His Unknown Wife

As to her history or nationality, the only reliable tokens were the swords, which were Spanish, with Toledo blades. The copper cooking-pots were Mexican. In a word, she was ostensibly a trader, and Maseden believed that the iron-clamped box containing the treasure had been hidden beneath the floor of the cabin, because the planks were broken where the heavy package had apparently fallen through.

One thing was certain. The similarity of the six flagons, the two dishes and the four animal figures showed that they came from an Aztec teocalli, or temple, of great wealth and importance. It was highly improbable that any town on the west coast of Mexico contained any such fame. If, therefore, they had been looted from the interior of the country, a reasonable assumption was that some band of Spanish adventurers, finding the way hopelessly blocked to the east, fought their way westward, and actually built the vessel which should convey them to far-off Cadiz.

It was a strange hap that laid bare their plunder to the eyes of four descendants of the race which was destined to sweep them and their barbarous methods off the high seas.

After a day of hard work and many thrills, Maseden was moved to accept the discovery as a good omen.

“I had in my mind to suggest that we should renew our voyage by to-morrow’s first tide,” he said, as they sat near the camp-fire after the evening meal. “Just as the Romans consulted the oracle before starting on any great undertaking, so have we been given a happy augury by having thrust into our hands, so to speak, a notable treasure. Friends, I propose that we accept the decision of the gods, and weigh anchor in the morning.”

For no assignable reason, the suddenness of this resolve seemed to startle the others.

“Have you made up your mind, then, that the channel is practicable?” inquired Sturgess after a marked pause.

“The only channel we know is practicable,” said Maseden.

“Do you mean that we should return the way we came?” put in Nina in an awed tone.

“It offers our only means of escape,” was the grave answer. “To my mind, if we attempt the southern exit we go to certain death. We have a roomy boat, a sail, and oars. By putting off slightly before high water we can reach the mouth of the gorge just on the turn of the tide. I think we can get through without any real difficulty, and even beach our boat in the open and shallow channel of Hanover Island which we were making for when the raft was swept out of its course. We have discussed the tides many times, and we all believe that we shall find ourselves in the main tidal stream again on the other side of that island opposite,” and he pointed to the mass of black hills outlined against the eastern sky. “It is only the ‘lesser of two evils,’ I admit, but it yields a possibility; whereas I regard any attempt to navigate the southern avenue as absolutely fatal.”

“Why the rush for the morning tide?” queried Sturgess.

Then Maseden laughed.

“You have fallen a victim to the prospecting mania,” he said cheerfully. “Having made a good strike, you want to follow it up. I don’t blame you. I believe this beach would pay well for digging. Before you were through with the search you would have a fine collection of odds and ends. But I’m minded to be superstitious for once. That puma with the glistening eyes has seemed to wink at me all day and say ‘Get me and yourself out of this quick!’ I don’t want to impose my wishes on you others, but my advice is: Start to-morrow!”

Madge, listening intently, nodded.

“You are always right,” she said emphatically. “‘Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest – ’”

She hesitated, as though conscious that her tongue was running away with her. The quotation, though apt, was peculiarly infelicitous. It did not please Sturgess; it reminded Maseden of an extraordinary relationship which he had tried in vain to ignore; it jarred on Nina Forbes’s sensitiveness, because it recalled the promise she had made at dawn but had not had any opportunity of fulfilling.

She it was who broke up the conclave abruptly by springing to her feet.

“If we’re going sailing the angry seas to-morrow, it’s high time we were trying to sleep,” she said. “Come, Madge… By the way, is there to be any more guard-mounting to-night?”

“Yes, and you have no concern therein,” said Maseden firmly.

“Who’s keeping guard?” inquired Madge. “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

“Alec has had an attack of the fidgets ever since he saw that empty coracle,” said Nina. “But I’m the worst sort of sentry, anyhow, and you would be no better, dear, so let us snooze selfishly, and be ready to help the men in to-morrow’s hard work.”

