His Unknown Wife

“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.

CHAPTER XII

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.

CHAPTER XIII

“Please tell them, Nina, that we are not romancing,” she cried indignantly.

Nina handed the rifle to Maseden.

“Put this thing right,” she said coolly. “It won’t work, but I’m sure I hit the beast with the first bullet.”

Maseden pressed down the lever, and saw that a cartridge had jammed, as the extractor lever had not been jerked downward with sufficient force. He began adjusting matters with the blade of his knife.

“Were you attacked by an animal?” he inquired.

“We don’t know exactly what it was,” said Madge. “When you left us we decided to have a bath before putting on dry clothes. As our only towel was the ship’s flag, we arranged that each should rub the other dry with her hands. We had just finished dressing, and Nina had gone to pile fresh logs on the fire, when I heard a splash in the water of the creek. I looked around and saw a fearful creature, bigger than a horse, which barked at me. I shrieked, and Nina ran with the rifle. The thing barked again—it was only a few feet away—so she fired. Then we both made off.”

“You disturbed a seal, I expect.”

“No. If those were seals we saw last night, this was no seal,” said Nina decisively. “It had small, fiery eyes and long tusks. I think it had flappers, though, in place of feet, but it was enormous.”

“Sounds like a walrus,” put in Sturgess.

“There are no walruses in the South Pacific,” said Maseden. “Anyhow, now that the magazine works all right, let’s go and have a look.”

Ample corroboration of the girl’s story was soon forthcoming. The splashing of water behind the group of big rocks sheltering the pool in which they had taken their bath showed that something unusual was going on.

They all reached the spot in time to witness the last struggles of a gigantic sea-lion, one of the most fearsome-looking of the ocean’s many strange denizens. The shot fired by Nina Forbes had struck it fairly in the throat, inflicting a wound which speedily proved mortal.

The animal was a full-grown male, fully ten feet in length, with a neck and shoulders of huge proportions. Its tusks and bristles gave it a most menacing aspect. The wonder was not that the bathers ran, but that Nina had the courage to face such a monster.

Maseden was delighted, and patted her on the shoulder.

“Well done!” he cried. “You’ve supplied the larder with fresh meat for days. We must even try our ’prentice hands at curing what we can’t eat to-day or to-morrow.”

The girl herself was not elated by her triumph. The water in which the sea-lion lay was deeply tinged with its blood, which had also bespattered the rocks.

“I have never before killed any living creature,” she said in a rather miserable tone. “Why did the stupid thing attack us? We were doing it no harm.”

Maseden laughed.

“Off you go, both of you!” he said. “C. K. and I have the job of our lives now. It will be no joke disjointing this fellow with a couple of pocket-knives. But if the fact brings any consolation, I may tell you that a sea-lion when irritated can be a very ugly customer. Probably this one was sleeping in the sun under the lee of a rock, and you may have come unpleasantly near him without knowing it. When he awoke and saw you he was curious. Instead of slinking off, he roared at you, and might easily have killed the pair of you!”

“Can’t we help?” inquired Nina, seeing that Maseden meant to lose no time.

“No.”

“But we ought to,” she persisted. “We must get used to such work.”

“You can do something quite as serviceable by rigging a few lines on stout poles, where there is plenty of sun and air, and seeing that a big fire is kept up.... And, by the way, don’t come this way till we call you. We shan’t be—presentable.”

The two disappeared without further question.

“This will be a messy undertaking,” Maseden explained to his assistant. “The best thing we can do is strip, or our clothes will be in an awful state.”

At the outset they abandoned any thought of actually dismembering the colossal carcass. They skinned it with difficulty, and then cut off the flesh in layers. After an hour’s hard endeavor they had gathered a fine store of meat, while the pelt, after being well washed in salt water, was stretched on a flat rock to dry.

They were dressing again when a new trouble arose. From out of the void had gathered a flock of vultures. These fierce, evil-looking birds were so daring in their efforts to raid the pile of meat that two actually allowed themselves to be knocked over by the staves the men carried.

Sturgess remained on guard, therefore, while Maseden took the strips and hung them on the lines the girls had already prepared.

