Adventure, November 1915 — page 18: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

aot - wa 4) ~~ se ” “7 Ws “a, 7. . / & A Rae AM Ahh? ; eae Mee ‘ 7, y ’ 5 4 4 * ' : g, : 16 when I took my duds off, but it was agood move to let him go through them—or he might have murdered me in the boat when I was asleep, for I c’d see he hadn’t been satisfied about what I said of the figgers bein’ in my head. “Finally we got everything stowed i in one of the caves—you know where, miss.’ Peggy nodded. “We got the opened chest into the little boat an’ was so done up we slep’ on the beach all night, too tired to make a fire or cook a meal. “Next mornin’ Henley was in a high fever an’ I had a hard time to get him into the boat. He was off his head at times an’ wished we should stay by the gold, but I got him quieted down. I rowed around the point, inside the reef, to the opening on the other side of the island, got up my rag of a sail, fixed Henley so he’d be in the shadow of it on the bottom boards, an’ steered northeast by the compass with a steady breeze drivin’ us due from behind. “T’ve often laid nights when I couldn’t sleep an’ thought about that trip. There was a long time when it was all out of my head, as [ll tell you, though now I remem- ber everything that happened as if it was yesterday. There was me in the stern with the opened box of gold between my feet. Then Henley, moanin’ for water an’ me givin’ him all we c’d spare, an’ more. Stowed all about was a keg of beef, the - water-cask an’ canned crackers an’ stuff. The bows of the cranky little boat was cocked ’way up. I had a canvas over the water-cask an’ kept it wet with seawater to let the wind hold the stuff as cool as pos- sible. “It was sun—sun—sun, fourteen hours of the day, dryin’ you to a mummy, crackin’ your lips, swellin’ up your tongue an’ spoil- in’ the canned stuff so I had to throw it all overboard. The beef went pretty bad an’ there was nothin’ but that, the crackers, some cans of tomatoes an’ the water—hot water, at that. | “The third day a big shark slipped up astern an’ kep’ trailin’. He was the one of the five, I figgered out, that hadn’t had his share, an’ I wondered which one of us it was goin’ to be, an’ didn’t care much. There was his fin, night an’ mornin’ like a V upside down. After a while I got to talk- in’ to him. Henley was unconscious most of the time, My hands cracked an’ I didn’t Adventure want to eat—couldn’t keep the food down when I did. “T never was a navigator. Anyway, all I had was one watch an’ no chronometer, so I cu’dn’t have even figgered out latitude if I’d known how. I had no idea of dead reck- onin’, no log, an’ I didn’t know what cur- rent might be swingin’ me. I figgered that the gold-island was the point of a big tri- angle with the Hawaiians makin’ the base line of about four hundred miles. I wanted to hit that base somewhere. In a straight line, it was an eight-hundred-mile course I had to run. It didn’t seem I could miss them altogether if I wasn’t blown off my course or drifted too far when I was asleep. To offset that I lowered the sail nights when I napped. If I did happen to miss the Is- lands it was the end, of course, with nothin’ closer than two thousand miles on the course an’ small chance of pickin’ them up again if I once passed ’em. ME figgered to make eighty miles a day, sleepin’ an’ wakin’, if the wind held. It was guesswork, of course, without any log. At the rate the water was goin’ I had enough to last out. “Five days along I began to get faint an’ confused. I couldn’t see anything for min- nits at a time. Henley was dead, I thought. I crawled over twice an’ wet his lips, which was all black, an’ he never stirred. I was burned to toast an’ more cracks come in my hands. The boat was too low in the water, an’, when the breeze was fresh, the spray ’ud hit the bows an’ wet me so that I got sea-sores all over. “Late that fifth night I come to with a start. It was starlight though it was close to dawn. I could see Henley. He’d moved an’ was all huddled over the chest. The sky began to shake an’ the sun jumped up, an’ there was his eyes starin’ at me, his lips grinnin’, one hand mixed in with the gold. “The boat tipped high on a wave an’ water came runnin’ to my feet. Somethin’ told me what it was, but I tasted it. I was right. It was fresh. got by Henley an’ found the plug out an’ the keg bone dry, ’cept the inch or so beneath the bung. Somehow or other Henley must have had a rally an’ got out the plug. “T sat there a while. Then I mopped up what I could with a rag an’ squeezed it back into the keg. It wasn’t much. The shark come glidin’ up alongside an’ swirled over showin’ his teeth. That set mecrazy. ‘You Eomichbooks (E@) mm