WRECKAGE AND SALVAGE
All the wood in the cleft was sodden from the fierce downpour that had
accompanied the cyclone; all the cleft bottom other than the bare ledges
was a bed of mud; everything without the tree-cave had been either blown
away or heaped with broken boughs and mud-spattered rubbish. But the girl
had far too much to think about to feel any concern over the mere damage
and destruction of things. It was rather a relief to find something that
called for work.
Not being able to find dry fuel, she gathered a quantity of the least
sodden of the twigs and branches, and spread them out on a ledge in the
clear sunshine. While her firewood was drying, she scraped away the mud
and litter heaped upon her rude hearth. She then began a search for lost
articles. When she dug out the pottery ware, she found her favorite
stew-pot and one of the platters in fragments. The drying-frames for
the meat had been blown away, and so had the antelope and hyena skins.
Catching sight of a bit of white down among the bamboos, she went to it,
and was not a little surprised to see the tattered remnant of her duck
skirt. It had evidently been torn from the signal staff by the first gust
of the cyclone, whirled down into the cleft by some flaw or eddy in the
wind, and wadded so tightly into the heart of the thick clump of stems
that all the fury of the storm had failed to dislodge it. Its recovery
seemed to the girl a special providence; for of course they must keep up
a signal on the cliff.
Having started her fire and set on a stew, she hunted out her sewing
materials from their crevice in the cave, and began mending the slits
in the torn flag. While she worked she sat on a shaded ledge, her bare
feet toasting in the sun, and her soggy, mud-smeared moccasins drying
within reach. When Blake appeared, the moccasins were still where she had
first set them; but the little pink feet were safely tucked up beneath
the tattered flag. Fortunately, the sight of the white cloth prevented
Blake from noticing the moccasins.
"Hello!" he exclaimed. "What's that?--the flag? Say, that's luck!
I'll break out a bamboo right off. Old staff's carried clean away."
"Mr. Blake,--just a moment, please. What have you done with--with it?"
Blake jerked his thumb upward.
"You have carried him up on the cliff?"
"Best place I could think of. No animals--and I piled stones over....
But, I say, look here."
He drew out a piece of wadded cloth, marked off into little squares by
crossing lines of stitches. One of the squares near the edge had been
ripped open. Blake thrust in his finger, and worked out an emerald the
size of a large pea.
"O-h-h!" cried Miss Leslie, as he held the glittering gem out to her
in his rough palm.
He drew it back, and carefully thrust it again into its pocket.
"That's one," he said. "There's another in every square of this
innocent, harmless rag--dozens of them. He must have made a clean sweep
of the duke's--or, more like, the duchess's jewels. Now, if you please,
I want you to sew this up tight again, and--"
"I cannot--I cannot touch it!" she cried.
"Say, I didn't mean to-- It was confounded stupid of me," mumbled
Blake. "Won't you excuse me?"
"Of course! It was only the--the thought that--"
"No wonder. I always am a fool when it comes to ladies. I'll fix the
thing all right."
Catching up the nearest small pot, he crammed the quilted cloth down
within it, and filled it to the brim with sticky mud.
"There! Guess nobody's going to run off with a jug of mud--and it
won't hurt the stones till we get a chance to look up the owner. He
won't be hard to find--English duke minus a pint of first-class
sparklers! Will you mind its setting in the cave after things are fixed
up?"
"No; not as it is."
He nodded soberly. "All right, then. Now I'll go for the new
flag-staff. You might set out breakfast."
She nodded in turn, and when he came back from the bamboos with the
largest of the great canes on his shoulder, his breakfast was waiting
for him. She set it before him, and turned to go again to her sewing.
"Hold on," he said. "This won't do. You've got to eat your share."
"I do not--I am not hungry."
"That's no matter. Here!"
He forced upon her a bowl of hot broth, and she drank it because she
could not resist his rough kindness.
"Good! Now a piece of meat," he said.
"Please, Mr. Blake!" she protested.
"Yes, you must!"
She took a bite, and sought to eat; but there was such a lump in her
throat that she could not swallow. The tears gushed into her eyes, and
she began to weep.
Blake's close-set lips relaxed, and he nodded.
"That's it; let it run out. You're overwrought. There's nothing like
a good cry to ease off a woman's nerves--and I guess ladies aren't
much different from women when it comes to such things."
"But I--I want to get the flag mended!" she sobbed.
"All right, all right; plenty of time!" he soothed. "I'm going to see
how things look down the cleft."