Madge volunteered to do the cooking. She had found two flat, thin stones, somewhat resembling hard slate, and she fancied that by placing some steaks between these and covering them with glowing charcoal the trick would be achieved. As a matter of fact, she succeeded wonderfully well. Even Nina, sniffing her portion, vowed that the shooting of a sea-lion had its compensations.

More vultures arrived. The sea-lion’s bones were rapidly picked clean, but one of the men had to keep close watch all day over the curing operations.

An amusing argument arose as to the correct method of drying meat. Maseden held that he distinctly remembered reading that biltong, or South African antelope steak, was prepared by hanging the strips in the sun. The girls were positive that this would cause putrefaction, and that the meat should be placed in the shade.

As Maseden was not quite sure of his facts, he compromised as to a quarter of the supply, with the result that this smaller quantity was rendered uneatable.

The story of Alexander Selkirk has been told so often, and in so many forms, that it will not bear repeating here. During a whole fortnight these four young people devoted their wits and their muscles to the all-important task of feeding themselves and securing some means of escape into the interior. The men soon learned how to circumvent the wily seal, and thus store plenty of meat and skins, which latter, with sinews and a knife, were converted first into garments for the women and, as supplies increased, into a tent.

Maseden noticed that the high-water mark fell daily, so he reasoned that the Southern Cross struck during a high spring tide, and that the neap would occur in fourteen days. He laid his plans on that assumption, which was justified almost to a day.

Another gale blew up, but despite its discomfort it helped them materially, because the men loosened a barrier of logs which had formed high up the wooded cliff, and the rain freshet brought down far more timber than was needed for the biggest raft they could hope to construct.

After some experiments they decided to make it a three-tier one, and flexible in the center. Hence it was fully thirty feet in length, the average length of a thick log being fifteen feet after its roots and thin section had been burnt off. For the same reason the raft was fifteen feet wide. It had a step in the forepart for their old friend, the broken topmast. They dispensed with a rudder, believing they could guide their ark with poles.

Observation showed that the tide flowed swiftly in mid-stream, and their well-matured project was to push out to a prearranged point at high-water, anchor while the tide fell, and travel as far as practicable on the next tide. They tried to avoid all risks that could be foreseen.

The raft was built in the waterway which Madge had termed the “creek”—the gulley cleared for itself by the torrent whose dry bed had offered them a road through the otherwise impenetrable forest. Every test of stability their inventiveness could devise proved that an area of thirty feet by fifteen of logs arranged in three rows would support four or five times the weight they were likely to place on it. By manipulating the poles Maseden and Sturgess found that they could control the movements of even such an unwieldy bulk, while if the wind suited they might rig a sail of skins.

They were able to build quickly and well because of three essentials. The timber was at hand, they had a fire, and in the pieces of rope and strips of iron and wire they had invaluable means of making the structure secure.

At last, on the fifteenth day after the wreck, Maseden poled out the raft during the slack tide at high-water, and fastened it to ropes already fixed and buoyed nearly a quarter of a mile from the shore. He would allow none of the others to accompany him, nor did he carry any of the few stores they possessed. He could not be absolutely certain that the cables would withstand the strain, and if the raft were swept seaward by the falling tide only one life was in jeopardy, while Sturgess might be able to help him from the shore.

His vigil was watched by anxious eyes, especially when he thought fit to ease the stress on the ropes by planting a long pole against a big rock which he knew rested a few feet astern and below the surface. The two hours of half-tide were the worst, but the anchors held. Three hours later the raft was aground and he came ashore.

It was then nearly dark, as their first voyage would naturally be taken in broad daylight. Nothing was said at the time, but he was told afterwards, that for no conceivable guerdon would any of the three again go through the agony of suspense they endured while the raft swung and lurched in the fierce current.

Meat, fresh and dried, a quantity of oysters, the leather trunk, and a charcoal fire cunningly packed in oyster shells kept in position by wire—this cooking brazier being the invention of Nina Forbes—formed the cargo. Most fortunately Maseden carried the poncho and the rifle slung across his back with rope, and the cartridges were in his pockets.

