He drew his arm about her as they sat together on the beach.
“Just be patient, that's all,” bade he. “Just give me a day or so to find out our location, and I'll get things going again, never fear. A week from now we may be sailing into Boston Harbor--who knows?”
And, shipwrecked and destitute though they were, alone in the vast emptiness of that deserted world, yet with his optimism and his faith he coaxed her back to cheerfulness and smiles again.
“The whole earth is ours, and the fulness thereof!” he cried, and flung his arms defiantly outward. “This is no time for hesitance or fear. Victory lies all before us yet. To work! To work!”
CHAPTER XIV
A FRESH START
Indomitably the human spirit, temporarily beaten down and crushed by misfortunes beyond all calculation, once more rose in renewed strength to the tremendous task ahead. And, first of all, Stern and the girl made a camping place in the edge of the forest, close by the spring under the big rock.
“We've got to have a base of supplies, or something of that sort,” the man declared. “We can't start trekking away into the wilderness at once, without consideration and at least some definite place where we can store a few necessaries and to which we can retreat, in case of need. A camp, and--if possible--a fire, these are our first requisites.”
Their camp they built (regardless of the protests of birds and squirrels and many little woodland folk) roughly, yet strongly enough to offer protection from the rain, under a thick-leaved oak, which in itself gave shelter. This oak, through whose branches darted many a gay-plumaged bird of species unknown to Stern, grew up along the overhanging face of Spring Rock, as they christened it.
By filling in the space between the rock and the bole of the oak with moss and stones, and then by building a heavy lean-to roof of leafy branches, thatched with lashed bundles of marsh-grass, they constructed in two days a fairly comfortable shack, hard by an abundant, never-failing supply of the finest water ever a human set lip to.
Here Stern piled fragrant grasses in great quantity for the girl's bed. He himself volunteered to sleep at the doorway, on guard with his only weapon--a jagged boulder lashed with leather thongs to a four-foot heft, even in the; very fashion of the neolithic ancestors of man.