His Unknown Wife

Missing Maseden by a hair’s breadth, it struck the foretop, and the spar snapped like a carrot. It fell forward, and the identical block which had nearly brought about the death of the South American sailor now caught his rescuer on the side of the head.

In the same instant a heavy stay dragged Maseden bodily over the fore-rail and he pitched headlong to the deck, where, however, the actual fall was broken by the stout canvas of the sail.

A woman screamed, but he could not hear, being knocked insensible.

“All hands amidships!” shouted the captain, and there was a race for the ladders. One man, however, the Spaniard, stooped over the young American’s body. His eyes were streaming with tears.

“Good-by, friend!” he sobbed. “Maybe this is a better way than that opened by my bottle of brandy!”

He was sure that the vaquero who swore like an Americano had been killed, because blood was flowing freely from a scalp wound; but he lifted Maseden’s inert form, and, without any valid reason behind the action, placed him in his bunk, as the cabin door stood open.

Then he ran after the others.

Poor fellow! He little dreamed that he was repaying a thousand-fold the few extra days of life the good-looking vaquero had given him.

Almost immediately the ship struck. There was a fearsome crash of rending plates and torn ribs, the great vessel reeled over, struck again and bumped clear of the outer reef.

Now, too late, the after anchor lodged in a sunken crevice; the cable did not yield, because the vessel was sucked into a sort of backwash and driven, bow on, close to an apparently unscalable cliff.

She settled rapidly. As it happened a submerged rock smashed her keel-plate beneath the engine-room, and the engines, together with the stout framework to which the superstructure was bolted amidships, became anchored there, offering a new obstacle to the onward race of the seas pouring over the reef.

Every boat was either smashed instantaneously or wrenched bodily from its davits. Two-thirds of the hull fell away almost at once, the forecastle tilting towards the cliff, and the poop being swept into deep water.

With the after part went at least half the ship’s company, their last cries of despair being smothered by the continuous roar of the wind and the thunder of the waves. The bridge, with the rooms immediately below, remained fairly upright, but the smoking-room, and officers’ quarters close to it, were swept by water breast high.

Some one – who it was will never be known – had ordered the passengers to run into the smoking-room when the forward cable parted. Now, with the magnificent courage invariably shown by American sailors even when the gates of death gape wide before their eyes, the first and second officers contrived to hoist the two girls to the chart-room behind the bridge.

Sturgess, behaving with great gallantry, helped the women first, and then their father, who was floating in the room, to reach the only available gangway. Others followed, but the difficulty of rescue – if such a sorrowful transition might be called a rescue – was enhanced by the noise and sudden darkness.

Ever the central citadel of the Southern Cross was sinking lower. Ever the leaping waves and their clouds of spray tended more and more to shut out the light.

Seven people were plucked from immediate death in this fashion. All told, officers, crew and passengers, the survivors of seventy-four souls numbered twelve.

There was a thirteenth, because Maseden was lying high and dry in his bunk. But of him they took no count.

They gathered in the chart-room. Those who still retained their senses tried to revive the more fortunate ones to whom was vouchsafed a merciful oblivion of their common plight. Even in the temporary haven of the chart-room the conditions quickly savored of utter misery. The windows were blown away. The doors were jammed open by the warping of the deck. Wind, waves and sheets of spray seemed to vie with demoniac energy as to which could be most cruel and deadly. The ceaseless warping and working of what was left of the ship presaged complete collapse at any moment, and the din of the reef was stupefying.

Still, the captain did not abate one jot of his cool demeanor. He eyed the sea, the rocks, the remains of his ship and the beetling crags from which he was cut off by sixty feet of raging water.

Then he deliberately turned his back on it all. Going to a locker, he produced a screwdriver and began methodically drawing the screws of the door-hinges.

The chief officer thought that the other man’s brain had yielded to the stress.

“What are you doing, sir?” he said, placing a hand gently on his friend’s shoulder.