They slept on board. Soon after daybreak the raft was afloat, but was not allowed to move until there was a fair depth of water, owing to the very great probability of the whole structure being dashed to pieces against some awkwardly placed boulder. At last, however, Maseden thought the channel was practicable, and the ropes were cast loose, being sacrificed, of course, but that could not be helped.

They were off! The first of the sixty miles was already slipping away. They were so excited, so bent on the adventure ahead, that none of them thought of looking back until Providence Beach, which was the name they gave their refuge, was nearly out of sight.

Suddenly Madge Forbes remembered, and turned her eyes in that direction. She waved a hand and cried:

“Good-by, trees and rocks! You were kind to me and to all of us! I have not had two such happy weeks since I came to South America!”

Maseden heard, but paid no particular heed. For one thing, he had decided now not to re-open the question of the extraordinary relations between his wife and himself until, if ever, they reached civilization again. For another, he was busily conning the channel and noting the behavior of their clumsy but quite buoyant craft.

He estimated the pace of the current at fully six miles an hour. The raft was traveling about half that rate, which was quite fast enough for his liking, so, although there was a strong breeze from the west, he did not hoist the “sail.” He stood on the port side and Sturgess on the starboard. The two girls were seated on a pile of fir branches behind the mast, which was stayed by ropes in such wise that all four had something to cling to if the raft struck a sunken rock and lurched suddenly.

The project was to drift as far inland as the day’s tide would take them, pole ashore at the nearest suitable place, and repeat the overnight anchoring until they reached smooth water, when they might perhaps make longer voyages. If they ran six miles that day they would have done admirably. Providing Maseden’s calculations as to their precise locality were reasonably accurate, the next day would bring them into a much wider arm of the sea.

Here the conditions might vary, but they would adapt themselves to circumstances, always bearing in mind the exceeding wisdom of the Italian proverb: Che va piano va sano—“He goes safely who goes cautiously.”

But there are other proverbs which are equally applicable to human affairs, and especially to the hazards awaiting rafts floating on unknown waters. For an hour they ran on gaily, with little or no trouble, because the men could see broken water a long way ahead and promptly piloted their argosy towards the open channel.

Then came the unexpected, or, to be exact, the crisis arose which Maseden had foreseen many days earlier, but forgotten as the raft grew strong and seaworthy under their hands.

About four miles from Providence Beach the gap between the two small islands which shut off Hanover Island from its southerly neighbor came into full view. Maseden anticipated a little difficulty at this point, but he was quite unprepared for that which really took place.

He had every reason to believe that the main stream would flow straight ahead until the second island was passed; he meant to land on Hanover Island again, just short of the easterly end of Island Number Two. Therefore he was annoyed, but not alarmed at first, at finding that the current carried the raft into the straits between the islets.

The others, of course, noticed the change of direction, and being well aware of his hopes and plans, asked him in chorus if this deviation mattered.

“I don’t see that it does,” he said. “In any case, we must follow the tide, and if this is the short cut so much the better.”

He told them that which he actually believed. Still, at the back of his head lay an uneasiness hard to account for. The raft was traveling south now, not east, having swept round the bend in magnificent style. The precipitous heights were closing in, but the channel was fully a quarter of a mile in width. He would vastly have preferred skirting the wooded slopes of Hanover Island, because these smaller islets were absolutely barren in this hitherto invisible section, but, having no choice in the matter, silenced his doubts by recalling his first and quite correct theory that the real deep-water passage lay beyond, the Southern Cross having in fact struck several miles north of Nelson Straits.

Owing to the steady narrowing of the waterway the rate at which they traveled was increasing momentarily, though progress was delightfully smooth and easy. The simile did not occur to any of the four until complete disaster had befallen them, but the silent, resistless onrush of the current was ominously suggestive of the course of some great river during the last few miles before it hurls itself over a cataract.

Hanover Island soon vanished from sight altogether, and the towering cliffs on either hand seemed to merge into an unbroken barrier ahead. But the tidal race hurried on, so there must be an outlet, and this presented itself, after a sharp turn to eastward again, when they had covered a couple of miles on the new course.

They were only given the briefest warning of the peril into which they were being carried. The stream flung itself against a great mass of rock, which had been undermined until the upper edge of the precipice hung out fifty feet or more over the rushing waters beneath. A most uncanny maelstrom was thus created.

