PROGRESS
When he stood beside them once more on the ledge he told them what he
had seen.
"It's a fortress of rock up there, and nothing else," he said. "We may
have to climb at least a couple of hundred feet. Have any of you ever
done any Alpine work?"
No; they knew nothing of the perils or delights of mountaineering.
"I'm in the same boat," he confessed, "but I've read a lot about it, and
I've noticed one thing in our favor--the pitch of the strata is downward
towards the land, and that kind of rock face gives the best and safest
foothold. Moreover, this cleft, or fault, seems to continue a long way
up.
"Now, we haven't a minute to spare. Each hour will find us weaker. The
weather, too, is clear, and the rock fairly dry, but wind and rain, or
fog, would prove our worst enemies. There is plenty of cordage down
below. I'll gather all within reach. It may prove useful."
He seemed to have no more to say, and was stooping to begin the descent
when Sturgess grabbed him by the shoulder.
"Wait a second, commodore!" he cried. "You've got your job cut out, and
I'll obey orders and keep a close tongue, you bet; but when it comes to
collecting rope lengths, that is _my_ particular stunt, as I sell hemp,
among other things. You just rest up a while."
Maseden nodded, and made way for a willing deputy. It was only fit and
proper that he, too, should conserve his energies.
"'Round the corner to the left," he said, "you'll find a sloping rock.
Some wreckage is lodged in an eddy alongside it. Secure the cordage, and
any other odds and ends you think useful. Shin up here with a few rope
lengths at once. I want them straight away. Have you a strong knife?"
Yes, Sturgess luckily did possess a serviceable knife. By the time he
had handed over a number of rope strands Maseden, helped by the girls,
had hauled back the mast, to which he began attaching short loops, or
stirrups, about two feet apart. He did not expect that either Madge
Forbes or her sister would be able to climb the mast, and it was almost
a sheer impossibility that he and Sturgess should carry them time and
again. So the mast, after serving twice as a bridge, was now to become a
ladder.
Sturgess returned with a curiously mixed spoil--a good deal of rope, a
sou'wester, a long, thin line--probably the whip used to establish the
connection between bridge and forecastle while parts of the _Southern
Cross_ still held together--and the ship's flag, the ensign which was
flying at the poop when the ship struck.
Water was dripping off him. Evidently he had either been caught by a sea
or had slipped off a rock.
"Accident?" inquired Maseden.
"Not quite. I had to risk something to get these," and he produced from
his pockets a dozen large oysters.
No party of _gourmets_ ever sat down to a feast with greater zest than
those four hungry people. Probably, in view of the labors and hardships
they were yet fated to undergo, the oysters saved their lives. There is
no knowing. Human endurance can be stretched to surprising limits, but,
seeing that they were destined to taste no other food during twelve long
hours of arduous exertion, the value of Sturgess's find can hardly be
overrated.
The oysters were of a really excellent species, though under the
circumstances they were sure to be palatable, no matter what their
actual qualities.
"I suppose I need hardly ask if there are any more to be had?" inquired
Maseden, when the meal was dispatched.
"No, sir," grinned Sturgess.
He left it at that, but the others realized that he had probably risked
his life more than once in the effort to secure even that modest supply.
The meal, slight though it was, not only gave them a new strength--it
brought hope. If only they could win a way to the interior, and reach
the land-locked waters of the bay which opened up behind the frowning
barrier they must yet scale, in all likelihood they would at least
obtain a plentiful store of shell-fish.
Nina Forbes uttered a quaint little laugh as she threw the last empty
shell on to the rocks beneath.
"Now," she said, "I am quite ready for the soup and a joint."
"Oh, don't be horrid!" cried Madge. "You've gone and made me feel
ravenous again."
"He, or she, who would eat must first labor," said Maseden. "Thanks to
friend Sturgess, we've enjoyed a first-rate snack. I've never sampled
manna, but I'll back the proteids in three fat oysters against those in
a pound of manna any day. Now, let's get to business. If I'm not
mistaken we're going to tackle a stiff proposition."
He knotted some stout cord around his own waist and that of each of the
others, and slung the longest available coil over his shoulders. Then
the mast was fixed in its place across the ravine, and he climbed to the
opposite crest by straddling the pole, putting his feet in the loops,
and pulling himself up by both hands.
Throwing back the rope, he told Sturgess to see that it was fastened
securely to one of the girls on the belt already in position. He
purposely refrained from specifying which one. By chance, Madge Forbes
stood nearest, and it was she who came.
The crossing was awkward rather than dangerous, and rendered far more
difficult by the fact that the unwilling acrobat was compelled to expose
her naked limbs. But after the first shock common sense came to her aid,
and she straightway abandoned any useless effort to observe the
conventions.
Still, she blushed furiously, and was trembling when Maseden caught her
hands and helped her to land.
"Thank Heaven we've kept our boots," he said, unfastening the rope.
"Just look at the ground we have to cover, and think what it would mean
if our feet were bare."
