THE MYSTERY SOLVED.
We paused for a while, and looked at one another's faces blankly.
"Suppose," Jim suggested at last, "we get out the charts and see if such
a place as Tanaki is marked upon them anywhere."
"Right you are," says I. "Overhaul your maps, and when found, make a
note of."
Well, we did overhaul them for an hour at a stretch, and searched them
thoroughly, inch by inch, Jim taking one sheet of the Admiralty chart
for the South Pacific, and I the other; but never a name could we find
remotely resembling the sound or look of Tanaki. Tom Blake, too, was
positive, as he put it himself, that "there weren't no such name, not in
the whole thunderin' Pacific, nowheres." So after long and patient
search we gave up the quest, and determined to wait for further
particulars till the boys had recovered enough to tell us their strange
story.
Meanwhile, it was clear we must steer somewhere. We couldn't go beating
wildly up and down the Pacific, on the hunt for a possibly non-existent
Tanaki, allowing the _Albatross_ to drift at her own sweet will wherever
she liked, pending the boys' restoration to speech and health. So the
question arose what direction we should steer in. Jim solved that
problem as easy as if it had come out of the first book of Euclid (he
was always a mathematician, Jim was, while for my part, when I was a
little chap at school, the asses' bridge at an early stage effectually
blocked my further progress. I could never get over it, even with the
persuasive aid of what Dr. Slasher used politely to call his _vis a
tergo_.)
"They're too weak to row far, these lads," Jim said in his didactic
way--ought to have been a schoolmaster or a public demonstrator, Jim:
such a head for proving things! "Therefore they must mostly have been
drifting before the wind ever since they started. Now, wind for the last
fortnight's been steadily nor'east"--the anti-trade was blowing.
"Therefore, they must have come from the nor'east, I take it; and if we
steer clean in the face of the wind, we're bound sooner or later to
arrive at Tanaki."
"Jim," said I, admiring him, like, "you're really a wonderful chap. You
do put your finger down so pat on things! Steer to the nor'-east it is,
of course. But I wonder how far off Tanaki lies, and what chance we've
got of reaching there by Wednesday the tenth?" For though we didn't even
know yet who the people were who were threatened with massacre at this
supposed Tanaki, we couldn't let them have their throats cut in cold
blood without at least an attempt to arrive there in time to prevent it.
Of course, we knew with our one brass gun we should be more than a match
for any Melanesian islanders we were likely to meet with, if once we
could get there; but the trouble was, should we reach in time to
forestall the massacre?
By Wednesday the tenth we must reach Tanaki--wherever that might be.
Jim took out a piece of paper and totted up a few figures carelessly on
the back. "We've plenty of coal," he said, "and I reckon we can make
nine knots an hour, if it comes to a push, even against this head wind.
To-day's the sixth; that gives us four clear days still to the good. At
nine knots, we can do a run of two hundred and thirty-six knots a day.
Four two-hundred-and-thirty-sixes is nine hundred and forty-four, isn't
it? Let me see; four sixes is twenty-four; put down four and carry two:
four three's is twelve, and two's fourteen: four two's--yes, that's all
right: nine hundred and forty-four, you see, ex-actly. Well, then, look
here, Julian: unless Tanaki's further off than nine hundred and
forty-four nautical miles--which isn't likely--we ought to get there by
twelve o'clock on Wednesday at latest. Nine hundred and forty-four miles
is an awful long stretch for two boys to come in an open boat. I don't
expect these boys can have done as much as that or anything like it."
"Wind and current were with them," I objected, "and she was drifting
like one o'clock when we first sighted her. I shouldn't be surprised if
she was making five or six knots an hour before half a gale all through
that hard blow. And the poor boys look as if they might have been out a
week or more. Still, it isn't likely they would have come nine hundred
knots, as you say, or anything like it. If we put on all steam, we ought
to arrive in time to save their father and mother. Anyhow we'll try it."
