Kitabı oku: «What Happened at Quasi: The Story of a Carolina Cruise», sayfa 11

XXVI
AN UNEXPECTED INTERRUPTION

There was nobody near the half burned-out camp-fire, but there were evidences in plenty of the fact that somebody had cooked and eaten there that day. There were no cooking utensils lying about, but there was a structure of green sticks upon which somebody had evidently been roasting meat; there were freshly opened oyster shells scattered around – “the beginnings of a kitchen midden,” Dick observed – and many other small indications of recent human presence. Especially, Cal noticed, that some smouldering brands of the fire had been carefully buried in ashes – manifestly to serve as the kindlers of a fresh fire when one should be needed. Finally, Tom discovered a hunting knife with its point stuck into the bark of a tree, as if its owner had planned to secure it in that way until it should be needed again, just as a house-wife hangs up her gridiron when done with it for the time being.

As the three were discovering these things and interpreting their meaning, Larry joined them and suggested a search of the woods and thickets round about.

“Why not try nature’s own method first?” Tom asked.

“How’s that?”

“Yelling. That’s the way a baby does when it wants to attract attention, and it generally accomplishes its purpose. That’s why I call it nature’s own method. Besides, it covers more ground than looking can, especially in an undergrowth as thick as that around this little open spot.”

“It is rather thick,” said Larry, looking round him.

“Thick? Why, a cane brake is wind-swept prairie land in comparison. Let’s yell all together and see if we can’t make the hermit of Quasi hear.”

The experiment was tried, not once, but many times, with no effect, and a search of the immediate vicinity proved equally futile.

“There seems to be nothing to do but wait,” Larry declared, at last. “The man in distress must have gone away in search of food. He is starving perhaps, and – ”

“Not quite that,” said Cal. “He may be craving a tapioca pudding or some other particular article of diet, but he isn’t starving.”

“How do you know, Cal?”

“Oh, it is only that he has a haunch of venison – sun-crusted for purposes of preservation – hanging in that tree there” – pointing – “and unless he is more different kinds of a lunatic than the chief engineer of any insane asylum ever heard of, he wouldn’t starve with that on hand.”

“Perhaps it is spoiled,” said Tom, looking up the tree where the venison hung and where Cal alone had seen it.

“It isn’t spoiled, either,” answered Cal, with assurance.

“But how can you tell when you’re ten or twenty feet away from it?” Tom stopped to ask.

“The carrion crows can tell at almost any distance,” Cal returned, “and if it were even tainted, they’d be quarreling over it.”

Tom was not satisfied, and so he climbed the tree to inspect. Sliding down again, he gave judgment:

“Why, the thing’s as black as ink and as hard as the bark of a white oak tree. It’s dried beef – or dried venison, rather.”

“You’re mistaken, Tom,” said Larry. “It is sun-crusted, as Cal said, but that’s very different. Inside it is probably as juicy as a steak from a stall-fed ox.”

“What do you mean by ‘sun-crusted,’” asked Dick.

“Oh, I see,” Larry answered. “You and Tom are not familiar with our way of preserving meat in emergencies. When we are out hunting and have a joint of fresh red meat that we want to keep fresh, we don’t salt it or smoke it or do anything of that sort to it. We just hang it out in the very strongest sunlight we can find. In a brief while the surface of the meat is dried into a thin black crust as hard as wood, and after that it will keep for days in any cool, shady place. Flies cannot bore through the hard crust, and the air itself is shut out from the meat below the surface.”

“How long will it keep in that way?”

“How long, Cal?” asked Larry, referring the question to his brother’s larger experience.

“That depends on several things,” Cal answered. “I’ve kept meat in that way for a week or ten days, and at other times I’ve eaten my whole supply at the first meal. But I say, fellows, we’re wasting precious time. The night cometh when no man can work, and we have a good deal to do before it comes. We must find a safe anchorage for the Hunkydory and set up a camp for ourselves. In aid of that we must find fresh water, and I have an idea we’ll find that somewhere along under the line of bluffs – at some point where they trend well back from the shore with a sandy beach between. The hermit must get water from somewhere near, and there’s no sign of any around here.”

Cal’s conjecture proved to be right. A little spring at the foot of the bluff had been dug out and framed around with sticks to keep the margin from crumbling.

Obviously this was the hermit’s source of water supply.

“But why in the name of common sense,” said Larry, “didn’t he set up his Lares and Penates somewhere near the spring?”