“We haven’t a ten-million to one chance of remaining here till the gale gives out,” was the calm answer, “but we may as well rig up some sort of protection from the weather. There are four lockers and four doors. Let’s block up those broken windows as well as we can.”

A curiously admiring light shone in the chief officer’s eyes. He said nothing, but helped. Soon a corner was completely walled. They decided it was better to have one section thoroughly shielded than the whole only partially.

They made a quick job of it. The girls, Mr. Gray, and two men recovering consciousness were allotted to the angle.

Then the captain opened one of the three bottles of claret stored in a locker, and portioned out the contents among the survivors.

There was no need to measure the share of a heavily-built Spaniard who was reputed to be a wealthy rancher from the Argentine. His spine was broken when the ship lurched over the reef. He was found dead when they tried to move him to the sheltered corner.

And now a pall of darkness spread swiftly over the face of the waters. The tide fell, but the ship sank with it. She no longer rocked and shook under the blows of the waves. It seemed as though she knew herself crippled beyond all hope of succor, and only awaited another tide to meet annihilation.

Wind and sea were more furious than ever. In all likelihood, the gale would blow itself out next day. But long before dawn the rising tide would have made short work of what was left of the Southern Cross.

Never was a small company of Christian people in a more hopeless position. Every boat was gone. They had no food. They were wet to the skin, and pierced with bitter cold. Even the hardy captain’s teeth chattered as he took a pipe from his pocket, rolled some tobacco between the palms of his hands, and said smilingly to those near him:

“This is one of the occasions when a water-tight pipe-lighter is a real treasure. Who’d like a smoke? You must find your own pipes. I can supply some ’baccy and a light!”

CHAPTER VIII

ONE CHANCE IN A MILLION

Maseden was badly hurt and quite stunned. Of that there could be no manner of doubt. He was blissfully unaware of the destruction of the ship, and did not regain his senses until long after the captain and some few of the men gathered in the dismantled chart-room had indulged in what was to prove their last pipeful of tobacco.

Even when a species of ordered perception was restored he was wholly unable during an hour or more to collect his wits sufficiently to understand just what had happened.

Certain phenomena were vaguely disturbing; that was all. He knew, for instance, that the Southern Cross was wrecked, because the deck was tilted permanently at an alarming angle. As the downward slope was forward, however, and his bunk lay across it and on the forward side of the door the physical outcome was by no means unpleasant, since his body was wedged comfortably between the mattress and the bulkhead.

He was dry and warm. The weather-proof garments of the pampas were admirably adapted to resist exposure, while the pitch of the deck, aided by the conformation of the bows, diminished the striking power of the waves and carried the spray and broken water clean over the remains of the forecastle.

Maseden’s position resembled that of a man ensconced in a dry niche of a cave behind a waterfall. So long as he did not move and the cavern held intact he was safe and comfortable. Happily, a long time elapsed between the first glimmer of consciousness and the moment when the knowledge was borne in on him that he was actually beset by immediate and most deadly peril.

He imagined that the ship had been cast ashore after he met with some rather serious accident, that some kind Samaritan had tucked him into his own berth, and that, in due course, some one would look in on him with a cheery inquiry as to how he was faring. His answer would have been that his head ached abominably, that his mouth and throat were on fire, and that a long drink of cold water was the one thing needed to send him to sleep and speedy recovery.

He did not realize that when he dropped face downward into the folds of the sail he had swallowed a quantity of salt water lodged there instantly by the pelting seas. It was not until he moved, and yielded to a fit of vomiting, which relieved the pain in his head and cleared his faculties, that the dreadful truth began to dawn in his mind.

Once, however, the process of clear reasoning set in, it developed rapidly. He noticed, in the first instance, that the angle of the deck was becoming steeper. It was strange, he thought, that although the light was failing, no one came near. His ears, too, told him that seas were still hammering furiously on every side.

Finally, a marked movement of the forecastle as it slipped over a smooth rock race, owing to the increase of dead weight brought about by the falling tide, induced a species of alarmed curiosity which proved a most potent tonic. At one moment feeling hardly able to move, the next he was scrambling out of the bunk and climbing crab-like through the doorway.