And I shouted down the speaking tube, "Hi, you there, engineer!--pile on
the coal hard and make her travel. We want all the speed we can get out
of the _Albatross_ for the next three days."
"All square, sir," says Jenkins; and he piled on, accordingly.
So we steamed ahead as hard as we could go, in the direction where we
expected to find Tanaki.
Half an hour later, Nassaline, who had been down below with the Malay
cook and one of the men, looking after the patients, came up on deck
once more, with a broad grin on his jet-black face from ear to ear, and
exclaimed in his very best Kanaka-English, "Boy come round again. Eat
plenty arrowroot. Eat allee samee like as if starvee. Call very hard for
see Massa Captain."
"What do you think's the matter with them, Nassaline?" I asked, as I
walked along by his side towards the companion-ladder.
Nassaline's ideas were exclusively confined to a certain fixed and
narrow Polynesian circle. "Tink him fader go sell him for laborer to a
man _oui-oui_, or make oven hot for him," he answered, grinning; "so him
run away, and come put himself aboard Massa Captain ship; so eat
plenty--no beat, no starvee."
It was his own personal history put in brief, and he fitted it at once
as the only possible explanation to these other poor fugitives.
"Nonsense!" I said, with a compassionate smile at his innocence. "White
people don't sell or eat their children, stupid! It's my belief,
Nassaline, we'll never make a civilized Christian creature of you, in a
tall hat, and with a glass in your eye. You ain't cut out for it,
somehow. How many times have I explained to you, boy, that Christians
never cook and eat their enemies?... They only love them, and blow them
up with Gatlings or Armstrongs--a purely fraternal method of expressing
slight differences of international opinion.... Now, come along down and
let's see these lads. It's some of your heathen relations, I expect, the
poor fellows are flying from."
But I omitted to have remarked to him (as I might have done) that I
hadn't seen such a painful sight before, since I saw the inhabitants of
a French village in Lorraine--old men, young girls, and mothers with
babies pressed against their breasts--flying, pell-mell, before the
sudden onslaught of a hundred and fifty Christian Prussian Uhlans. These
little peculiarities of our advanced civilization are best not mentioned
to the heathen Polynesian.
In the cabin we found both boys now fairly on the high-road to recovery,
though still, of course, much too weak to talk; but bursting over, for
all that, with eagerness to tell us their whole eventful history. For my
own part, I, too, was all eagerness to hear it; but anxiety for their
safety made me restrain my impatience. The elder boy, now leaning on his
elbow and staring wildly before him with horror--a mere skeleton to look
at, with his sunken cheeks and great hollow eyes--began to break forth
upon me with his long tale in full; but I soon put a stop to that, you
may be pretty sure, with most uncompromising promptitude. "My dear Mr.
Martin Luther Macglashin," I said severely, giving him the full benefit
of all his own various high-sounding names for greater impressiveness,
"if you don't lean back this moment upon your pillow, quiet your rolling
eye down to everyday proportions, and answer only in the shortest
possible words nothing but the plain questions I put to you, hang me,
sir, if I don't turn you and John Knox adrift again upon the wild waves,
and continue on my course for Levuka in Fiji."
"Why, how did you come to know our names?" he exclaimed, astonished.
"You must be as sharp as a lynx, Captain."
"That's not an answer to my question I asked you," I replied with as
much sternness as I could put into my voice, looking at the poor
fellow's starved white face. "But as a special favor to a deserving
fellow-creature, I don't mind telling you. I'm as sharp as a lynx, as
you say, and a trifle sharper: for no lynx would have looked for your
names on the flap of your shirts--There, that'll do now; don't try to
talk; just answer me quietly. Where do you come from, and where do you
want us to go to?"
Martin lifted up his face and answered with becoming brevity, "Tanaki."
"That's better!" I said. "That's the sort of way a fellow ought to
answer, when he's more than half-starved with a week at sea. But the
next thing is, where's Tanaki?"