“I can think of two reasons,” Cal answered, “either of which is sufficient to answer your question.”

“Go ahead – what are they?”

“One is, that he may be a crank, and another is, that he may be a prudent, sensible person, preferring comfort with inconvenience, to convenience with discomfort.”

“Now, then, Sphinx, unravel your riddle.”

“Its meaning ought to be obvious,” Cal drawled, “but as it isn’t, I’ll explain it. The man is probably a crank. If not, he wouldn’t have set up a signal of distress and then have gone away and hidden himself so that if rescuers came they couldn’t find him. To a crank like that any foolishness is easily possible. On the other hand, if he happens to be a man of practical common sense – as there is equally good reason to believe – he would very naturally pitch his camp up where it is, rather than here where you fellows are already fighting the sand flies that will be heavily reinforced toward nightfall.”

“That’s so!” said the others.

“Of course it’s so. Anybody would know that, after slapping his cheeks till they feel as if they had been cured with mustard plasters, and weren’t half well yet.”

“What shall we do, Cal?” Tom asked.

“Why, imitate the hermit and improve upon his ideas.”

“You mean – ” began Larry.

“I mean we must go up on the bluff and pitch our camp a hundred yards or so back from the beach. Otherwise we shall all be bored as full of holes as a colander before we stretch our weary limbs upon mother earth for sleep.”

“That’s all right,” said Tom, “but you haven’t told us about the improvement upon the hermit’s ideas. Do you mean we should go farther back from the water?”

“No, I didn’t mean that, though we’ll do it. I meant that instead of carrying water from this brackish spring we’ll dig a well where we pitch our tent of palmete leaves.”

“But you said – ”

“I know I did; but that was in swampy land where the only water to be had by digging was an exudation from muck. It is very different here. These bluffs and all the high ground that lies back of them are composed of clean clay and clean sand. Look at the bank and see for yourself. Now all we’ve got to do to get sweet, wholesome water anywhere on the higher land – which isn’t as high a little way back as it is here at the face of the bluff – is to dig down to the level of the sea. There we’ll find sea water that has been freed from salt and all other impurities by siping through a mixture of clay and sand that is as perfect a filter as can be imagined.”

“Now if you’ve finished that cataract of words, Cal,” said Larry, “we must get to work or night will be on us before we’re ready for it. You go and pick out a camping place, and the rest of us will follow you with things from the boat. We can dig the well and build a shelter to-morrow.”

But Tom and Dick were full of enthusiasm, now that they had at last got to Quasi, and they had both tasted the water of the spring. Its flavor strongly stimulated their eagerness for something more palatable.

“Why not begin the well now – as soon as we get the things up from the boat?” asked Dick. “There’ll be a moon nearly full, and the sea breeze here is cool. I for one am ready to dig till midnight.”

“I’ll dig all night,” said Tom, “rather than take another swig of that stuff. If we work hard we can get the well in commission before we use all the water left in the kegs.”

“We sha’n’t have to dig all night,” said Cal. “I’ll pick out a place where we needn’t go down more than eight or nine feet, and this sandy earth is easily handled. If we’re really industrious and don’t waste more time over supper than we must, we’ll strike water within a few hours, and it’ll be settled and clear by morning. But we must hustle if we’re to do that. So load yourselves up while I pick out a camp and I’ll join the caravan of carriers in the next load.”

It was necessary, of course, to remove everything from the boat to the bivouac, as it was the purpose of the company to make this their headquarters for several weeks to come, or at least for as long as they liked.

It was nearly sunset, therefore, when that part of the work was done, and it was decreed that Larry should get supper while the rest worked at well-digging.

As there remained no fresh meat among their stores, Larry’s first task was to go out with his gun in search of game. Squirrels were abundant all about the place, and very easily shot, as they had never been hunted. As the time was short, Larry contented himself with the killing of a dozen or so of the fat rodents, suppressing for the time being his strong impulse to go after game of a more elusive and therefore more aristocratic sort. He did indeed take one shot at a flock of rice birds, killing a good many of them, but mutilating their tender little butter-balls of bodies because he used bird shot instead of the “mustard seed” size, which alone is fit for rice-bird shooting.

On his return to the bivouac to cook his game, he found the well already sunk to nearly half the required depth, and by the time he was ready to bid his comrades cease their work and come to supper, at least another foot had been added to its depth.