Then he saw that the forecastle deck had been torn away in line with the forward bulkhead of the fore hold. With some difficulty, being still physically weak and shaken, he raised head and shoulders above this jagged edge and peered over.

Then he understood. The ship was in pieces on the reef. Two bits of her still remained; the forecastle, a stubborn wedge nearly always the last part of a steel-built vessel to collapse, and the bridge, with its backing of the chart house. All else had gone – the funnels had fallen an hour earlier.

Even the steel plates and stout wood work of the superstructure had melted away from the six strong ribs to which the sunken engines were bolted, leaving the bridge and chart house in air.

Already, too, one of the six pillars which had proved the salvation of that forlorn aerie had yielded to the strain and snapped. In the half-light it was difficult to discern just what support was given to the squat rectangle of the chart-house; Maseden had to look long and steadily through the flying scud before he gathered the exact facts.

The upper deck of the forecastle shut off any glimpse of the cliffs. All he could see was the reef, much more visible now, but still partially submerged by every sea; beyond it, a howling wilderness of broken water, and in the midst of this depressing picture, the ghost-like chart-house and bridge.

But he recalled vividly enough the sight of an awesome precipice close at hand before something had hit him and robbed him of senses. If the ship, or what was left of her, was lodged on the reef towards which she was being driven at the time of his mishap, the shore could not be far distant.

Within a foot of where he lay on the deck, clinging to it as a man might save himself from falling off the steeply-pitched roof of a house, was the big bole of the foremast, on which the rings of the sails formed a sort of ladder. He pulled himself up, stretched his body along the mast in the opposite direction, and made out the uneven summit of the cliff above the straight line of the upper deck.

He was exposed to the weather here, but the waves were not breaking across the forecastle now, and the spray and biting wind tended rather to dissipate the feeling of lassitude which had proved quite overpowering while he remained in the bunk. He raised himself cautiously another foot or so, and the rugged wall of the precipice loomed so close that at first he fancied the wreck was touching it.

The broken topmast, however, swaying in the wind, and still held to its more solid support by a couple of wire stays, pointed drunkenly at the cliff, and the pulley dangling from it was occasionally dashed by the gale against an overhanging ledge.

Even while Maseden was arriving at a pretty accurate estimate of the way in which he had been injured – because he now recalled the parting of the anchor cable – the forecastle moved again, the wet and frowning wall became even more visible, and although an awesome gap intervened, the swaying, pointed spar seemed to offer a fantastic glimpse of a means of escape.

As yet, the truck, or top of the mast, was fully sixteen feet distant from the face of the cliff. But it had been twenty feet or more distant a moment ago, and that last movement of the hull had lessened the width of the chasm.

What if the spar jammed? Could a man obtain foothold on that slimy rock surface?

He thought it possible. A deep crevice seemed to promise some vague prospect of upward progress to one who could climb, and to whom any risk was preferable to the certain fate which must attend remaining on the wreck during the coming tide.

But, notwithstanding his partial recovery, he still felt very feeble and quite unequal to more exertion. As nothing in the way of an attempt to save his life was possible until the broken topmast was lodged firmly against the cliff, he wondered whether he would find some sort of food in the forecastle.

It was improbable, of course. Meals were brought from the cook’s galley amidships, and utensils only were stored in the lockers of the dingy saloon in which he and many of the sailors used to eat.

Still, spurred by the necessity of doing something to take his mind off the fearsome alternative should the forecastle topple over sideways, or even remain in its present position, he turned his back on the cliff. With never a glance at the bridge, he regained the sloping deck, lowered himself to the doorway of his own cabin, and peered into the gloom in the effort to determine how best and where to begin his search.

At first his heart sank, because the saloon was awash. Then he remembered the Spanish sailor’s queer offer of a bottle of brandy, stored in a kit-bag in number seven berth, “the lowest bunk on the left.”

