His Unknown Wife - Louis Tracy (large ebook reader .TXT) 📗

“On, forget it!” cried Maseden, more angry now with himself than with the youngster whose candor had provoked this outburst. “I didn’t intend to be offensive. My mind was running on the day’s worries. We’re in a deuce of a fix, and I can see no way out of it. If I annoyed you by a careless expression, I apologize.”

“Rub it off the slate, friend. I only want to put in a first bid for Madge, so to speak.”

“But, for all you know, she may be-engaged to some other man,” Maseden could not help retorting.

“Nix on the other fellow. He’s not on in this film. I’ll have him beaten to a frazzle long before I see good old New York again.”

Then Maseden did contrive to choke back the very obvious comment that Madge Forbes might even be married already. Sufficient for the day was the problem thereof. It was not matrimony that was bothering him, though the queer marriage tie contracted in San Juan seemed fated to make its fetters felt even in the wilderness. He was wondering what would happen if, as was highly probable, they were marooned on an island rarely if ever visited by man.

He laughed grimly.

“New York is away below the horizon this morning,” he said. “Let’s go and hunt more oysters!”

Still, for the life of him he could not altogether get rid of the spectre raised by Sturgess’s almost banal candor. The New Yorker was unmistakably a good fellow. He had behaved like a man during twenty-four hours which tested one’s moral fibre as pure metal is separated from dross in a furnace. Was it quite fair that he should be kept in ignorance of the astounding fact that Madge Forbes, and none other, was the heroine of that extraordinary ceremony in the Castle of San Juan?

Why not tell him? There was every reason to believe that he had indulged in no overt lovemaking as yet. Why not emulate his outspokenness, and thus spare him the certain shock of discovery?

Moreover, when the truth came out, would he not feel with justice that he had been very badly treated both by Maseden and the woman whom he professed to love?

Maseden squirmed under the thought. Such a discussion, at such a moment, savored of rank lunacy, but it was better to act crazily than dishonorably.

Then came a reflection that hurt like a cut from a jagged knife. Sturgess was an impressionable youngster. He might easily transfer his wooing from Madge to Nina.

Maseden could not help asking himself why a torturing question of that kind should come to plague him at a time when their lives were in dire jeopardy. They might, by chance, exist a week, a month-several months in that dreadful fastness of rock, forest and sea, but the briefest glance towards the interior showed how desperate was their case, and he knew only too well that the absence of proper food, of fire, of clothing, of everything that renders life tolerable and joyous, would soon bring mortal sickness in its train, even though they ran the gantlet of other perils like unto those of yesterday.

Why, he wondered, in addition to ending these present evils, should he be called on to solve a fine point in ethics?

He did not realize how clearly the torment in his soul was revealed in his face until Sturgess demanded cheerfully:

“What’s worrying you now, boss? You ain’t chewing on that little misunderstanding of a minute ago, are you?”

Maseden smiled dourly. Here was an opening, and he would take it, no matter what the personal cost.

“No. That is not my way,” he said. “I was merely turning over in my mind a somewhat ticklish problem. Sometimes, when a man does not know how to act for the best, it is not a bad plan to run counter to one’s own inclinations. Then, at any rate, there is no fear of selfishness warping one’s judgment. In this instance-”

“Is the tide rising or falling?” interrupted Sturgess excitedly.

“Falling.”

“Good…. What’s that?”

They were walking in the direction of the oyster bed which Maseden had found overnight. The beach was strewn with boulders, the surface of each a mosaic of myriads of tiny mussels. The rock floor was not quite flat, but dipped slightly eastward, and the outcrop of every stratum, worn smooth by countless tides, offered a number of irregular paths by which it was possible to walk dry-shod a mile or more towards mid-channel.

Between these tracks, so to speak, the water lodged in pools, and here, too, as might be expected, the smaller rocks gathered, mostly in groups.

Among one such pile Sturgess’s sharp eyes had detected some wreckage.

Now, any sort of flotsam or jetsam might be peculiarly useful to folk whose belongings had been reduced to a cloak, a ship’s flag, a few oilskins, and, in the case of the women, little else. The sight of a cabin trunk, upended among a litter of woodwork and tangled iron, drove into the special Limbo provided for all vain and foolish things the personal difficulty which was perplexing Maseden.

He hurried on, and soon was aware of an oddly familiar aspect about the trunk, battered though it was, and discolored by long immersion in salt water.

“Well, if this isn’t something like a miracle!” he cried when he could believe his senses. “Here is my own trunk! The last time I saw it, it was wedged between the forecastle deck and the iron frame of a bunk.”

“The court accepts the evidence,” chortled Sturgess. “We find in close conjunction the remains of a bunk and a deck. If you produce a key, and unlock the aforesaid trunk, it will be declared yours without further inquiry. “

“There is no key. It is only strapped.”

“What’s inside?”

“Some underclothing, socks and shirts…. By Jove! When dried, they will be invaluable to those two girls…. How in the world did they contrive to lose most of their clothing?You were all fully dressed when the ship struck, I suppose?”

“I guess your college class didn’t include a course of heavy seas washing through a deckhouse every half minute during a whole day. What sort of feminine rig would stand the tearing rush of tons of water hour after hour? Man alive, I had the devil’s own job to keep any of my own clothes on, and would never have succeeded if I wasn’t well buttoned up in an oilskin. As for the girls’ skirts and things, they simply fell off ‘em. At first they made frantic efforts to save a few rags, but they had to give up. I saw Madge’s skirt washed overboard in strips. All the seams parted. I’m in pretty bad shape myself. Look here.”

Sturgess opened his oilskin coat, and showed how the lining had fallen out of his coat and the back had parted from the front of his waistcoat.

“If it hadn’t been for the oilskins we would all have been stripped stark naked,” he went on. “Gee! It’s marvelous what one can withstand in the shape of exposure when one is pushed to it good and hard. I should have said that those two girls would have died fourteen times on the wreck, let alone the hour before dawn yesterday.”

Maseden, meanwhile, was pulling the trunk free from the twisted frame of the bunk, which,screwed to the deck, had carried a precious argosy nearly a mile from the reef; then, most luckily, it had caught in a clump of seaweed, and remained anchored during two ebbs.

“We needn’t bother to open it here,” he said. “I know exactly what is inside-rough stuff, bought to maintain my disguise as a vaquero, but all the better for present purposes.”

He paused dramatically, and said something which might, perhaps, sound better in Spanish. When a man who has not been perturbed in the least degree by grave and imminent danger shows signs of real excitement, his emotion is apt to be contagious, and his companion’s eyes sparkled.

“Holy gee! What is it?” he almost yelped. “Spit it out! Don’t mind me!”

“This trunk contains a gun and cartridges!”

“Gosh! I thought it must be either a steam launch or an aeroplane! What is there to shoot, anyhow?”

“Don’t you understand? Waterproof cartridges mean fire. We’ll have a roaring fire within five minutes.”

“Put it there!” shouted Sturgess, holding out his right hand. “There’s millions of tons of iron-stone in that hill above the wood. Let’s start a ship-yard!”

They were so elated that they forgot to gather any oysters, and even neglected to take away the iron and