He slept like a log, careless of wet clothing, but was awakened before daybreak by heavy rain. The fire was drowned out. There was no use trying to relight it. He huddled wretchedly under his blanket for some time, while a wet, gray light came slowly up. He finally ate a cold roasted potato and cold corned beef from a tin, gathered up his stores, and set out doggedly.
That day was very like the preceding. The ground was bad, the shore line growing rougher. It rained for three hours, and then settled into a woolly, clinging fog. About the middle of the day he contrived to build a fire, made hot soup, and slept an hour, and made the better speed for it afterward.
His strength was holding out better than he ever would have expected. He felt capable of going on and on, fallen into a sort of mechanical movement. His mind grew lethargic; he almost forgot at times where he was, what he was heading for. The memory of the emeralds, of Morrison, of Eva was dull in his brain. Hour after hour he plodded on in his numb stupidity, indifferent as any animal to the wind and wet, when he suddenly trod upon something that startled him like a blow.
It was the black, scattered cinders of a fire.
In the sudden shock he thought first of Carroll. But the second glance told him that the fire was old. The ashes were scattered, wet, beaten into the earth. They did not look quite like wood ashes, either; they were full of black charred pieces of stone. It looked like coal. It was coal, and Lang remembered now that Morrison and Floyd had found an outcrop of coal on the coast and had used it for their camp fires.
He had hit the spot; it could not be otherwise. He stared about through the blanketing fog. He made a wide circuit, found nothing more, hurried forward, and came to the edge of a deep and steep ravine. As he stood there he became aware of a strange, cold smell in the air, not like the odor of the mountains or the sea.
He could not see what was at the bottom of the ravine, and he walked up and down the bank a little way, then turned back. Returning to the fire spot, he looked about for the coal outcrop that had fed it. He wanted it for his own fire, for he was not going to leave that spot till he had found out what lay around him.
He looked for a long time before he found it, a hundred yards up the hillside, amid scattered growths of stunted cedars. There were shallow, shelving veins of the black, slaty-looking stuff, and clear marks where fragments had been broken away with a tool.
It would take a hot fire to start that inferior coal, and he had infinite trouble in finding kindling—birch bark and dry wood. What he could find he piled right against the coal seam, for he could see no object in making his fireplace elsewhere.
He sacrificed one of his candles to light the damp wood, spilling the flaming wax on the kindling, and eventually the coal began to snap and flare gassily. It was evidently bituminous, and of the lowest possible quality, but it burned at last with a strong heat that was greatly superior to that of the wet wood.