"My God, Gregg, has anything happened to the schooner?" shouted
Boreland, his long stride covering the distance to the porch.
"Not a thing that I know of, Skipper." The young man, with a weary gesture, brushed the hair back from his forehead upon which blood from a slight wound had dried. "But you see I left her before she started back to Katleean." In answer to the quick questioning in the five pairs of eyes raised to his he stammered: "I—I—wanted to come—ashore—for a few minutes, and—I—I—the current carried me onto the reefs at the south end, and—I wandered in here a little while ago."
Bruises and deep scratches marred the whiteness of his slim body, and bore evidence of a desperate struggle with the sea and rocks. He was the last person in the world that Ellen would have chosen to be thus romantically cast up on the shores of Kon Klayu with them, but woman is potentially a mother and even her heart was touched by his plight. For Harlan, trying—and failing—to appear nonchalant and at ease in his embarrassing situation was boyishly appealing.
"Why, Shane, then the poor fellow hasn't had a bite to eat since yesterday," she exclaimed practically, while preparing to divest herself of her pack. "Everybody get busy here and we'll get him some lunch. Shane, you and Kayak see what you can spare in the way of clothes, and in the meantime, Mr. Harlan—" her conventionally polite tone as she turned to that young man caused Boreland and Kayak Bill to exchange an amused wink—"you may take this blanket that Jean has wrapped about her violin, and put it around you."
A few minutes later Kayak Bill filled the coffee pot from a small crystal spring that trickled from the hillside into a sunken, moss-grown barrel, and placed it over a bonfire Boreland had made. Ellen left the old man to prepare lunch for their unexpected guest, and followed Jean and Lollie into the cabin that was to be their home.
As she crossed the threshold the close, musty odor of decay smote her unpleasantly. The room had one tiny cobwebbed window through which the north light filtered. In the center a rough, home-made table, with one leg slanting inward, supported some battered cooking utensils now green with a fungus-like mould and disagreeably reminiscent of the Indian hunters who had last camped in the place, no one knew how long ago. In the corner where a stove had once stood, was a pile of damp soot and ashes, and the floor was littered with decaying woolen socks, old papers and rubber boots from which the tops had been cut to make a house-shoe known to Alaskan miners as "stags." Here and there daylight showed between the uncovered log walls, and great cobwebs wavered in dusty festoons from the chinking of brown peat. An infirm ladder leaned against one side of the room evidently for the purpose of mounting to the loft indicated by the black opening that yawned in the ceiling.
Ellen had no inclination to follow her sister into the little room that opened off the right. She was appalled at the amount of work to be done before the musty squalor of the place could be banished and the cabin made really habitable. For a moment she even considered the possibility of living in the tents until the White Chief brought the winter provisions, by which time she hoped she might be able to persuade her husband to leave the Island.
Boreland, coming into the room with the broom on his shoulder, interrupted her gloomy thoughts.
"Pretty snug little place, eh, El?" he said cheerfully, looking about him and lunging for the nearest cobweb with his broom. "The roof is good and when we get another window here facing the sea, and fix her up a bit, we'll be cozy as bears in a cave."
He filled his pipe, still warm from the last smoke, and lighted it. Going to the opening leading to the next room he called: "Clear out now, young ones. I'm going to start things going in here pretty pronto!"