Wednesday the Tenth, A Tale of the South Pacific

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Allen Grant. Wednesday the Tenth, A Tale of the South Pacific

CHAPTER I. WE SIGHT A BOAT

CHAPTER II. THE BOAT'S CREW

CHAPTER III. THE MYSTERY SOLVED

CHAPTER IV. MARTIN LUTHER'S STORY

CHAPTER V. A BREAK-DOWN

CHAPTER VI. ON THE ISLAND

CHAPTER VII. ERRORS EXCEPTED

CHAPTER VIII. HOT WORK

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Presently, as we headed towards the black object on the horizon, Nassaline stretched out that skinny finger of his once more (no amount of feeding ever seemed to make Nassaline one ounce fatter), and cried out in his shrill little piping voice, "Two man on the boat! him makey signs for call us!"

I'd give anything to have eyes as sharp as those Polynesians. I looked across the sea, and the loppy waves in the foreground, and could just make out with the naked eye that the row-boat had something that looked like a red handkerchief tied to her bare mast, and a white signal flapping in the wind below it; but not a living soul could I distinguish in her without my binocular. So I put up my glasses and looked again. Sure enough, there they were, two miserable objects, clinging as it seemed half-dead to the mast, and making most piteous signs with their hands to attract our attention. As soon as they saw that we had really sighted them, and were altering our course to pick them up, their joy and delight knew no bounds, as we judged. They flung up their arms ecstatically into the air, and then sank back, exhausted, as I guessed, on to the thwarts where they had long ceased sitting or rowing.

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Jim held the youngest boy's head on his lap, and opened those parched lips of his that looked as dry as a piece of battered old shoe-leather. The tongue lolled out between the open teeth like a thirsty dog's at midsummer, and was hard and rough as a rasp with long weary watching. We judged the lad at sight to be twelve years old or thereabouts. Jim put the flask to his lips, and let a few drops trickle slowly down his burnt throat. At touch of the soft liquid the boy's lips closed over the mouth of the flask with a wild movement of delight, and he sucked in eagerly, as you may see a child in arms suck at the mouthpiece of its empty feeding-bottle. "That's well," I said. "He's all right, at any rate. As long as he has strength enough to pull at the flask like that, we shall bring him round in the end somehow."

We took away the flask as soon as we thought he'd had as much as was good for him at the time, and let his head fall back once more upon Jim's kindly shoulder. Now that the first wild flush of delight at their rescue was fairly over, a reaction had set in; their nerves and muscles gave way simultaneously, and the poor lad fell back, half-fainting, half-sleeping, just where Jim with his fatherly solicitude chose to lay him.

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