The work was easy, not only because the sandy soil was easily shoveled out without the use of picks or spades, but because of the form Cal’s observation of other temporary well digging had taught him to give to the excavation.

“We’re not really digging a well,” he explained at the outset. “We’re only scooping out a basin in order to get to water. So instead of working in a narrow hole, we’ll take a bowl for our model – a bowl eight or ten feet across at the top and growing rapidly narrower as we go down. Working in that way, we’ll not only get on faster and with less labor, but we’ll spare ourselves the necessity of cribbing up the sides of our water hole to keep them from falling in. Besides, the farther down we get the less work each additional foot of digging will cost us.”

When Larry announced supper, all the company admitted that they “had their appetites with them”; but Cal did not at once “fall to” as the others did. Instead, he went into the woods a little way, secured a dry, dead and barkless stick about five feet long, and drove it into the bottom of the excavation. Pulling it out again after waiting for twenty or thirty seconds, he closely scrutinized its end. Then, measuring off a part of it with his hands so placed as to cover approximately a foot of space at each application, he tossed the stick aside and joined the others at their meal.

Nobody interrupted the beginning of his supper by asking him questions, but after he had devoured two or three rice birds the size of marbles and had begun on the hind leg of a broiled squirrel which lay upon an open baked sweet potato, he volunteered a hint of what he had been doing.

“As nearly as I can measure it with my hands, we’ll come to water about three feet further down, boys. We’ve acquitted ourselves nobly as sappers and miners, and are entitled to take plenty of time for supper and a good little rest afterwards – say till the moon, which is just now coming up out of its bath in the sea out there, rises high enough to shine into our hole. That will be an hour hence, perhaps, and then we’ll shovel sand like plasterers making mortar. It won’t take us more than an hour or so to finish the job, and we’ll get to sleep long before midnight.”

“How did you find out how far down the water was, Cal,” asked Tom, who was always as hungry for information as a school boy is for green apples or any other thing that carries a threat of stomach ache with it.

“Why, I drove a dry stick down – one that would show a wetting if it got it – till it moved easily up and down. I knew then that it had reached the water-saturated sand. I pushed it on down till the upper end was level with our present bottom. Then I drew it out and measured the dry part and six inches or so of the wet. That told me how far down we must go for the water.”

“It’s very simple,” said Tom.

“I’ve noticed that most things are so when one understands them,” said Dick. “For example – ”

What Dick’s example was there is now no way of finding out, for at that point in his little speech the conversation was interrupted by a rather oddly-dressed man who broke through the barrier of bushes and presented himself, bowing and smiling, to the company.

XXVII
THE HERMIT OF QUASI

The newcomer was a man of fifty or fifty-five years of age. He was slender, but rather with the slenderness of the red Indian than with that suggestive of weakness. Indeed, the boys observed that his muscles seemed to be developed out of proportion to his frame, as if he had been intended by nature for a scholar and had made an athlete of himself instead.

There was not an ounce of unnecessary fat upon his person, and yet he gave no sign of being underfed. Instead his flesh had the peculiar hardness of the frontiersman’s who eats meat largely in excess of other foods.

A little strip across the upper part of his forehead, which showed as he stood there with his hat removed, suggested that his complexion had once been fair, but that exposure had tanned it to the color of a saddle.

His costume was an odd one, but it was made of the best of materials, now somewhat worn, but fit still to hold their own in comparison with far newer garments of cheaper quality. Perhaps they were aided in this by the fact that they had evidently been made for him by some tailor who knew how to make clothes set upon their wearer as if they were a part of him.

Yet his dress was perfectly simple. He wore a sort of Norfolk jacket of silk corduroy – a cloth well nigh as durable as sole leather – with breeches of the same, buttoned at and below the knee, and covered at bottom with close-fitting calf-skin leggings of the kind that grooms and dandy horsemen affect.

The hat he held in his hand, as he addressed the company that had courteously risen to receive him, was an exceedingly limp felt affair, soft to the head, light in weight and capable of assuming any shape its wearer might choose to give it. His shoes were Indian moccasins.

No sign of linen appeared anywhere about his person, but just above the top button of his jacket a bit of gray flannel shirt showed in color harmony with his other garments.

“Good evening, young gentlemen,” he said; “I trust I do not intrude, and if I do so it shall not be for long. My name is Rudolf Dunbar. May I ask if you young gentlemen are the rescuers I have been hoping to see during the three or four weeks that I have been marooned on this peninsula which nobody seems ever to visit?”

