He, stepped down from the gun-platform. There were no cheers. Every voice was stilled, every face was set. Many seconds passed before there was even the slightest stir among those who had listened so intently.
Then the few English-speaking people from the steerage began to whisper hoarsely to their bewildered companions.
BOOK TWO
CHAPTER I.
The warm, summer season was well-advanced in this far southern land before the strenuous, tireless efforts of the marooned settlers began to show definite results.
Some six weeks after the stranding of the Doraine, staunch log cabins were in course of completion along the base of the hills overlooking the clear, rolling meadow-land to the north and east. Down in the lowlands scores of men were employed in sowing and planting. The soil was rich. Farmers and grain-raisers among the passengers were unanimously of the opinion that almost any vegetable, cereal or fruit indigenous to Argentina (or at the worst, Patagonia), could be produced here. Uncertainty as to the duration of the warm period, so vital to the growing and maturing of crops, was the chief problem. No time was to be lost if there were to be harvests before the cold and blighting weather set in.
It was extremely doubtful if the spring and summer seasons combined covered more than five months in this latitude. Assuming that the climate in this open part of the world was anything like that of the Falkland Islands, the rainy season was overdue. Midwinter usually comes in July, with the temperature averaging between 35 deg. and 10 deg. above zero over a period of four or five months. At the time of the wreck, the thermometers were registering about 70 deg. during the day, and dropping to 50 deg. or thereabouts after nightfall. This would indicate that spring was fairly well-advanced, and that midsummer might be figured on as coming in January. It was now the end of November. Warm weather probably would last until February or March. Possibly they would be too late with their planting, but they went about it speedily, determinedly, just the same.
All of them had had crop failures before. All of them had seen the labour of months go for naught in the blight of an evening's frost, or the sweep of a prairie fire. So here on this virgin isle, in soil whose sod had never been turned, they sowed from the bins of the slumbering ship. Wheat and oats and flax, brought from the Argentina plains; potatoes, squash and beet-root; even beans and peas were tried, but with small hope. And there were women ready to till the soil and work the gardens, women to draw the strangely fashioned ploughshares as willing beasts of burden, to wield the hoe and spade, and to watch for the cherished sprout that was to glorify their deeds.