“Well,” he replied, “I still hold to my first notion. They were blown ashore on the beach we have just left, and made prisoners. Then a supply schooner or perhaps a steamer came along, and they were sent off in her to be handed over to the authorities. The vessel put in somewhere. We’ll say she was lying in an inlet with a boat astern, and somehow our friends cut that boat loose in the dark, and got away in her.”
He broke off for a moment to look at his companion significantly.
“You can find quite a few points where that idea seems to fail,” he added. “They were in Kamtchatka, but I’m beginning to feel that we shall never know any more than that.”
Wyllard made a gesture of concurrence, but in his face Dampier saw no sign that he meant to abandon his project. He seemed to sink into sleep, and the skipper, who went up on deck, paced to and fro a while before he stopped by the wheel and turned to the helmsman.
“You can let her come up a couple of points. We may as well make a little southing while we can,” he said.
Charly, who was steering, looked up with suggestive eagerness. “Then he’s not going for the Aleutians?”
“No,” answered Dampier dryly. “I was kind of afraid of that, but I choked him off. Anyway, this year won’t see us back in Vancouver.” He paused. “We’re going to stay up here until we find out where those men left their bones. The man who has this thing in hand isn’t the kind that lets up.”
Charly made no answer, but his face hardened as he put his helm down a spoke or two.
Next day the wind fell lighter, but for a week it still held westerly, and after that it blew moderately fresh from the south. Crippled as she was, the Selache would lie a point or two south of east when they had set an old cut-down fore-staysail on what was left of her mainmast. The hearts of her crew became lighter as she crawled on across the Pacific. The men had no wish to be blown back to the frozen North.
The days were growing shorter rapidly, and the sun hung low in the southern sky when at last the schooner crept into one of the many inlets that indent the coast of Southern Alaska. There was just wind enough to carry her in around a long, foam-lapped point, and soon afterwards they let the anchor go in four fathoms of water. Their haven was a sheltered arm of the sea with a river mouth not far away. There was no sign of life anywhere and the ragged cedars that crept close down to the beach stood out in somber spires against the gleaming snow.