“THE UNGAINLY CRAFT PITCHED AND ROLLED ABOUT LIKE A PIECE OF CORK.”
Eileen was the only one who had kept her wits about her. She reasoned with the boys, or at least she tried to; she told them how very, very, lucky they were in that for the second time none of them were drowned, and as for the gold it was a blessed good thing it was all gone, she said, for it only brought bad luck.
Bill looked at her as she spoke these consoling words in a funny kind of way, as though he’d just got out of a merry-go-round and didn’t quite know where he was.
“Eileen,” he managed to say, blinking at her; “I wouldn’t even let a perliceman talk that way to me. If you was me pard, Jack here, I’d make you put up your dooks, see.”
Eileen laughed as if either he, or what he had said, was a great joke, and what’s more, she laughed out loud—the first time since they had known her. Then Jack laughed, and Bill, not to be left out in the cold, joined them with his hearty guffaw. And there the three of them sat on a fallen tree, water soaked, bedraggled, dead broke and as miserable as possible, laughing fit to kill.
Having had experience in losing things, including a few mere sacks of gold and a lot of provisions when his sled went down, Bill had insisted before they embarked on their raft that they should each carry a day’s rations strapped to their backs. Building a big fire they dried their clothes and had their drop of tea and bit of pemmican and after that they felt much better, and quit laughing.
The huskies fared very much a la Mother Hubbard’s dog, which is to say that the cupboard was bare and so the poor brutes had none, no, not even a piece of fish to eat.
“Well, one good thing,” said Bill, whose pemmican had revived him again, “we won’t have to mark this blarsted spot where the last bit of our gold was dumped for I’d know that rock if I saw it a thousand miles off Fire Island.”
Jack and Eileen took a good look at the projecting finger which wouldn’t get out of the way of their raft, and they agreed with Bill that it was a monument of misfortune which having once been run into could never be forgotten.