The comment was merely one of those matter-of-fact bits of philosophy
which are most effective in the major crises of life. It was so
true that a display of leg or ankle mattered little afterwards.
Nevertheless, a similar ordeal caused Nina to blush, too, but she
laughed when Madge cried ruefully:
"What in the world has happened to my ankles? They are scrubbed and
bruised dreadfully."
"That was last night's treatment, my dear," said her sister. "I escaped
more lightly than you."
"But what do you mean? I felt some soreness, but imagined I knocked
myself in coming from the wreck."
"You were in a dead faint, so Mr. Maseden and Mr. Sturgess massaged you
unmercifully."
Madge surveyed damages again.
"I must have been very bad if I stood that," she said.
"You'll be worse before we see the other side of this cliff," murmured
Nina, casting a critical eye over the precipitous ground in front.
It is not to be wondered at if the girls' hearts quailed at the sight.
They were standing on a sloping terrace, of no great depth, which ended
abruptly at the foot of a towering cliff. A little to the right ran
the line of the cleft, but so forbidding was its appearance, and so
apparently unscalable its broken ledges, that the same thought occurred
to each--what if they had but left a narrow, sheltered prison for a
wider and more exposed one?
Maseden, however, allowed no time for reflection. He and Sturgess had
already dragged the foremast after them, and were shouldering it in the
direction of the first hump of rock which seemed to offer a way into the
cleft. Any other route was absolutely impossible.
After one last glance at the reef which had slain a gallant ship and so
many lives, they quitted the ledge which had proved their salvation. It
was then five o'clock in the morning. At four o'clock that afternoon
they flung themselves, utterly spent, on a carpet of thick moss which
coated the landward slope of the most westerly point of Hanover Island.
Their hands and knees were torn and bleeding, their fingernails broken,
their bones aching and their eyes bloodshot. But they had triumphed,
though many a time it had seemed that if Providence meant to be kind,
an avalanche of loose stones or a slip on treacherous shale would have
hurled them to speedy death on the rocks beneath.
On five separate occasions they had found themselves strung out on
a narrow ledge which merged to nothingness in the sheer wall of a
precipice. Five times had they to go back and essay a different path,
often beginning again fifty or even a hundred feet below the point they
had reached. They were obliged to drag or carry the heavy topmast every
inch of the way, because, without its aid, either as a bridge or a
ladder, they could never have surmounted a tithe of the obstacles
encountered.
In those eleven awful hours they had climbed not two, but five hundred
feet, a distance which, on the level, a good runner would traverse in
about twenty seconds, whereas it took them an average of a minute to
climb one foot.
The marvel was that the women could have done it at all, even with the
help which both men gave unstintedly. During the last weary hours no one
uttered an unnecessary word. Each of the four was determined to go on,
not for his or her own sake, but for the sake of the others. They were
roped together. If one fell, it meant disaster to all. So, with splendid
grit, each resolved not to fall so long as hand would hold or foot lodge
on the tiniest projection.
But, with final success, came utter collapse. Even Maseden, far stronger
physically than Sturgess, fell like a log. True, he had borne far more
than his share of the day's toil. No matter what his inmost thoughts, he
had never, to outward seeming, lost heart. It was he who always found
the new line, he who earliest decided to turn back and try again.
It was he, too, who called now for renewed exertion after some minutes
of complete and blissful repose.
"Sorry to disturb your _siesta_," he cried, with a woful assumption of
cheery confidence, "but we must reach the shore, if possible, before
night falls. Oysters and Chablis await us there. _En avant, messieurs et
'dames!_"
Nina Forbes sat up and brushed the hair from her eyes.
"I don't think I can walk another yard. Won't you leave me here?" she
demanded.
"No."
"Are we to carry that mast with us?"
"Why not? We may need it."
Her eyes followed Maseden's down the slope. Compared with the sullen,
frowning realm of rock they had quitted, this eastern side of the island
resembled a Paradise. The moss on which they were resting was thick and
wiry. A hundred feet beneath were fir-trees, sparse and stunted at
first, but soon growing luxuriantly, yet promising, to Maseden's
weighing eye, a barrier nearly as formidable as the fearsome wall of
rock they had just surmounted.
He knew that which was happily hidden from the others. In this wild
land, seldom, if ever, trodden by the foot of man, the forests throve on
the bones of their own dead progenitors. Aged trees fell and rotted
where they lay, and the roots of newcomers found substance among the
heaped-up logs. Gales and landslides helped to swell the mad jumble of
decaying trunks, which formed an impassable layer hardly ever less than
fifteen feet in depth and often going beyond thirty feet.
Of the two, Maseden believed he would sooner tackle another wall of rock
rather than essay to cross that belt of fantastic growths.
But, down there was water--perhaps food--certainly shelter. He guessed
that at an altitude where hardy Alpine mosses alone flourished the cold
would be intense at night. Already there was a shrewd nip in the breeze.
They must not dawdle another instant.
