With this the party separated. Mr. Clark and Philip were detailed to command the respective crews who were to bring up the ordnance, and the others, with Captain Seaworth at their head, went to pay the last honors to those who had fallen in the singular engagement.
The ship’s surgeon was the busiest man on the island, and while the dead were being suitably interred he, with the women as nurses, established a hospital in the court-yard of Captain Seaworth’s house. The awnings were replaced by spare canvas; hammocks were slung on either side, where patients would be most likely to get the benefit of cooling draughts of air, and every preparation was made for a long time of enforced seclusion.
The four central buildings of the village were selected as the ones to be fortified; holes were pierced in the shutters to receive the muzzles of the cannon, and loop-holes made that the men might be able to train the pieces. Powder, grape and canister were brought in large quantities from the ship and stacked up in the rooms, until the buildings intended for the peaceful occupancy of industrious colonists looked like the embrasures of a fort.
At the end of the day succeeding the battle everything was in readiness for the experiment, and fully two-thirds of the colonists were sent on board the Reynard, with orders to remain concealed. It was not deemed advisable to remove the wounded from the court-yard, for unless the apes should begin a regular siege, as they had done when Philip was alone, this temporary hospital would not be exposed to an attack.
Captain Seaworth, Philip, Mr. Clark and the second mate had charge of the cannon, and from sunrise on the first day after these arrangements had been completed the four commanders watched carefully and eagerly for the coming of the apes, whose curiosity it was hoped would lead them to their death.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
APISH STRATEGY.
From the moment when everything was in readiness for the carrying out of Mr. Clark’s scheme there were no sounds to be heard on the island save those caused by the apes or the myriad forms of insect life. It was as if the colonists had suddenly been stricken dumb; and so careful was the captain and his officers to carry out the plan thoroughly that this silence was not broken by any one under their command.
Save for the six ominous-looking protuberances from the shutters, everything about the village was as it had been when the colonists fled before the pirates, and even human beings might have been deceived by this pretended abandonment of the island.