His Unknown Wife

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?”