He rose to his feet as a man in bedraggled white uniform appeared in the doorway.
"You were speaking, sir?" he said.
"I was," said Desmond. "I suggested that it was a pity somebody couldn't torpedo this benighted continent. Any word from the men you sent ashore?"
"They've signaled from the rise," said the Palestrina's mate. "No sign of him yet. I don't expect them off until to-morrow. The surf's running steep." Desmond made a gesture of concurrence as he glanced at the filmy spray-cloud that drove like smoke up the wet and glistening beach. It was flung aloft by a wild white welter of crumbling seas, and he realized that the boat's crew who had gone ashore could not rejoin the Palestrina before the morning, at least. They went every day to watch for a lumbering ox team or a band of carriers plodding seaward across the littoral, and it seemed they had once more signaled that there was no sign of either. Then he moved towards the door bareheaded, with only an unbuttoned duck jacket over his thin singlet, and the mate ventured a deprecatory protest.
"She's throwing it over her in sheets forward," he said.
Desmond disregarded him, and staggering clear of the deck-house stood with feet spread well apart gazing at the stretch of leaden sea while, as the Palestrina's bows went up, the spray that whirled in over her weather rail wet him to the skin. He saw the livid tops of the combers that rolled by the point and heard the jarring cables ring, and then turned his eyes shorewards and gazed across the waste of misty littoral.
"It's a cheerful place, but now and then you feel you might get to like it," he said. "Perhaps it's the uncertainty as to when the fever will get you that gives living here a zest. When you come to think of it, some of us have curious notions."
He appeared to be considering the point as they edged back under the lee of the deck-house, and the mate grinned.
"The men don't take kindly to it, sir," he said. "They've been worrying me lately as to how long we're stopping here."
"A week," said Desmond. "Ormsgill's time is running out, and he'll be here or send us word by then. He said he would, and what that man says you can count on being done."