“I’ve never before known a verse from the Bible break up a meeting like that,” commented Sturgess thoughtfully when the girls had gone. “Somebody might have heaved a tin of kerosene into the fire, the way Nina jumped up.”

“The words may have evoked distressing memories,” said Maseden incautiously.

“As how?”

Sturgess’s alert brain was very wide awake at that moment, but Maseden contrived to extricate himself.

“That famous phrase of Ruth’s contains the essence of an otherwise uninteresting Biblical story,” he said. “If Ruth had not been so faithful to her mother-in-law we might never have heard of her.”

“Was Naomi her mother-in-law?”

“Yes. Ruth, herself a widow, married Boaz.”

“I guess I was sort of mixed up about it.”

“Lots of people are,” said Maseden dryly, and the subject dropped.

They were astir early and, when the tide served, put off with as little ceremony as though they were going on a river picnic.

The boat, of course, was far more easily managed than the raft. By keeping in the slack water inshore they contrived to reach the mouth of the gorge about the beginning of the ebb, and their calculations were completely verified by the smoothness and safety of their subsequent passage.

Maseden stood in the bows with an oar in readiness to sheer away from any obstruction in mid-stream. The two girls each took an oar, and Sturgess steered, also with an oar, as the broad-bladed rudder ran a foot deeper than the keel, being intended to act as a center-board when the sail was in use.

So preoccupied were they with their task that they hardly noticed the spot where the cliff had fallen away soon after they had passed beneath. Even the canopied rock on which they found sanctuary after the loss of the raft merely attracted a momentary glance. Madge, eyeing the fissure which had so terrified her, was about to say something when a warning shout from Maseden caused her to pull a few vigorous strokes.

They sheered past a flat boulder. A couple of vultures, scared by the unwonted apparition of a boat, flapped aloft, and they all saw, stretched on the rock, some portions of a human skeleton which most certainly had not been there when they came that way little more than a fortnight earlier.

The uncanny sight vanished as swiftly as it came. None spoke. The pace of the stream was quickening, and each had to be in instant readiness to obey orders.

At this stage Maseden asked the girls to reverse their positions and pull steadily. In consequence they were backing water, and thus checking the boat’s way appreciably. By this means they rounded an awkward corner without any trouble, and again their eyes dwelt on the towering hills and wooded slopes of Hanover Island.

Maseden and Sturgess now began to press laterally towards the eastern channel. Two possible openings were abandoned because of the ugly reefs sighted only a couple of hundred yards away. At last, when practically in the center of a two-mile-wide passage between the three islands, Maseden saw a long stretch of open water.

Shipping a pair of oars, and leaving the steering and general look-out to Sturgess, he called on the girls to pull in the orthodox way. The three bent to the task. After ten minutes of really strenuous effort they were sensible of a greatly diminished drag in the current. Five minutes later they were in slack water, and speedily thereafter the boat ran aground.

“Hooray!” yelled Sturgess, who alone had any breath left to celebrate their victory. Somehow, little as they had gained in actual distance, since Providence Beach was only three miles away, they all felt that their chief enemy was conquered. They had profited by the initial mistake of keeping in mid-channel; they had learned a great deal about the tricks and changes of the Pacific tides; they had secured a first-rate boat, and, lodged in skins as a portion of the ballast, was a treasure of no mean proportions.

Small wonder that they were elated, or that Maseden’s strong face softened into a smile of satisfaction as he drove the boat’s anchor securely into a crevice in the rocky beach.

But he neither forgot the skeleton on the rock in Hell Gate nor failed to interpret correctly its sinister message, so it was his careful scrutiny that first revealed a figure lying on the shore at high-water mark about a quarter of a mile to the east. He surveyed it steadily for a while until the others, too, saw it. Then he made up his mind as to the only practicable course of action. He unhooked the anchor.

“All hands overboard,” he said quietly. “We must get the boat afloat.”

They obeyed instantly. The girls returned on board, their task being to steady the boat with the oars. Maseden took a cudgel, which he preferred to a sword, and hurried towards the prone figure. Sturgess followed, some fifty yards behind, with the rifle, his mission being to cover the retreat, if need be.