He made up his mind to head for a gap in the trees which seemed to mark
a recent land-slip, and trust to fortune that the gradient might not be
too steep. Better any open risk than the fall of perhaps the whole party
into a pit of dead wood choked with foetid and noisome fungus growths.
Once caught in such a trap, they might never emerge.
And now they met with their greatest among many pieces of luck that day.
The opening Maseden had noticed was not the track of an avalanche, but a
rough water-course, through which the torrential rain-storms of the
coast tumbled headlong to the sea.
Notwithstanding the long-continued gale, the descent was so steep that
only a vestige of a stream trickled down the main gully. Here and there
lay a pool. Though the water was brackish, it was strongly pigmented
with iron, and the roots of vigorous young trees seemed to find
sustenance in it.
At any rate, they must drink or die, so they drank, though Maseden
warned them to be moderate. They laved their wounds, which were
intensely sore at first, owing to the encrustation of salt on their
skins. But here, again, nature's surgery, if painful, was effective.
Salt is a rough and ready antiseptic. None of them owned any real
medical knowledge. In their hard case ignorance was surely bliss,
because they must have had the narrowest of escapes from tetanus.
The descent, though trying, was not specially perilous. Three times did
the mast bring them down small cataracts, and many times across
extraordinarily ingenious log barriers, set up against the stress of
falling water by nature's own engineering methods.
Once, indeed, a heavy boulder, poised in unexpected balance, toppled
over just as they had reached the base of a waterfall. It would have
crushed Nina Forbes to a pulp had not Maseden seen the stone move. As it
was, he snatched her aside, and a ton of rock crashed harmlessly on to
the very spot where she had been standing the fifth part of a second
earlier.
Such an incident, happening in civilized surroundings, would have been
regarded as phenomenal, something akin to an escape from a train wreck.
Here it passed as a mere item in the day's trials. It did not even shake
the girl's nerve.
"I suppose I ought to say 'thank you,' but I'm not quite sure you have
done me a service," she murmured wearily.
Hitherto both she and her sister had been so brave, so uncomplaining,
that Maseden took warning from the words. The two girls were at the
extreme limit of their powers of endurance, mentally and physically. It
was five o'clock in the evening. After a day and a night of passive
misery they had been subjected to every sort of muscular strain during
nearly twelve hours, and might collapse at any moment now.
"Courage!" he said, with a gentleness curiously in contrast with the
rather gruff and hectoring manner he had adopted all day. "You haven't
noticed how near the sea is. We shall be on shore in a few minutes."
The girl's lips parted in a wan smile.
"You are wonderful," was all she said, but the pathos underlying the
tribute wrung his heart.
Somehow, anyhow, they slithered and dropped down the remaining steps of
their Calvary. During the last few feet they were able to leave behind
the friendly topmast, but the shadows were falling when they stood,
forlornly triumphant, on the flat rocks which served as the beach of
the estuary.
The two girls sank at once to a moss-covered boulder. They looked so
deathly white beneath the tan of exposure and the crust of dirt and
blood not altogether removed when they bathed their faces in the pool,
that Maseden unstrapped the poncho which he carried slung to his
shoulders and produced from its folds that thrice-precious bottle of
brandy.
The patients weakly resisted his demand that they should share nearly
the whole of the mouthful of spirit which remained; but he was firm, and
they drank. Sturgess, who staggered and nearly fell when he tried to
move after the brief halt, was given a few drops; Maseden himself had
what was left. Then he filled the bottle with water, and each took a
long drink.
There is this supreme virtue in water, that, while slaking thirst, it
stays the worst pangs of hunger, and Maseden had enough strength in
reserve to hurry off in search of oysters, or any sort of shell-fish,
before daylight failed wholly. He was fortunate in finding a
well-stocked bed almost at once.
He alone knew what agony he endured when his bruised and torn fingers
were plunged into ice-cold salt water. But he persevered, and gathered
such a quantity that in ten minutes he and his companions were enjoying
a really satisfying meal.
While they ate, they examined their surroundings. It was half tide. A
bleak, rocky foreshore provided at least an ideal breeding-ground for
oysters. Behind them rose the solemn bank of pine-trees through which
they had come. On the right, only half a mile away, stood the great
shoulder of rock which shut out the Pacific on that northern side of the
estuary. In front, two miles or more distant, lay a jumble of forests
and wild hills, and a similar vista spread far to the left, because the
estuary widened to a span of several miles.
It was, indeed, a wild, desolate, awe-inspiring land, a territory
abandoned of mankind! In such regions old-time sailors found fearsome
monsters, amphibious reptiles larger than ships, and gnomes of demoniac
aspect.
Such visions were easy to conjure up. Nina Forbes saw one now in the
dusk.
"Oh, what is that?" she cried, in genuine alarm, gazing seaward with
terror-laden eyes.
It took some time to unmask the strange denizen of the deep which she
had discovered. Three seals, lying in a row on a flat rock, looked
remarkably like the accepted pictures of a sea-serpent, but the illusion
was destroyed when one of the creatures dived, followed, in turn, by
each of the others, in one, two, three order.
"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.