That was the end of their first day.
The second held other problems, chiefly those of food and water and shelter. They spread their clothes to dry on the sand, and occupied that time in collecting sections of the boat that had come ashore. Tangled and caught with sea-weed they found the long painter-rope. Norton patiently worked it free and coiled it to dry. But most pressing was the question of food. Later they could unravel a bit of the rope and form a fish-line, but the need was immediate. They put on their shoes and scoured among the rocks, catching little crabs and minnows, of which six might make a mouthful. They ate these raw for an hour or so, with the help of Norton’s jack-knife.
“I got a tin of matches in my pants for next time,” the latter explained. “But they eat good this way, huh?”
The sailor was the provident man, forehanded, capable. The thin-faced one with the wide forehead and loose lip would not have seen the practical wisdom of carrying matches in a water-tight receptacle.
In the afternoon they circuited the island and partially explored the interior, which indicates its size. Of man they found no trace, except, on the highest point, charred wood from some signal-fire. They were concerned chiefly at their failure to discover running water, for what pools they found in the rocks were brackish and filled with life, both animal and vegetable.
“If we had a kettle we could cook it”
Pug observed. “But we ain’t.”
The dead tree they had seen the day before was a pine, and they collected the brown needles for a bed. The day passed very quickly with the multitude of tasks. At night they slept close together for the warmth. The sailor got up once to see to the fire, but the other slept through without a wink of the eyelid.
They fashioned a low shelter, roofing it with needles and with green from the profuse underbrush. They made a fireplace that would endure the heavy rains. In all these things the sailor advised and directed, and Rill, unaccustomed to that, had to conceal his irritation. He did as the other advised, however, because invariably that was the best method. He had to admit that to himself, and the sailor took it as a matter of course. The latter would not have comprehended passing a mistake for the sake of the other’s self-satisfaction.
For instance, the cook had made a bird-snare and caught a gull. After their meal from it Rill threw carelessly the bones into the fire and leaned back. Pug swore and forked them out.
“You got to be more careful,” he admonished the other. “Them bones is valuable.”
Rill considered Pug, sucking his loose under lip.
“You got the bulge on me out here,” he answered. “If we were in town I might appear in other light—what an you doing?”
Pug had cleaned the clavicles or furcula, which in a chicken is the wishbone, and was carving it.
“Fish-hook,” he replied, and opened up the other phase. “I knew you was a city guy. I piped you stringing along with the other passengers on the Bertha. You was mostly at the tables in the smoking-room, wasn’t you? But I ain’t placed you—sometimes I think you’re educated, and next minute you’re spielin’ as if you was raised on the water-front.”
Rill did not avail himself of the request for an autobiography. He got to his feet and scanned lazily the empty sea.
“Yep, Pug, I’ve been arbiter elegantia, so to speak, among the esthetes and the patricians, and again I’ve mooched a plate of beans from a Cholo tamale man. While you’re fishing this afternoon, I’ll go over the island again.”
Pug watched him put his hands in his pockets and stroll easily around the curve in the shore.
“He’d bag a gink for a dime, if he thought he could get away with it,” he murmured to himself, and went on with the hook-making.
He was cleaning a meager catch of fish when the one who had gone exploring came back and sat down beside him.
“You got to be expert to bring ’em in with this here hook,” Pug announced, and considered that he had done his duty in the matter of small talk. But the other appeared engrossed.
“You can’t read Egyptian hieroglyphics or Chinese ideographs, can you?” he asked presently.
That was a good Joke. Pug chuckled loudly and laughed again at the straight face the other kept.
“Sure, an’ deaf an’ dumb languige, too. You need that?”
“Remember that big regular-shaped rock we saw on the other side of the island? That’s a monolith.”
“A which?”
“The big one near the shore, that stuck up like a pillar, flat on top—now you remember?”
“What about it?”
“I thought it looked queer, and I peeled off some of the moss. The thing is all carved with some ancient writing, related, I think, both to Egyptian and Chinese, maybe Mexican. And another thing, the stone is granite. You won’t find another piece on the island.”
“Whew!” Pug waited for a moment, studying these bits of information in the light of the other’s facial expression. But a solution not immediately presenting itself, he turned again to the fish.
“And that wasn’t all,” Rill went on. “It looked as if there might have been a road into the island there, and I followed it up. About fifty yards from the monolith there’s a big hole, some twenty feet across. I dropped in a rock or two and judged they fell maybe a hundred feet, and then rolled down a slanting shaft. To-morrow we’ll go look it over. There’s copper indications near there.”
There was new excitement in the sailor that had not appeared even in the fight with the surf. After the meal the explanation came:
“I ran across a poor bum,” Pug said, “down in Sitka a couple of years ago. We had a drink, and he spieled a lot of queer bunk. They said he’d gone nuts. Anyhow, he sez he was with a party of Indians in these here islands, prospecting for ore. There was a small island with a big pine in the middle of it what the Indians called ‘The Island of the Lost God.’ They wouldn’t land him till he pulled his gun and threatened to shoot them-said a green devil lived there in a deep cave; a bad one.
“This guy laughs at ’em an’ makes ’em lower him into this here cave on a rope—he sez it looks to him like an old copper-mine shaft. The boys up top get scared as soon as he hits the bottom and light out for keeps. He doesn’t know it, though, and goes on in. It’s great, the story he tells about that, about how he meets this green devil coming, grinning at him. He takes a pot-shot at him and shinnies the rope like he was a cat. By an’ by somebody picks him up—crazy with the thirst and the fright and all. But he ain’t never forgot that green thing. Say, I wish we could get picked up right now—”
Rill allowed himself an ironical smile.
“Why, you believe in the story?” he asked.
“No, I don’t say that—but still, my mother was Irish, and she saw the banshee once, an’ she knew the runes of the fairies—we’d best go ’round the hole,”
“No devil’ll scare me away from a lost copper, mine. If there’s anything there you can buy out fifty devils—”
“Make