No sooner had the two men seen the danger than they labored with might and main to slew the raft away to the opposite shore.

They succeeded in avoiding the first jumble of black rocks which lay at the base of the cliff, but the whole character of the stream changed instantly. It became a furious turmoil of broken water. The raft was hurled hither and thither as though by some titanic force, and a few yards farther on was dashed against a second and even more terrifying reef.

The violence of the impact smashed the whole structure to pieces. Had not the logs been arranged in tiers crosswise they must have split up instantly, but the method in which they were put together held them for one precious moment while the men each clutched one of the girls and leaped for the nearest rock.

By rare good luck they kept their feet, and reached a great flat mass which, judged by appearances, had only recently fallen.

Further advance or retreat was alike impossible. On three sides roared the cheated torrent; behind and above, canopy-wise, towered the cliff. If the evidence of ominous fissures and lateral cracks were to be read aright, there was no telling the moment when they might be buried under another avalanche of thousands of tons of stone.

Every tide deepened the sap. They were imprisoned in one of nature’s own quarries, where work was relentless and unceasing.

Once again idle chance had decided that Maseden should save Nina and Sturgess Madge. Not that it mattered a jot. If ever four people were in hapless case, it was they. For a time even to Maseden, who had never lost faith in his star, it seemed that the best fortune that could now befall would be for the trembling rock overhead to crash down on them.

The din was terrific, and the water level was rising so rapidly that five minutes after they had gained their present position the boulders to which they had sprung from the sundering platform of logs were a foot deep in the swirling current. Each of the girls, wholly unconscious of her attitude, clung despairingly to the man at her side and watched the climbing surge with somber eyes.

They were too stunned to yield to fear, and the life of the past fortnight had so steeled their nerves and strengthened their bodies that fainting was no longer the readiest means of obtaining a merciful respite from present horrors. Rather did a bitter rage possess them, for it was a harsh and monstrous decree of fate which had not only robbed them of a hard-won means of escape, but immersed them in a veritable condemned cell.

Maseden, like the others, was watching the encroaching water-line in a benumbed way when he became aware that Nina was speaking. He looked into her drawn face and tried to smile, though a sort of mist clouded his eyes.

“What is it, girlie?” he said, putting his mouth close to her ear and addressing her as though she were a timid child.

“Is this the end?” she cried, imitating him.

“Not yet, anyhow,” and he gave her a reassuring hug.

“Tell me—if you think—we have only a few more minutes,” she said.

He read nothing into the request save a natural desire that she should be prepared for the worst and try to cross the Great Divide with a prayer on her lips. The pitiful words helped to dispel the cloud which had befogged his wits, and he began to weigh the pros and cons of the forlornest of forlorn hopes.

The water was lapping their feet. The rock arched outward over their heads. Between the spot where they stood and the actual wall of rock there was already a flowing stream.

He looked at his watch. The hour was seven o’clock, and he estimated the time of high-water at about half-past seven. Then, as when he was lying along the foremast of the Southern Cross amid the thunders of the reef, a tiny seed of hope sprang into life in his brain. If they could outlast the tide there was still a chance!

The very fact that this chaos of fallen cliff created a fearsome rapid in the tide-way showed that the passage must be fairly open during low water. If promptness in decision could enable a man to conquer a difficulty, Maseden was certainly not lacking in that attitude.

“Come!” he said. “Not for the first time, we must put our backs to the wall. We may find a good grip for our feet before the water mounts too high. The four of us must lace arms and cling together. I believe the tide will not rise above our knees. At any rate, we cannot be swept away easily. It is worth trying.”

She nodded. Turning to her sister, she explained Maseden’s scheme. Soon they were braced against the rock and facing valiantly their new ordeal.

In the Middle Ages, when a lust for inflicting torture infected some men like a cancerous growth, a favorite method of at once punishing and destroying an unfortunate enemy was to chain him in a dungeon to which a tidal river had access, and leave him there until the slow-rising flood drowned him.

They were in some such plight, self-chained to a rock, though not knowing when a sudden swirl of water might sweep them to speedy death.

CHAPTER XIV

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.