard you and Madge as being so much alike. Of course, you resemble each other physically, but in temperament you are wide apart as the poles.”
“Dear me! This is really interesting. In what respects do we differ?”
“Madge is emotional, you are self-contained. She would have cried had I spoken to her about you as I have spoken of her to you, but you survey the problem coolly, and solve it, probably on the best lines. Sometimes, you puzzle, at others, vex me. You are ready and willing to confide in Sturgess, but refuse me your confidence. I find Madge easy to read; you remain an enigma. I believe you would almost die rather than enlighten me as to the true history of my marriage.”
“Oh, bother your marriage! Can’t you talk of something else?”
“I am prepared to talk about you during the next hour.”
“How boring for both of us.”
“Only a minute ago you welcomed my efforts as an analyst.”
“I was mistook, as the children say. These personal matters seem ineffably stupid when one sees the dawn appearing over the walls of our prison. We may never get away from here, or lose our lives in the attempt. It will be of very small significance then as to why a sorely-tried girl agreed to marry a man she had never seen, and who was under sentence to die before the ink was dry in the register.... Still, Alec, I’m pleased we have had such a candid discussion. I have come round to your point of view, too. It is not fair to C. K. to keep him in the dark. To-morrow, as ever is, if you don’t work us so hard that we have no time for chatter, I promise you that Madge shall tell him everything.”
“And me nothing?”
“That is implied in the bargain, is it not? Does it really concern you? You were speaking for C. K., not for yourself.... Oh, no, we’re not going to re-open the argument. Just let matters remain where they are, please. I want you to satisfy a woman’s curiosity on a matter of more immediate importance. When do you purpose leaving here? Shouldn’t we start soon? At this season we have fine weather of a sort. Don’t we incur a good deal of risk by each week of delay?”
“Hullo, you two!” came a cherry voice. “A nice bunco game you’ve played on me! There was I, snoring like a hog, while you were spooning under the stars. Wise Alec and Naughty Nina! But wait till I tell your poor deluded sister. A whole tribe of Indians could have crept up and tomahawked you where you sat.”
They started apart, almost guiltily. Each shared the same thought. How much, or how little, had Sturgess heard?