Neither Nina nor Madge uttered a word. They were becoming hardened to danger. They knew full well that, for some unimaginable reason, a territory hitherto closed to Indians was now open to them, and Maseden had left his companions under no delusions as to the characteristics of the wretched tribes which infest the lower coast and islands of Chile.

But the particular business of the women at the moment was to keep the boat in such a position that the men could jump in and shove off into deep water without delay, and they attended to that and nothing else.

War makes soldiers, and the struggle for life had assuredly made these two girls brave women.

CHAPTER XVII

RUNNING THE GANTLET

Maseden was not greatly concerned about the dead Indian lying on the shore. What he really expected was a sudden rush of savages from an ambuscade, since it was now certain that a party of natives had descended on Hanover Island. Some might have escaped, but others had come to grief.

The mere presence of a body showed that one, at least, must have died quite recently, while the bleaching bones passed in Hell Gate had probably been alive two days earlier. Some vultures were already circling high overhead, and he wondered why the birds had not begun their ghoulish task.

He could not recollect what manner of sepulture the aborigines adopted, but, from every point of view, it was more than strange to find a corpse abandoned on the beach in such conditions, unless, indeed, some drowned man had just been cast up there by the receding tide.

If that were so, why did the vultures wait?

He was on the alert, therefore, for any suspicious movement among the nearest trees and tall grasses, and warned Sturgess to keep a sharp look-out in the same direction.

“These natives are treacherous brutes,” he said. “They may have seen that our boat was heading this way, and be simply waiting an opportunity to stick harpoons into us. Don’t shoot actually on sight, but be ready to put a stopper on anything like an attack.”

The words had hardly left his lips when the body on the beach moved! Slowly and, as it seemed, painfully, the Indian raised head and shoulders, and turned in the direction of the voice, finally sitting up sideways and using the right arm as a support.

Then, as Maseden drew near, he saw that this was not a man, but a woman, a woman so emaciated and feeble that the first astonished glance he took her to be middle-aged, whereas, in reality, she was not yet eighteen. She was stark naked, and he soon discovered that her left leg was broken.

The unfortunate wretch had dragged herself to an oyster bed, as an array of freshly opened shells testified; but there was no great supply in that place; the water was too shallow. At any rate, Maseden had no other means of estimating how long she had been there; indeed, he gave little thought to that consideration, because the problem of what to do with her arose instantly.

He argued, however, that the members of her tribe could not be close at hand, since the merest instinct of self-preservation would lead them to assist one of their number rendered helpless by an accident, though, among these wild folk, an old woman might be regarded as of no account.

He spoke to her in Spanish, asking what had happened, and she appeared to have a vague sense of his meaning; but her eyes were glistening with terror and fever, and he could make nothing of a mumbled reply except a word that sounded like humo, “smoke.” She showed extreme fear at sight of the gun carried by Sturgess. Holding out her left hand as if pleading for mercy, she collapsed with a groan.

Sturgess, of course, was as fully aware as his companion of the difficulties raised by the discovery of this maimed creature.

“Well, by way of a change, Alec, I guess we’re up against a mighty tough proposition,” he said, scratching his head in sheer perplexity.

“We have only one course open, I take it,” said Maseden, though he, like Sturgess, felt that they might well have been spared this additional burden.

“That’s so. But – are broken legs in your line?”

“I have a notion that the bone-setter has to straighten and adjust the fracture by main force, and then bind the limb tightly, leaving the rest to nature. We have a spare oar. Chop the blade into two lengths of about fifteen inches, and get the girls to cut narrow strips out of the canvas cover. Bring me my oilskin, and what is left of the cover. We can carry her in that. Leave the rifle with me – and hurry! On no account must either Nina or Madge come away from the boat. Be sure and impress that on them. We may have to run for our lives any second.”

Sturgess soon returned with the improvised splints and bandages. He also brought a tin of beef essence which Madge had found among the boat’s stores and was hoarding carefully for such Lucullian feast when soup would appear on the menu.

