His Unknown Wife

“Guess we’re satisfied with your control so far,” said Sturgess. “What are you making a kick about? You prophesied just what would occur, and that’s more than the average wizard can do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Didn’t you tell us we might strike a score of reefs between Providence Beach and Smyth’s Channel, and that we should be lucky if we didn’t have to build ’steen rafts?”

Maseden smiled. The rock he had marked as an index was reappearing, and the water had sunk another inch below his knees. The tide had unquestionably turned; the water banked up on the opposite shore was also yielding to the new force.

“I never anticipated another complete shipwreck,” he said. “We have lost everything, ropes, skins, food – our chief supporter, the broken foremast – even our flag.”

“But we still have the rifle and cartridges, and we’re plus a fortnight’s experience. If we don’t start life again better fixed than when we climbed to the ledge in the dark from the forecastle of the Southern Cross, call me a Dutchman.”

“I agree with C. K.,” Nina chimed in. “Even here there must be some sort of a passage at low water. Which way shall we go – back or forward?”

“We gain nothing by going back,” said Maseden slowly. “For one thing, we are on the wrong side of the channel. For another, I have been taking stock of the peculiar vagaries of the tide during the past fifteen minutes, and I imagine that there is a slight difference in the water level between this point and that which we left this morning. Still water attains a dead level, of course, but strong tides have rules of their own.

“Now, supposing the tide from the Pacific runs into Providence Beach a few minutes earlier than it reaches Nelson Straits, that would account for the terrific rush in which we were caught. For the same cause, the falling tide should be far less strenuous here, but stronger there, and I do really believe that opposite our camp the ebb tide always developed a swifter current than the flood.”

“I’m sure of it,” agreed Sturgess. “They were both pretty hefty, but this morning’s flood didn’t begin to compare with last night’s ebb. You ought to know. You went through it alone on board the raft.”

“Then the answer is, ‘Go forward,’” said Madge.

“I think so. Let us be guided by events. We have the best part of the day before us. Surely we can find some safer lodgment than this before night falls.”

The others knew that Maseden’s voice had lost its confident ring, but the fact that they had so narrowly dodged death barred all other considerations.

In his heart of hearts he was deadly afraid that they might indeed be compelled to return to Hanover Island. The sheer barrenness of the islet on which they were now stranded was its vital defect. Probably they would still find shell-fish, still knock an occasional seal on the head, but wood they must have, both for fire and raft building, and it seemed to him that there were no trees nearer than the slopes facing Providence Beach.

However, having come so far, they might at least have a look at the conditions on the south side, where lay yet another island; and there was also the unalterable fact that if they must escape by using the tides, their first day’s experiences, though resulting in disaster, had brought them many miles in the right direction.

Perhaps they had met and conquered their greatest danger. They had paid a dear price for victory, but that was nothing new in war.

Of course there was a long and wearisome wait before they could do other than sit on the slowly emerging rocks. But it was something gained when they were free to climb out into the open and see the sky over their heads. The silent, nerve-racking menace of the canopied rock was quite as unbearable as the loud-mouthed threats of sea and reef.

Madge, slightly less self-contained than her sister, promptly voiced her relief.

“If I live to be older than I want to be I shall never forget one awful crack in the roof just above us,” she said. “I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. It seemed to be opening and shutting all the time with a horrible slowness.”

“How old do you want to be?” demanded Sturgess, readily seizing the chance to divert her thoughts from a nightmare memory.

“Forty-five,” she answered without any hesitation.

“Gee! That leaves me less than eighteen years to live!”

“I wasn’t thinking of you, C. K.”

“But your limit rouses one’s curiosity. Why forty-five, any more than fifty or sixty? Granted good health, heaps of people enjoy life at sixty.”

“At forty-five a woman begins to fade and men grow horrid,” she announced calmly, as though stating an incontrovertible thesis.

“Please don’t talk rubbish, either of you,” interrupted Nina sharply. “Alec, can’t we dodge along from rock to rock? It seems to be ever so much more open half a mile ahead.”

“Let’s try,” said Maseden.

He wondered vaguely why Nina broke in on her sister’s quaint theorizing. Any nonsense which took their minds off the troubles of the hour was a good thing in itself.

They scrambled and slithered through the passage, which resembled the moraine of a glacier, save that the rocks were on the same plane, and the central stream was clear and greenish instead of being nearly milk white. Once they were held up fully fifteen minutes because the channel ran close to an overhanging rock which really looked as though it might be brought down by the disturbance of a pebble.

Then Maseden was moved to make investigations, and discovered that the main waterway was extraordinarily deep. In other words, the sea had preferred to scoop out a ditch rather than flow through the ample space bordering Hanover Island. Even at low tide there was deep water here.

“We must go on, one at a time,” he said, and led the way.

He found that Nina Forbes was close behind.

“Remain where you are!” he said gruffly. “I’ll tell you when to follow and indicate the best track.”

She frowned, and her eyes sparkled, but she obeyed. Sturgess, too, growled a protest.

“He ought to give me that kind of try-out,” he said. “If there’s trouble, and I go under, it won’t matter so much. But you girls can’t spare Alec. He’s worth twenty of me when it comes to a show-down.”

However, they all crossed the danger point safely, and each in turn noticed that which Maseden alone had been able to see at first – that a huge buttress had fallen quite recently, probably during the preceding tide, so the whole mass might crumble into ruin at any moment. As was their way, once a danger had passed they did not discuss it again. Sturgess, of course, had something to say, though it only bore inferentially on this latest risk.

“I always had a notion that the New York Fire Department was a pretty nervy proposition,” he informed all and sundry during a halt on the only strip of open beach yet encountered in their new exploration, “but I guess I can show the chief a few fresh stunts first time I blow into headquarters on East Sixty-seventh Street.”

Sturgess’s airy references to New York were excellent tonics. He refused to regard that great city and its ordered life as dreamlike figments of the imagination. To him the flaring lights of Broadway ever glimmered above the horizon. Had he sighted the Statue of Liberty around the next bend that would mean reality; this, the dreary expanse of dead hills, water and black rock, would have been the dream.

Maseden, recovering his poise, had resumed his everyday air of well-grounded optimism. At any rate, he argued, the four of them were living and uninjured. They still owned those thrice-precious cartridges, the rifle and the poncho. They had many hours of daylight before them, and would surely find drinkable water and food before dark.

Happily the weather was fine, though clouds banking up in the west told of a possible gale, which might blow itself out in a few hours, or last as many days, or weeks. In that climate there was no knowing. The almanac declared that it was high summer, yet it would be no uncommon event if a snowstorm came from the southwest and mantled all the land a foot deep.

As for their clothes being wet, these young people thought little of such a trifle. Their skins were becoming, in the expressive Indian phrase, “all face.”

So they trudged on, heading for the mouth of the defile. In the far distance they discerned the broken line of another mountainous island, the lower slopes black with forests.

“That’s a good sign, folk,” said Maseden, smiling cheerfully once more. “We’re making for a timber belt. When you come to think of it, trees simply couldn’t grow on these rocks, and the watershed seems to fall away on both sides of the gorge, which must have been cut by an earthquake.”

His eyes had been searching constantly for signs of the raft’s wreckage, but never so much as a splintered log could he see. Nina, not so preoccupied, was gazing farther afield.

Suddenly she stopped, and something in her manner arrested the others.

“I don’t think I’m mistaken,” she said, “but are not those two points the flanks of these islands?”

“There can be little doubt of that,” agreed Maseden, following her glance towards the gap some three or four miles in front. It was difficult to estimate distance accurately in that region of vast solitudes.

“Then, if that is so,” she went on in a puzzled tone, “where does the remainder of the land go to? The cliffs end not so very far away. Why don’t we see other bits sticking out?”

The underlying sense of the question was clearer than its form. For some undetermined cause the passage between the islands evidently widened considerably before it closed in at the ultimate southern exit. Hopefulness is often a close blend of curiosity and expectation. They pressed on more rapidly, eager as children to see what lay around the corner.

They were soon enlightened, and most agreeably so. They entered a spacious amphitheatre – in its way, almost a place of beauty. Not only were the hillsides clothed with pines and other trees, but, rarest sight of all along that stark coast, strips of white sand bordered the foreshore.