CHAPTER XXV
NEWS OF DISASTER
When the boat reached the schooner Dampier went off with one of the men, and with difficulty contrived to make a landing on the ice only to find it covered with a trackless sheet of slushy snow. Though Dampier floundered shorewards a mile or two, there was nothing except the shattered boat to suggest what had befallen Wyllard and his companions. The skipper, who retraced his steps with a heavy heart, retained little hope of seeing them again. Dampier waited two days until a strong breeze blew him off the ice, which was rapidly breaking up, and he then stood out for the open sea, where he hove the Selache to for a week or so. After that he proceeded northward to the inlet Wyllard and he had agreed to.
Dampier was convinced that this was useless, but as the opening was almost clear of ice he sailed the schooner in, and spent a week or two scouring the surrounding country. He found it a desolation, still partly covered with slushy snow, out of which ridges of volcanic rock rose here and there. On two of these spots a couple of days’ march from the schooner, he made a depôt of provisions, and piled a heap of stones beside them. At times, when it was clear, he could see the top of a great range high up against the western sky, but those times were rare. For the most part, the wilderness was swept by rain or wrapped in clammy fog.
There was, however, no sign of Wyllard, and at last Dampier, coming back jaded and dejected from another fruitless search, after the time agreed upon had expired, shut himself up alone for a couple of hours in the little cabin. He was certain now that Wyllard and his companions had been drowned while attempting to make a landing on the ice, since they would have joined him at the inlet as arranged had this not been the case. The distance was by no means great, and there were no Russian settlements on that part of the coast. The skipper sat very still with a clenched hand upon the little table, balancing conjecture against conjecture, and then regretfully decided that there was only one course open to him. It was dark when he went up on deck again, but the men were sitting smoking about the windlass forward.
“You can heave some of that cable in, boys,” he announced. “We’ll clear out for Vancouver at sun-up.”
The men said nothing, but they shipped the levers, and Dampier went back to the cabin, for the clank of the windlass and the ringing of the cable jarred upon him.
Early next morning the Selache stood out to sea, and once they had left behind them the fog and rain near the coast, she carried fine weather with her across the Pacific. On reaching Vancouver, Dampier had some trouble with the authorities, to whom it was necessary to report the drowning of three of his crew, but he was more fortunate than he expected, and after placing the schooner for sale with a broker, he left the city one evening on the Atlantic train. Three days later he was driving across the prairie towards the Hastings homestead. The members were sitting together in the big general room after supper, when the wagon Dampier had hired swung into sight over the crest of a hill.
It was a still, hot evening, and, as the windows were open wide, a faint beat of hoofs came up across the tall wheat and dusty prairie before the wagon topped the rise. Hastings, who sat in a cane chair near the window, with his pipe in his hand, looked up as he heard it.
“Somebody driving in,” he remarked. “I shouldn’t be astonished if it’s Gregory. He talked about coming over the last time I saw him.”