When Maseden spoke of the remains of the canvas cover he had in mind the fact that the girls had fashioned the greater part of the coarse material into divided skirts. Seals were not plentiful in Rotunda Bay, and the devising of garments had become a sheer necessity.

They persuaded the Indian girl to swallow some of the beef extract. After tasting the first mouthful she would have emptied the tin, but this Maseden would not permit, because he knew the ordeal that was coming.

It was a tough job, too. In a sense, it almost proved more trying for the amateur surgeons than for their unfortunate patient. Luckily, she fainted at the first wrench. Then they set their teeth and pulled the broken bones into their correct positions as well as they could adjudge them. When the girl revived she was already clothed in the oilskin and slung in the canvas sheet as in a hammock, while the limb was bound immovably between two roughly fashioned splints.

Maseden imagined that this creature of the wild was, in all probability, as hardy as a cormorant, and equally voracious. At any rate, when laid in the boat, she gobbled up the remaining contents of the tin, ate ravenously of ship’s biscuits and salt beef, and drank a mug of coffee in a gulp. When she discovered that no more food would be supplied she yielded to an evidently overwhelming desire to sleep.

Before closing her eyes, however, she had something to say. She was afraid of the men, but obviously placed trust in the two girls, neither of whom knew a syllable of Spanish beyond the few phrases which all travelers in South America must perforce acquire.

Madge, having the gift of music, contrived to mimic certain words with tolerable accuracy, and “smoke,” “boats,” “bad men,” seemed, to Maseden’s ear, to emerge from the guttural Indian accents. In one important respect, the wishes of the new addition to the party were quite understandable. She pointed to Providence Beach, indicated the boat, and made it clear that she counselled a prompt move eastward.

At last Maseden evolved a fairly intelligible notion of what she was endeavoring to convey. He believed, and rightly so, that she was telling her rescuers how a number of Indians had been attracted to Hanover Island by the smoke of the castaways’ fire. They assumed a wreck, with its prospect of loot, and, egged on by greed, had ultimately dared a passage hitherto regarded as impracticable. Some had been killed; others had escaped, and were now on the camping-ground at Providence Beach.

Apparently the girl was warning these strangers against her own people and recommending a speedy flight to safer quarters. Oddly enough, her advice coincided with Maseden’s own views. By landing on that part of the coast, and lighting a fire, they would be incurring a grave risk if there were Indians about, since the few miles’ strip of shore, difficult though it was, would be negotiated easily by natives.

The abandonment of the injured girl he could not account for, nor was he sure the boat had been observed, granted even that Providence Beach was not actually occupied by savages. But he was not inclined to take any chances. Deep water flowed yet in the main channel, and the day was not far advanced.

So he and Sturgess shipped the oars and pulled until they were weary; before night fell they had met the rising tide, and made a good landing, not on Hanover Island, but on the eastern end of Island Number Two.

They slept in the boat as best they could, the men taking turns at mounting guard, as in addition to the now somewhat improbable chance of being attacked, their craft had to be maneuvered into slack water as the tide rose and fell. They were all heartily glad to see the dawn and eat a good meal.

The very smell of food awakened the Indian girl. Like a healthy animal recovering from hardship, she was growing plumper and comelier under their very eyes. With each hour she shed a year in appearance, and her confidence increased in about the same ration.

When she discovered that Maseden alone spoke Spanish she tried to explain matters to him. But her own knowledge of the language was of the slightest, and he was only able to confirm his overnight belief as to the danger of remaining in the vicinity of their first landing-place.

Singularly his close acquaintance with the San Juan patois proved most helpful. It occurred to him that this might be so, as the root words of Indian tribes throughout the South American continent have undergone fewer changes than would have been the case among civilized peoples. Many were in use among the Spanish half-castes on the ranch, and this aborigine grasped their meaning at once. Good linguist though he was, however, Maseden failed to extract more than a glimmering of sense from her uncouth accents.

But none could fail to be impressed by her relief when the boat was afloat and traveling east. They soon quitted the channel between the islands and entered the wide expanse of Nelson Straits. The weather was fine, and a steady wind from the southwest encouraged Maseden to rig the sail.

