LAUNCHING THE MUD TURTLE
There was still no sign of the missing man at the camp when the sun
rose, and a fear that had haunted Dave began to become very real. He
was now firmly convinced that his friend had gone for a swim and been
drowned. In a very dismal mood he walked down to the bay where they
usually took their dip, and searched, fearing to find what he was
searching for.
“Jim,” he said at last, “we’ll put up some lunch and spend the rest of
the day going over every foot of this island. There’s always a chance.”
Systematically they explored the southern and western extremities of
the place, and the sun was already slanting westward when they came to
the rugged territory in the north. Dave had very little hope left,
when suddenly Jim gave a cry of delight which brought the boy to his
side at a run.
On one of the few patches of ground which did not consist of hard rock
two or three footmarks were distinctly visible.
“We get him yet,” declared the Kanaka, now moving quickly from place to
place like a hound eagerly picking up scent. A score of yards farther
on he stooped over a broken twig and silently pointed to it. Under it
was the faint imprint of a shoe heel.
Gradually they progressed almost to the northern shore, guided by one
indistinct mark after another and shouting as loudly as possible every
few minutes.
At length the Kanaka put his hand on Dave’s shoulder suddenly, his head
bent in a listening attitude.
A faint cry reached the boy’s ears.
“Thank goodness!” he said solemnly.
Five minutes later he was by Tempest’s side.
“Hello, old top,” said the latter, in a weak voice. “You don’t happen
to have a plate of ham and eggs about you, and a quart or so of coffee,
do you? I’m ravenous. I couldn’t find a restaurant open anywhere round
here.”
“Stop fooling!” said Dave. “Where are you hurt?”
“I guess I ought to be nearly all right by now,” Tempest said with a
grin. “I’ve been doing nothing particular but nurse it for about thirty
hours. I twisted my ankle a bit yesterday, and I must have bumped my
head in falling, because I don’t remember much about it.”
“Well, cheer up,” said Dave. “We’ll soon get you home now.”
“Oh, I’ve been cheered up for the best part of an hour,” said Tempest.
“I heard you and Jim yelling the top of your heads off, but the wind
was in the wrong direction for you to hear me shouting back. I knew
you’d roll up sooner or later. Sorry to give you so much trouble. Jim,
you’re as strong as a rhinoceros, if not so good-looking. If there
isn’t any sign of a taxicab, would you mind giving me a pickaback as
far as our little dump, and I’ll promise never to call you an ugly old
sinner again?”
Without a word the Kanaka stooped, and Tempest scrambled onto his back.
He winced once or twice as they traveled over uneven ground, for, in
spite of his cheerfulness, his ankle was very painful. Tireless as a
horse, Jim carried him all the way, and deposited him gently at the
camp, where Dave assumed the rôle of doctor. It was now his turn to
apply a cold compress, but the sprain had been a severe one, and the
swelling did not go down appreciably for three days.
While the patient was lying resting his injury he and Dave had a long
talk on the possibility of their being picked up. Five weeks had
elapsed since the crew of the ill-fated _Manihiki_ set sail. It was
only possible to speculate, of course, as to what had happened to the
small craft. There had been no very rough weather on the island, but
that was not much to go by, as a terrific storm might sweep by within
fifty miles and never be noticed where they were.
“It is a little early to get impatient, yet,” Tempest commented. “If
they have all been sunk, we may be left here till we have beards down
to our knees, and not a soul would be the wiser; but we can safely wait
three months before making up our minds for that sort of thing.”
“I suppose we couldn’t possibly try to make the trip in our dory?” Dave
suggested.
“There’s no law against it,” Tempest said, “but you don’t catch this
child trying the experiment. You remember what happened not long ago
when you and Jim were out fishing and the wind got up a bit. And you
were practically under the shelter of this island all the time. You can
imagine what it would be like if a regular gale hit that cockleshell.”
“Well, couldn’t we build a boat?”
“I’ve thought of that. But it’s a big undertaking, you know, and I
never made anything out of wood but a dog-kennel. I’m game to try,
though, if you like. It’ll amuse us if it does nothing else. Let us
start by giving her a name. What are you going to call this wonderful
craft? How will the _Mud Turtle_ do?”
“That’ll do finely,” said the boy. “We will start on her as soon as you
can walk.”
Though neither Tempest nor Dave knew it, the day they laid the keel
of the _Mud Turtle_ the crew of the _Manihiki_ were being landed at
Melbourne, their plans having gone somewhat astray. They had covered
half the distance to Fiji laboriously by tacking against adverse winds
most of the time, and had reduced their ration of water by half, as
their supply of that precious liquid was getting perilously low, when
a steamer nearly ran them down in the middle of the night, the only
lamp on the long-boat having been broken. The helmsman on the steamer
heard their cries just in time to swing aside, and the men from the
_Manihiki_ were only too thankful to accept the offer of a passage
to the first port the vessel was bound for. There was no wireless on
board, so until he reached Melbourne Captain Peters was unable to
notify his owners of the loss of their vessel and the plight of those
he had left on the island. A month was to elapse, moreover, before the
next vessel was to leave Sydney for the scene of the shipwreck.