“We are here to rescue you if you so desire,” answered Larry, “but we set out with no such purpose. We were on our way here to fish, hunt, live in the open air and be happy in natural ways for a time. We caught sight of your signal of distress and hurried ourselves as much as possible, fearing that your distress might be extreme. As we found your camp showing no signs of starvation or illness, and could not find you, we set to work to establish ourselves for a prolonged stay here and wait for you to return. It seemed the only thing to do under the circumstances.”

“Quite right! Quite right! and I thank you for your kindly impulse. But you should have taken possession of my camp, making it your own – at least until you could establish yourselves more to your liking. I don’t know, though – my camp is bare of everything, so that you’re better off as you are.”

As he paused, Larry introduced himself and his comrades by name, and offered the stranger the hospitality of their camp, inviting him especially to sit down and share their supper.

He accepted the invitation, and after a little Larry said to him:

“May I ask the nature of your distress here, and how pressing it is? We are ready, of course, to take you to the village over yonder, ten or a dozen miles away, at any time you like. From there you can go anywhere you please.”

“Thank you very much. My distress is quite over now. Indeed, I am not accustomed to let circumstances distress me overmuch. I found myself marooned here, and naturally I wanted to establish communication with the mainland again – or the possibility of such communication. But if it had been necessary I could have remained here for a year in fair contentment. Long experience has taught me how to reconcile myself with my surroundings, whatever they may be, and game and fish are plentiful here. May I ask how long you young gentlemen have planned to remain here?”

“Three or four weeks, probably,” answered Larry. “But as I said before, we’ll set you ashore on the mainland at any time you like.”

“Thank you very much. But if it will be quite agreeable to you, I’ll remain here as long as you do. I haven’t finished my work here, and the place is extremely favorable for my business. If my presence is in any way annoying – ”

“Oh, not at all. We shall build a comfortable shelter to-morrow, and we’ll be glad to have you for our guest. As you see, we’re digging a well, and we’ll have good sweet water by morning.”

“That is very wise. I should have dug one myself if I had had any sort of implement to dig with, but I have none.”

“And so you’ve had to get on with the rather repulsive water from the spring down there?”

“Yes, and no. I have used that water, but I distil it first. You see, in my peculiar business, I must wander in all sorts of places, wholesome and unwholesome, and it is often impossible to find good water to drink. So for years past I have always carried a little distilling apparatus of my own devising with me. It is very small and very light, and, of course, when I have to depend upon it for a water supply, I must use water very sparingly. I think I must bid you good evening now, as I did not sleep at all last night. I will see you in the morning.”

“We’ll expect you to join us at breakfast,” said Larry.

“It will give me great pleasure to do so. Good night.”

With that he nimbly tripped away, leaving the boys to wonder who and what he was, and especially what the “business” was that he had not yet finished at Quasi. Cal interrupted the chatter presently, saying:

“We’ve annexed a riddle, and you’re wasting time trying to guess it out. Nobody ever did guess the answer to a riddle. Let’s get to work and finish the well.”

The boys set to work, of course, but they did not cease to speculate concerning the stranger. Even after the well was finished and when they should all have been asleep they could not drive the subject from their minds.

“I wonder how he got here, anyhow,” said Tom, after all the other subjects of wonder had been discussed to no purpose. “He has no boat and he couldn’t have got here without one.”

“What I wonder,” said Dick, “is why and how his ‘business’ has compelled him to wander in out-of-the-way places, as he says he has.”

“I am wondering,” said Cal, sleepily, “when you fellows will stop talking and let me go to sleep. You can’t find out anything by wondering and chattering. The enigma will read itself to us very soon.”

“Do you mean he’ll tell us his story?” asked Tom.

“Yes, of course.”

“Why do you think he’ll do that?”

“He can’t possibly help it. When a man lives alone for so long as he has done, he must talk about himself. It’s the only thing he knows, and the only thing that seems to him interesting.”

“There’s a better reason than that,” said Larry.

“What is it?”

“Why, that he is obviously a gentleman. A gentleman wouldn’t think of coming here to remain indefinitely as our guest without letting us know who and what he is and all the rest of it.”

“Finis!” said Cal.

Silence followed, and soon the little company was dreaming of queerly dressed marooners carrying flags union down.