Maud clapped her hands gleefully."Prometheus!" she cried.
But I was too occupied to acknowledge her delight.The feeble flame must be cherished tenderly if it were to gather strength and live.I fed it, shaving by shaving, and sliver by sliver, till at last it was snapping and crackling as it laid hold of the smaller chips and sticks.To be cast away on an island had not entered into my calculations, so we were without a kettle or cooking utensils of any sort; but I made shift with the tin used for bailing the boat, and later, as we consumed our supply of canned goods, we accumulated quite an imposing array of cooking vessels.
I boiled the water, but it was Maud who made the coffee.And how good it was! My contribution was canned beef fried with crumbled sea-biscuit and water.The breakfast was a success, and we sat about the fire much longer than enterprising explorers should have done, sipping the hot black coffee and talking over our situation.
I was confident that we should find a station in some one of the coves, for I knew that the rookeries of Bering Sea were thus guarded; but Maud advanced the theory, -- to prepare me for disappointment, I do believe, if disappointment were to come, -- that we had discovered an unknown rookery.
She was in very good spirits, however, and made quite merry in accepting our plight as a grave one.
"If you are right," I said, "then we must prepare to winter here.Our food will not last, but there are the seals.They go away in the fall, so I must soon begin to lay in a supply of meat.Then there will be huts to build and driftwood to gather.Also, we shall try out seal fat for lighting purposes.Altogether, we'll have our hands full if we find the island uninhabited.
Which we shall not, I know."
But she was right.We sailed with a beam wind along the shore, searching the coves with our glasses and landing occasionally, without finding a sign of human life.Yet we learned that we were not the first who had landed on Endeavor Island.High up on the beach of the second cove from ours, we discovered the splintered wreck of a boat -- a sealer's boat, for the rowlocks were bound in sennit, a gun-rack was on the starboard side of the bow, and in white letters was faintly visible Gazelle No.2.The boat had lain there for a long time, for it was half filled with sand, and the splintered wood had that weather-worn appearance due to long exposure to the elements.In the sternsheets found a rusty ten-gauge shotgun and a sailor's sheath-knife broken short across and so rusted as to be almost unrecognizable.
"They got away," I said cheerfully; but I felt a sinking at the heart and seemed to divine the presence of bleached bones somewhere on that beach.
I did not wish Maud's spirits to be dampened by such a find, so I turned seaward again with our boat and skirted the northeastern point of the island.
There were no beaches on the southern shore, and by early afternoon we rounded the black promontory and completed the circumnavigation of the island.I estimated its circumference at twenty-five miles, its width as varying from two to five miles; while my most conservative calculation placed on its beaches two hundred thousand seals.The island was highest at its extreme southwestern point, the headlands and backbone diminishing regularly until the northeastern portion was only a few feet above the sea.With the exception of our little cove, the other beaches sloped gently back for a distance of half a mile or so, into what I might call rocky meadows, with here and there patches of moss and tundra grass.Here the seals hauled out, and the old bulls guarded their harems, while the young bulls hauled out by themselves.
This brief description is all that Endeavor Island merits.Damp and soggy where it was not sharp and rocky, buffeted by storm winds and lashed by the sea, with the air continually a-tremble with the bellowing of two hundred thousand amphibians, it was a melancholy and miserable sojourning place.Maud, who had prepared me for disappointment, and who had been sprightly and vivacious all day, broke down as we landed in our own little cove.
She strove bravely to hide it from me, but while I was kindling another fire I knew she was stifling her sobs in the blankets under the sail-tent.
It was my turn to be cheerful, and I played the part to the best of my ability, and with such success that I brought the laughter back into her dear eyes and song on her lips; for she sang to me before she went to an early bed.It was the first time I had heard her sing, and I lay by the fire, listening and transported, for she was nothing if not an artist in everything she did, and her voice, though not strong, was wonderfully sweet and expressive.
I still slept in the boat, and I lay awake long that night, gazing up at the first stars I had seen in many nights and pondering the situation.
Responsibility of this sort was a new thing to me.Wolf Larsen had been quite right.I had stood on my father's legs.My lawyers and agents had taken care of my money for me.I had had no responsibilities at all.Then, on the Ghost I had learned to be responsible for myself.And now, for the first time in my life, found myself responsible for some one else.
And it was required of me that this should be the gravest of responsibilities, for she was the one woman in the world -- the one small woman, as I loved to think of her.