The task of building the _Mud Turtle_ was a more formidable one than
even Tempest had anticipated. To begin with they had very few planks
that were of any service for the purpose. One of the spars off the
_Manihiki_ made a rough keel, but almost all the rest of the material
had to be hewn out of green trees. They had plenty of tools, however,
and though the skeleton of the craft would probably have convulsed
a professional boat builder with laughter, it had at least more
resemblance to a boat than a dog kennel, as Tempest pointed out.
The _Mud Turtle_ was sixteen feet in length, and somewhat narrow in
order to overcome some of the difficulty of getting curves. As a matter
of fact she consisted chiefly of angles. From the first she had no
pretentions to elegance, and in spite of her builders’ ingenuity there
were awkward gaps where the rough planks positively refused to meet,
this necessitating a great deal more caulking and patching than was
consistent with beauty.
“How fast do you think she will sail?” Dave asked when they had her
about half finished.
“About a knot an hour, if we get out and push,” Tempest replied
lugubriously. “Pity we didn’t let that engineer bring the donkey engine
ashore. We could have rigged it up and converted our wonderful boat
into a steamer, maybe p’raps, as Jim says.”
The Kanaka, who had distinct ideas on the subject of boat building,
but whose ideas had been overruled because Tempest thought a catamaran
such as they could construct would be as dangerous as a bundle of
dynamite, viewed the _Mud Turtle_ with something akin to suspicion, if
not actual distrust; but he worked on her just as cheerfully as the
others, putting in long hours with the saw on green timber and using
other carpenter’s tools with remarkable skill considering they were all
strange to him.
It was decided to have the boat half decked in, lest they should
encounter bad weather, but before tackling that part of the job Tempest
and Dave made up their minds to set their vessel afloat for a trial
trip, just to see how she took to the water. Before sliding her down
the beach they went over every seam and applied pitch liberally. She
looked more like a disjointed miniature coal hulk than anything by the
time they had her ready, and when Dave ran a critical eye over her he
had certain misgivings.
“She’s no racer, certainly,” he said, “but considering she is the first
boat we ever made the result isn’t so bad, is it?”
Tempest glanced over her awkward lines.
“I’ll tell you better when I see her dancing over the silvery waves,”
he replied cautiously.
“We’re ready now, aren’t we? All together. Push.”
The _Mud Turtle_ slid down the greased boards with the grace of
a lumbering elephant, Dave, Tempest and Jim hanging on to her
tenaciously. Just as she plunged into the water they all three leaped
up the side. The boat had come down a considerable slope, and threw
up a large wave as she dived. The water was dead calm, and the _Mud
Turtle_ shot out twenty feet from the shore, but even as she was doing
so her builders realized that something was radically wrong. She was
canting over at a perilous angle, and the strain of being launched had
strained her timbers alarmingly. In half a dozen places jets of water
were squirting into her, and in one place where a patch had been
sprung the sea was coming in faster than it could have been bailed out.
Jim looked at the wreck of their hopes with a perfectly blank
expression. Perhaps he had anticipated something of the sort all the
time. Dave, standing ankle deep in the bottom of the boat, frowned
gloomily. Tempest, leaning against the side of the craft that was
highest out of the water, in an attempt to keep her balanced, laughed
long and loudly.
“I don’t call it a bit funny,” the boy said, watching the _Mud Turtle_
slowly settle down.
“I refuse to burst into tears about it,” Tempest said. “It is a whole
lot funnier to see her going down now right here than it would have
been if we had got about fifty miles away from shore in her and then
she had started to play tricks on us.”
“I suppose it is, really,” agreed Dave, who was beginning to absorb
from Bruce Tempest some of his unquenchable good spirits whatever
happened. “But can you suggest what we’re going to do with her now?”
“She would fetch a lot of money anywhere――as a curiosity,” said
Tempest. “But I’m afraid the buyers of this interesting maritime
monster will have to be quick, because in a few more minutes the sad
sea waves will have closed over her for ever.”
“Can’t we do anything with her?” the boy asked, smiling now in spite of
his disappointment.
“She is getting too wet to burn. That’s all I can think of.”
“What about putting ballast in to keep her upright?”
“You’d have to put enough rocks in to force the bottom out of her. No,
I’m sorry to say it, Dave, but the _Mud Turtle_ is a hopeless failure.
Come on, we have either to swim ashore or go down with the brute.”
And so, in six feet of water, they pushed off from the boat a few
minutes before it quietly sank. Its gunwale was disappearing as they
reached shore.