Number seven! Had he not seen the man at odd times entering or leaving the second cabin on the port side? At any rate, there was no harm in trying.

Crawling farther into the darkness, he walked on what was normally the cross bulkhead of the saloon, groped to a doorway, found a kit-bag in the stated position, opened it, and came upon a bottle of brandy!

He drank a little. Luckily it was not the raw spirit beloved of such men as its late owner, but sound, mellow liquor, which the Spaniard had probably bought as a medicine.

Be that as it may, the brandy exercised the magical effect which good cognac always produces in those wise enough not to vitiate the blood with alcohol when in robust health. For the first time since he was struck down, Maseden felt himself capable of putting forth physical effort involving sustained muscular exertion.

He returned to his own cabin, secured the poncho, or cloak, and wrapped the bottle in it. Rummaging round in the dark, he laid hands on a strap, with which he buckled the folded poncho tightly to his shoulders. Then reviewing the prospects which awaited an unfortunate castaway on that inhospitable coast, he endeavored to get at his own trunk.

Therein, however, he failed. The iron frame of the bunk had buckled, and the trunk was held as in a vise.

Realizing that he had very little time before the light in the interior of the forecastle would vanish altogether, he hurried back to the Spaniard’s berth and hauled out the kit-bag. He had an uncomfortable feeling that he was robbing the dead, but if it were practicable to land any sort of stores the effort should be made.

He had not a moment to spare for further search. The forecastle slipped again, and he experienced no little difficulty in regaining his perch on the solid stump of the foremast, on which, so nearly had it approached the horizontal, he could sit quite easily.

The dangling spar, he estimated, was now about eight feet from the cliff. Would it catch the rock wall while any glimmer of light remained, or would some new movement of the wreck divert its progress? He could only hope for the best and be ready to seize the opportunity when, if ever, it presented itself.

To his thinking, the gale was moderating; but he dared not indulge in the smallest hope that the forecastle would live through the next tide. The heavy swell of the Pacific after a westerly storm would create a worse sea on the reef than that already experienced. Probably the breakers would be more destructive immediately after than during the gale.

It was at that moment, when in a plight seldom equaled and never surpassed by any man destined to survive a disastrous shipwreck, that Maseden’s thoughts reverted to his fellow passengers. There was no need to watch the spar, since he could not fail to become aware of any further movement of the forecastle, so he lashed the kit-bag to a sail ring, again turned his back on the cliff, and gave close attention to the chart-house.

Despite the increasing darkness it was a good deal more visible now than when he had looked that way earlier. No dense clouds of spray or spindrift intervened; hence he noticed for the first time the improvised shutters which had replaced the glass front of the structure on the seaward side.

He was wondering whether or not it was possible that some one might still be living on the only other part of the ship still intact, when he became aware of a figure silhouetted against the sky above the canvas screen of the bridge.

It was, in fact, the captain, who crept out of the chart-house every now and then to examine the state of the iron uprights and the condition of the reef. The gallant old sailor had abandoned, or never formed, any notion of escape, because nothing could live for an instant on the reef itself, and he could not possibly detect the chance of salvation offered by the broken mast. But the nature of the man demanded that he should keep watch and ward over those committed to his care. In all likelihood he experienced a vague sense of relief in being able to discharge even the melancholy duty of noting the gradual breaking-up of the supports.

Three had gone, two on the port side and one on the starboard. When the third stanchion yielded on the port side, bridge and chart-room would fall with a crash and there would be an end. He said nothing of this to the unhappy company within.

“The weather is improving,” he told them cheerfully, as Maseden heard later. “I can’t honestly give you any prospect of escape, but – while there’s life there’s hope!”

And all the time he was listening for the ominous crack which would be the precursor of that final sinking into the depths! The marvel was that the middle of the ship had held together so long, but by no miracle known to man could what was left of her survive the next tide.

Yet why should he add to misery already abyssmal? Death would be a blessed relief; waiting for certain death was the worst of tortures.