Having a wholesome respect for the Pacific tides, he meant to hug the coast of Hanover Island. But after studying the clouds intently for an hour, the Indian girl signified that she wished to be lifted in her hammock. She then pointed to some small islands just distinguishable on the horizon, and apparently situated in the middle of the straits.

She saw the hesitancy in Maseden’s face, and by this time had evidently singled him out as the leader of the party. Then she turned to Nina Forbes, and her gestures said as plainly, no doubt, as her words:

“If I can’t persuade him, perhaps you can. Tell him to take the course I recommend.”

For some reason Nina’s cheeks grew scarlet under the brown tan of constant exposure to the weather, nor did a pronounced wink by Sturgess at Madge tend to restore her composure. But she met the Indian girl’s appeal with seeming nonchalance and bravely ignored the obvious inference.

“I suppose she thinks that I may exercise some influence in the matter, Alec,” she said, striving in vain to suppress a nervous little laugh. “I do honestly believe she means well. She is extraordinarily grateful to us. I have been watching her, and there is a dog-like devotion in her eyes when we render any little service that is reassuring.”

“Those islets out there may be bare rocks,” protested Maseden. He had little knowledge of sailing boats, and hesitated at a long trip in these fickle waters.

“Perhaps that is why she wishes us to go that way. They lie due east, and that is something in their favor.”

Still was he dubious, largely owing to the intervening stretch of open sea, but again he essayed to question their would-be pilot.

The girl was quite emphatic in her direction as to the course, and equally opposed to the more cautious method he favored. A good deal of this was expressed in pantomime, but it was none the less understandable.

Finally, finding that the others had faith in her, Maseden nodded to Madge, who was at the tiller, as the rudder had been shipped when the sail was hoisted; and the boat was put across the wind. The Indian girl smiled, and was satisfied. They lifted her down to her place amidships, where her head rested on the package of treasure, and she remained there contentedly many hours.

Long before the violet-hued blurs in front took definite shape as a group of two fair-sized islands, with trees, lying among a great many stark rocks, sticking straight up out of the sea, the voyagers became aware of at least one good reason for their guide’s choice of direction. The coast of Hanover Island began to fall away sharply to the northeast, and a wide gap opened up between it and the nearest land, a gap which must have been crossed in any event.

Maseden himself was the first to admit that they had been given sound advice.

Luckily the wind remained steady, and brought their craft on at a fair pace against a falling tide. Nevertheless it was a long sail, far longer than any of them had anticipated, and the shadows were deepening when the men again lifted the Indian girl level with the gunwale to find out if she could recommend the safest way of approaching a particularly forbidding shore.

She understood at once what they wanted, and indicated a narrow channel between two gigantic outlying rocks. Though it was precisely the one of three possible waterways which no stranger would have chosen, they did not dream now of disputing her judgment. The passage was made more easily than they had counted on, and a second time was their faith justified, because a strip of white beach soon showed on the line where trees and sea met.

The boat was run ashore, and a fire was lighted. The weather had become much colder, probably owing to the absence of shelter from the hills under which they had camped during the past month. The Indian girl offered no objection to the fire. In fact, when laid near it in a sand hollow, she fell asleep long before any of them.

The boat, of course, had to be safeguarded, as they landed at low water. Were it not for a fissure in the rock which permitted them to row fully a quarter of a mile nearer high-water mark than would have been possible otherwise, they must have devoted a wearisome time to the task of hauling her in as the tide rose. Fortunately, there was no heavy surf. The reefs they had seen some fifteen miles to the westward had broken up the long Pacific rollers, and the breeze was not strong enough to disturb this inland sea.

Nina and Madge elected to sleep on the sand.

“You can have too much of a good thing,” explained Madge laughingly, “and, greatly as I prize our ark, I am tired of it to-day. Every bone in my body is aching.”

They had, of course, given up each skin and strip of canvas they possessed in order to render the Indian girl more comfortable during the voyage, and a ship’s boat can be a most irksome conveyance in such circumstances.