"It's one of the group that used to be called the Duke of Cumberland's
Islands," the boy answered faintly, yet overflowing with eagerness.
"They lie just beyond the Ellice Archipelago, nearly on the line of a
hundred and eighty, as you go towards the Union Group along the
parallel of"....
"Now, my dear boy," I said, "if you run on like that, as I said before,
I shall have to turn you adrift again in your open boat at the mercy of
the ocean. Do be quiet, won't you, and let me look up your island?"
"We can't be quiet," Master John Knox put in eagerly, "when we know
they're going to murder our father and mother and Calvin and Miriam, on
Wednesday morning."
"Just you hold your tongue, sir," I said, pushing him down again on his
bunk, "and wait till you're spoken to. Now, not another word, either of
you, till I've consulted my chart. Jim, hand down the Admiralty sheets
again, there's a good fellow, will you?"
Jim handed them down, and we commenced our scrutiny at once. We soon
found the Duke of Cumberland's Islands, and as good luck would have it,
found we were steering as straight as an arrow for them. The direction
of the wind had not misled us. But no such place as Tanaki could we
still find anywhere.
"It used to be called 'The Long Reef,'" Martin said, looking up; "but
now we call it by the native name, Tanaki."
"Oh! The Long Reef," I said; "why didn't you say so at first? I know
that well enough by sight on the chart; but I never heard it called
Tanaki before. That accounts, of course, for the milk in the cocoa-nut.
Jim, hand along the calipers here, and let's measure out the course.
Two--four--six--eight," I went on, looping along line of sailing with
the calipers. "A trifle short of eight hundred miles. Say seven hundred
and eighty. And we have till Wednesday morning. Well, we ought to do
it."
"You'll be in time to save them, then!" the elder boy cried, jumping up
once more like a Jack-in-the-box. "You'll be in time to save them!"
"Will you be quiet, if you please?" I said, poking him down again flat,
and holding my hand on his mouth. "O, yes! I expect we'll be in time to
save them. If only you'll let us alone, and not make such a noise. We
can do nine knots an hour easy, under all steam; and that ought to bring
us up to Tanaki, as you call it, by Wednesday morning in the very small
hours. Let's see, we've got four clear days to do it in."
"Five," the boy answered. "Five. To-day's Friday."
"No, no," I replied curtly. "Will you please shut up? Especially when
you only darken counsel with many words. You're out of your reckoning.
To-day's Saturday, I tell you."
And in point of fact, indeed, it really was Saturday.
"No, it's Friday," Martin went on with extraordinary persistence.
"Saturday," I repeated. "Knife; scissors: knife; scissors."
"But we got away from Tanaki eight days ago," the boy declared strongly
with a very earnest face; "and it was Thursday when we left. I kept
count of the days and nights all that awful time we were tossing about
on the ocean alone, and I'm sure I'm right. To-day's Friday."
"Jim," I said, turning to my brother, "what day of the week do you make
it?"
"Why, Saturday, of course," Jim answered with confidence.
I went to the bottom of the companion-ladder and called out aloud where
the boy could hear me, "Tom Blake, what day of the week and month is
it?"
"Saturday the sixth, sir," Tom called out.
"There, my boy," I said, turning to him, "you see you're mistaken.
You've lost count of the time in this awful journey of yours. I expect
you were half unconscious the last day and night. But, good heavens,
Jim, just to think of what they've done! They've been out nine days and
nights in an open boat, almost without food or drink, and they've come
all that incredible distance before the high wind. Except with a ripping
good breeze behind them they could never have done it."
"For my part," said Jim, looking up from his chart, "I can hardly
understand how they ever did it at all. I declare, I call it nothing
short of a miracle!"
And so indeed it was: for it seemed as though the wind had drifted them
straight ahead from the moment they started in the exact direction where
the _Albatross_ was to meet them.
I'm an old seafaring hand by this time, and I may be superstitious, but
I see the finger of fate in such a coincidence as that one.