"Kill 'em," said Tollemache.
Courtenay glanced sharply at his fellow-countryman. He disliked these
references to the Alaculof bogy in Elsie's presence. It was enough
that it should exist without being constantly paraded. Though the girl
herself was the culprit, Tollemache should have left the topic alone.
But Tollemache was a man of fixed ideas. The device of canvas shields
to repel boarders had set him thinking how much more effective it would
be if the savages were kept at a distance. He well knew that they
would not be deterred by a shotgun and a few revolvers, once they had
made up their minds to carry the ship by assault. To explain himself,
he was compelled to speak at some length, and his swarthy face flushed
under the unusual strain.
"We have dynamite aboard," he said. "Why not construct a couple of
infernal machines which could be fired by pulling a string, and let
them drift towards the canoes when the Indians are near enough?"
"It is worth trying," was Courtenay's brief comment, though he saw
later that Tollemache's suggestion was a very useful one.
Elsie's first task was to prepare a large-scale drawing of the southern
part of Hanover Island, as set forth in Admiralty Chart No. 1837 (Sheet
2, Patagonia), which is the only trustworthy record available for
shipmasters using the outer passage between the Gulf of Penas and the
Straits of Magellan. It was a simple matter to fill in the few
contours given. The neighboring small islands were shown in reasonable
detail, but the whole western coast of Hanover Island itself consisted
of a dotted line and a solitary peak, Stokes Mountain, the height of
which could be estimated and its position triangulated from the sea.
Even Concepcion Straits on the north and the San Blas Channel on the
south were marked in those significant dotted lines. The coast was
practically unknown to civilized man. One of the last fortresses of
the world, grim, inhospitable, it guarded its secret recesses with crag
and glacier and reef-strewn sea.
It was borne in on the girl, while she worked, that the chiefest marvel
in her present condition was the triumph of science over nature in its
most hostile mood. The Kansas boasted all the comforts and luxuries
of a well-equipped hotel. Seated at the same table as herself was a
skilful sailor, using logarithms, secants and cosecants, polar
distances and hour angles, as if he were in some university class-room.
Near the door, enjoying the warm sun, Boyle was stretched on a
deck-chair, while Christobal was offering a half-hearted protest
against his patient's manifest enjoyment of the first cigar he had been
able to smoke since a Chilean knife disturbed certain sensory nerves
between his shoulder-blades. The every sociableness of the gathering
was a paradox: the truth lay with the ice-capped hills and the ape-like
nomads who infested the humid forests of the lower slopes.