The misty sun was high in the heavens when they reached the foot of the steep rise, and Wyllard gasped heavily as they crept up the ascent. He was making a severe muscular effort; but it was the nervous tension that troubled him most, for he knew that he would look down upon the inlet from the summit. He blamed himself bitterly for not sending a messenger to Dampier immediately after he fell in with Overweg. There had certainly been difficulties in the way, for the increase in the scientist’s party had made additional packers necessary, and Wyllard felt that he could not reasonably compel the man who had succored him to leave behind the camp comforts to which he had evidently been accustomed. In spite of that, he had been at fault in not disregarding every objection, and he realized it now.
Somehow he kept pace with Lewson, but he closed one hand tight as he neared the top of the promontory. When he reached the summit he stopped suddenly, and his face set hard as he looked down. Beneath him lay a strip of dim, green water, with a fringe of soft white surf, while beyond the beach there stretched away an empty expanse of slowly heaving sea. There was no schooner in the inlet, no boat upon the beach.
In another moment or two they went down the slope at a stumbling run, and then stopped, gasping by the water’s edge, and looked at one another. There were marks in the sand which showed where a boat had been drawn up not very long before. The Selache evidently had been there, and had sailed away again.
Wyllard sat down limply upon the shingle, for all the strength seemed suddenly to melt out of him, and it was several minutes before he looked up. Gazing out at sea, Lewson was still standing, a shapeless, barbaric figure in his garments of skins. The hide moccasins he wore had chafed through, and Wyllard noticed that the blood was trickling from one of his feet.
“Well?” Lewson asked harshly.
Wyllard laid a stern restraint upon himself. Their case looked desperate, but it must be grappled with.
“We must go back and meet the rest,” he said. “That first—what is to come afterwards I don’t quite know.” A faint gleam of resolution crept into his eyes. “The schooner the Russians seized lies in an inlet down the coast.”
Lewson made a sign of comprehension. “There are four of us. There will be birds by and by. I can trap things.”
He flung himself down near his comrade, and for an hour neither of them spoke. Wyllard was worn out physically and limp from the last few hours’ mental strain, while Lewson very seldom said more than was absolutely necessary. They made a very frugal meal, and long afterwards Wyllard was haunted by the memory of that dreary afternoon during which he lay upon the shingle watching the slow pulsations of the dim, lifeless sea.
They set out again early next morning, and, as it happened, found a little depôt of provisions that Dampier had made, but it was several days before they met Charly and the Indian, and another week had passed before Overweg reached the appointed meeting-place. The scientist listened to Wyllard’s story gravely, and then appeared to consider.