During all the time the trio were marooned they kept a fixed rule that
every three hours during the day one of them was to ascend the hill
where the flagpole stood and scan the horizon through the binoculars.
As the weeks sped into months they became more hopeful, for the time
was now nearing when the steamer sent by the crew of the _Manihiki_
might put in an appearance. Whatever doubts Tempest may have had on
that score, he said nothing about them. He knew well enough the grim
possibilities that might overtake a small, crowded boat on a trip of
four hundred miles, and there were times when he thanked his stars
that neither Dave nor he had undertaken the trip. At the same time,
it occurred to him there was a distinct chance that they might have
to remain where they were for a year or more, and, rather than miss
the opportunity of attracting some boat that might pass in the night,
he kept the bonfire of brushwood near the flagpole ready to light.
Sometimes he and the boy would stroll up to the look-out post during
the evening and yarn, while keeping a watch on the dark waters.
One night――it was the night of their seventy-second day on the
island――Dave, having dozed most of the afternoon, felt little
inclination to sleep. His two companions were in the land of dreams.
Stepping softly, to avoid waking them, he passed out of the hut, and
strolled out into the night air. A thin crescent of the moon shed a
pale light, and the stars glistened like a myriad of diamonds set in
the sky. First he strolled slowly down the silvery beach and stood near
the edge of the water, whose waves were lapping the sand gently. He
stood there a few minutes, drinking in the tropic beauty of the scene,
and then, to get a wider view, walked up the hill to the flagpole.
Scanning the horizon as a matter of habit, his eye rested for a second
on something far away where the starlit sky seemed to dip down into the
ocean. He stood still as a statue and tried to find it again. Surely
it was imagination――or was it? He could have been positive that just
for a fraction of a second a greenish light twinkled in the distance.
Perhaps it was a star. At any rate he could not pick it out again with
the naked eye, so he walked down for his binoculars. Five minutes later
he was back on the hill, peering through the glasses.
Suddenly his heart gave a thump. That was no star. The greenish hue
was unmistakable. Like a hare, he leaped down to the camp, shouting to
awaken Tempest.
“Matches, quick!” he yelled excitedly, fumbling in Tempest’s pocket.
“There’s a ship away off, fifteen or twenty miles to the south’ard.”
“And I was just getting off to sleep so beautifully!” expostulated
Tempest, who, however, did not allow any grass to grow under his feet.
He and Dave made a dead heat of it up to the flagpole, Jim lumbering
up in the rear.
“Where away?” asked Tempest, while Dave put a light to the dry twigs.
“Right over there, in a line with my finger. Use the glasses, or else
you can’t see it.” The boy’s finger shook a trifle as he pointed.
“Thunder! You’re right, laddie!” Tempest said after a moment. “More
brushwood, quick. Jim, you scalawag, I’ll skin you alive if you don’t
get busy. The fourth of July isn’t in it with this for a bonfire. Get
an ax, you Kanaka. Bushes――trees――whole forests if you can find ’em!”
Already the flames were licking their way above the pile of brushwood,
and Dave and Tempest were wildly tearing at the branches near by. Soon
the Kanaka, with gleaming eyes and mighty strokes, was tearing off more
fuel, which was quickly flung to the top of the bonfire.
“That’s the style!” Tempest shouted as the fire threw their figures up
in its glare. “If she’s going straight by there, we may only have a
little while to attract her attention. Jiminy! We ought to have a fire
they could see in Australia!”
Regardless of scratches and cuts, they toiled on, while the flames rose
higher and higher, Tempest pausing only now and again to take a squint
through the binoculars. At that distance it was very difficult to see
whether the vessel was putting about.
After about half an hour of this strenuous labor he leaned, breathless,
against the pole to steady the glasses.
“I can’t see a blessed thing of her now,” he said. “Here, Dave, you
have a try.”
The boy looked long and carefully.
“I don’t see the green,” he said, “but if I’m not mistaken there’s a
white light in about the same place.”
“More trees――more forests, Jim, or I’ll tear your ears off. That’s the
mast head light. She’s put about. Say good-bye to the little pigs on
this island, Dave, because I’m a Dutchman if you’ll get the chance to
do it soon. We’ll be bound for furrin parts before you know where you
are.”
Another half-hour showed unmistakably that the ship was heading direct
for the beacon. The trio still kept the flames leaping until the vessel
was about a mile off, and then they went down to the beach, where the
steady thump of her propeller was distinctly audible. Soon the rattle
of an anchor-chain came over the water, and the dark form of a dory
came creeping over the lagoon.
Dave was wildly elated. Tempest, now that the suspense was over, almost
seemed to be losing interest. It was beginning to dawn on him that he
had been as happy on the island as he ever was anywhere. The Kanaka
squatted on the sand with expressionless face, not even giving a grunt
of satisfaction when the dory ran on the sand.
“Hello, there!” said a voice. “Anybody at home?”