No one answered. The survivors – of the twelve four were dead now – were perishing with cold and dumbly resigned to their wretched fate. Had it not been for the protection afforded by the improvised screen, none would have been alive even then.

The wind still swirled and eddied into every nook and cranny. Though huddled together, the little group of men and women were conscious of no warmth. It was with the greatest difficulty that those not clad in oilskins kept any garments on their bodies.

So merciless is the havoc of the sea that its victims are stripped naked even while clinging to the battered hulk of a ship, though this last device of a seemingly demoniac savagery is easily accounted for. No product of loom or spinning machine can withstand the disintegrating effects of breaking waves helped by a fierce gale. The seams and fastenings of ordinary garments cannot resist the combined assault. In such circumstances, a woman’s flimsy attire will be torn off her in a few minutes, while the strongest of boots have been known to collapse after some hours of this kind of exposure.

Luckily a number of oilskins were kept in the chart-room of the Southern Cross; these were quickly served out to the shivering girls, whose clothing had practically melted away as though made of thin paper.

Soon after the captain had tried to hearten them with that scrap of proverbial philosophy, one of the girls, Nina, screamed in an elfin note that dominated even the roaring of the reef for an instant. Her father had collapsed. It was useless to pretend that he might only have fainted. They who fell now were doomed. In Mr. Gray’s case, he was dead ere he sank down.

The chief officer put a consoling hand on the girl’s shoulder. He was a Bostonian, and had daughters of his own. In that hour of tribulation his speech reverted to the homely accents of New England.

“It comes hard to see your father drop like that,” he said. “But it’s better so. He’s just spared a bit of the trouble we may have to face.”

“It is not that,” wailed the girl brokenly. “I’m thinking of my mother. She will never know. Oh, if I could only make her understand, I would not care!”

A strange answer, the sailor deemed it, most probably. At that instant he caught the captain’s eye. Both men had the same thought. The dead should be thrown overboard and thus lessen the weight supported by the one stanchion on the port side.

But of what avail were such precautions? They might as well all go together, the quick and the dead. Why should any of them wish to live on until the sea rose again in the small hours of the morning?

The girls were crying in each other’s arms. Two of the men lifted Gray’s body and placed it with four others. Five gone out of twelve!

The captain, speaking in the most matter-of-fact way, suggested that they should open and drink the last bottle of claret before the light failed.

“It’s a poor substitute for a meal,” he said, “but it’s the only thing we can lay hands on.”

The chief officer nodded his head towards the grief-stricken sisters.

“Maybe we can wait a bit longer,” he said. “You couldn’t persuade them to touch it just now… What’s that, sir? Did you hear anything?”

“No. What could we possibly hear?”

“It sounded like a voice, some one hailing.”

“I think I know whose voice it is,” said the captain. He himself had almost yielded to the delusion. It was distressing to find the same eery symptom of speedy breakdown in his old friend, the chief officer.

Both men listened, nevertheless, and were convinced. In silence they went out into the open, walking stealthily. Each knew that any undue movement might send the remains of the ship headlong to the reef. They strained their eyes in the only possible direction from which a voice might have come – the scrap of forecastle, sixty feet nearer the headland, or, incredible as it seemed, the headland itself. They could see nothing. Maseden’s body was not only in line with the receding angle of the foremast, but that piece of the wreck was merged in the gloom of the towering rock.

Maseden saw them, however, and shouted again, striving his uttermost now that he had attracted attention.

With each effort at speech his voice was becoming stronger. Though it was useless to think of conveying an intelligible message through the uproar of wind and water, he fancied he could get into communication with the inmates of the chart-room, provided they were on the alert. In effect, he had a knife, and was surrounded by an abundance of tangled cordage, and it would be a strange thing if after so many years of active life on a South American ranch he could not cast a weighted lasso as far as the bridge.

He began fashioning the necessary coil at once, working with feverish haste, because his refuge was on the move again, and ever towards the land. A trial cast fell short, as he had not allowed enough lee-way for the wind. He was gathering up the rope preparatory to another effort when a great voice boomed at him from the shadows: