There was also a lump of salt beef weighing some four pounds, more than a dozen potatoes, the tin of matches, and he piled out twenty cans of food, which should be enough for ten days, or more at short rations. At any rate it was all he dared try to carry, and he tied all these articles together in the blanket much as he had dragged them from the schooner, and made a loop to go over his shoulder.

There was not the slightest use in delaying his start. He packed tins of corn and beans in all his pockets, put the hatchet in his belt, took the rifle in his hand, and started to tramp southward along the beach in the rain.

CHAPTER XV
AN UNEXPECTED VISION

By degrees the rain slackened down to a fine Scotch mist. Heavy fog veiled the mountains, and the sea was a vast void at his right hand. There was hard sand underfoot, making good walking; then it coarsened to loose gravel, and then alternated from one to the other. He groped inland through the fog in search of a better roadway, blundered into a bog of innumerable little rivulets, and got back to the beach again.

Every few minutes, it seemed, he had to wade or jump a creek that rushed down from the hills. The sky was invisible; he could see nothing beyond the hazy circle of a few yards. It was a gruesome and ghostly sort of pilgrimage, over an invisible landscape, which would have been wildly terrifying if he could have seen it, amid the shifting mist clouds, where the only life seemed to be the rushing, crashing surf beside him.

The weight at his back grew painful; the cord was cutting a groove in his shoulder. He readjusted it repeatedly, sat down to rest, grew chilled, started again, and plodded on till it seemed to him that it must surely be midday.

He opened one of the tins of baked beans in his pocket and consumed them cold, without wasting time on the probably impossible job of fire making. Again he tramped ahead, wet through, sweating with exertion, conscious at times of a queer elation and optimism. Considering all things carefully, it did not seem likely to him that Eva Morrison would have gone in the Chita with her father—a girl alone with three men. She must have remained in Valparaiso, and this growing conviction cheered him wonderfully. However the adventure should turn out, he felt sure that he would get back to Valparaiso somehow. He still had over five hundred dollars on him. It seemed a great resource, and he felt that luck had done its worst possible and that nothing ever could daunt him again.

All day he kept up that persevering trudge. Now and again the mist cleared a little, and he caught glimpses of the forested mountain slopes and the desolate islands out across the channel. He crossed a great headland like Punta Reale, and rounded what seemed an immense bay. The going was nearly always hard and sometimes terrible, with mud or fog or tumbled rocks, and he had no idea of where the sun stood, or how the day was passing. His watch had been drowned and refused to go.

It was still daylight when he caught sight of the white gleam of a clump of birch trees on the slope above him, and he snatched at this piece of luck. He split and peeled off great rolls of bark, cut chips, and broke open a dead trunk to get at dry wood inside. With these aids, he was able to get a good fire under way, in spite of a heavy drizzle that started just then as if it meant to last.

But he was now growing used to being wet, and all he wanted was warmth and food. He broiled slices of the salt beef along with the roasting potatoes, and made a tin of vegetable soup hot. It was bad, but it was delicious. Lang swallowed it all greedily, and, to add to his comfort, the rain almost stopped when he dropped, hungering for sleep, on the piled heap of wet spruce branches.