He bolted the last of his meat, and at once left her alone to cry
herself back to calmness over the stitching of the signal.
His first concern was for the barricade. As he had feared, he found that
it had been blown to pieces. The greater part of the thorn branches
which he had gathered with so much labor were scattered to the four
corners of the earth. He stood staring at the wreckage in glum silence;
but he did not swear, as he would have done the week before. Presently
his face cleared, and he began to whistle in a plaintive minor key. He
was thinking of how she had looked when she darted out of the tree at
his call--of her concern for him. When he was so angered at Winthrope,
she had called him Tom!
After a time he started on, picking his way over the remnant of the
barricade, without a falter in his whistling. The deluge of rain had
poured down the cleft in a torrent, tearing away the root-matted soil
and laying bare the ledges in the channel of the spring rill. But aside
from an occasional boggy hole, the water had drained away.
At the foot, about the swollen pool, was a wide stretch of rubbish and
mud. He worked his way around the edge, and came out on the plain, where
the sandy soil was all the firmer for its drenching. He swung away at a
lively clip. The air was fresh and pure after the storm, and a slight
breeze tempered the sun-rays.
He kept on along the cliff until he turned the point. It was not
altogether advisable to bathe at this time of day; but he had been caught
out by the cyclone in a corner of the swamp, across the river, where the
soil was of clay. Only his anxiety for Miss Leslie had enabled him to
fight his way out of the all but impassable morass which the storm
deluge had made of the half-dry swamp. At dawn he had reached the
river, and swam across, reckless of the crocodiles. The turbid water of
the stream had rid him of only part of his accumulated slime and
ooze. So now he washed out his tattered garments as well as he could
without soap, and while they were drying on the sun-scorched rocks,
swam about in the clear, tonic sea-water, quite as reckless of the
sharks as he had been of the ugly crocodiles in the river.
For all this, he was back at the baobab before Miss Leslie had stitched
up the last slit in the torn flag.
She looked up at him, with a brave attempt at a smile.
"I am afraid I'm not much of a needle-woman," she sighed. "Look at
those stitches!"
"Don't fret. They'll hold all right, and that's what we want," he
reassured her. "Give it me, now. I've got to get it up, and hurry
back for a nap. No sleep last night--I was out beyond the river, in
the swamp--and to-night I'll have to go on watch. The barricade is
down."
"Oh, that is too bad! Couldn't I take a turn on watch?"
Blake shook his head. "No; I'll sleep to-day, and work rebuilding the
barricade to-night. Toward morning I might build up the fire, and take a
nap."
He caught up the flag and its new staff, and swung away through the cleft.
He returned much sooner than Miss Leslie expected, and at once began to
throw up a small lean-to of bamboos over a ledge at the cliff foot,
behind the baobab. The girl thought he was making himself a hut, in
place of the canopy under which he had slept before the storm, which,
like Winthrope's, had been carried away. But when he stopped work, he
laconically informed her that all she had to do to complete her new
house was to dry some leaves.
"But I thought it was for yourself!" she protested. "I will sleep
inside the tree."
"Doc Blake says no!" he rejoined--"not till it's dried out."
She glanced at his face, and replied, without a moment's hesitancy:
"Very well. I will do what you think best."
"That's good," he said, and went at once to lie down for his much
needed sleep.
He awoke just soon enough before dark to see the results of her hard
day's labor. All the provisions stored in the tree had been brought
out to dry, and a great stack of fuel, ready for burning, was piled
up against the baobab; while all about the tree the rubbish had been
neatly gathered together in heaps. Blake looked his admiration for her
industry. But then his forehead wrinkled.
"You oughtn't to've done so much," he admonished.
"I'll show you I can tote fair!" she rejoined. During the afternoon
she had called to mind that odd expression of a Southern girl chum, and
had been waiting her opportunity to banter him with it.
He stared at her open-eyed, and laughed.
"Say, Miss Jenny, you'd better look out. You'll be speaking American,
first thing!"
Thereupon, they fell to chattering like children out of school, each
happy to be able to forget for the moment that broken figure up on the
cliff top and the haunting fear of what another day might bring to them.
When they had eaten their meal, both with keen appetites, Blake sprang
up, with a curt "Good-night!" and swung off down the cleft. The girl
looked after him, with a lingering smile.
"I wish he hadn't rushed off so suddenly," she murmured. "I was just
going to thank him for--for everything!"
The color swept over her face in a deep blush, and she darted around to
her tiny hut as though some one might have overheard her whisper.
Yet, after all, she had said nothing; or, at least, she had merely said
"everything."