'Moral, sir? 'Tis plain.' He opened his brass tobacco-box, and deliberately twisted up another quid. Then he said impressively: 'Dog don't eat dog; otherways we 're all white men, and there 's no Kanakas.'
Phil Trentham laughed, a little ruefully.
'We may have to eat each other yet,' he said. Then, waving his arms towards the cliffs, he added: 'The prospect doesn't please--what do you make of it?'
The situation in which the four men found themselves had certainly no element of cheerfulness. They were the sole survivors from a tramp steamer which, on the previous day, had fallen a prey to a German raider. After a night's tossing in their small open boat, they had been cast up on this unknown shore, and when they examined the craft, marvelled that they escaped with their lives. Collision with a rock that just peeped above the breakers some fifty yards out had stove, in her garboard-strakes, a hole through which a man might creep. Luckily, the bag of ship's biscuits, which, with a keg of water, formed their whole stock of provisions, had not been washed out or injured.
But what of the future? The narrow strip of sandy beach on which they had been thrown stretched along the foot of high precipitous cliffs that showed a concave arc to the sea. At each horn a rocky headland jutted far out, its base washed high by the waves. The cliffs were rugged and appeared unscalable, even with the aid of the tufts of vegetation that sprouted here and there from fissures in their weather-beaten face. It seemed that they were shut in between the cliffs and the sea, penned between the headlands, confined to this strip of sand, perhaps two miles long, from which there was apparently no landward exit. Their boat was unseaworthy; there was no way of escape by land or sea.
Phil Trentham, working copra on a remote island of the South Pacific, had learnt of the outbreak of war some months after the event, and taken passage on the first steamer that called, intending to land at the nearest port and thence to make his way to some centre of enlistment. Among the few passengers he had chummed up with a young fellow about his own age--one Gordon P. Hoole, who hailed from Cincinnati, had plenty of money, and was touring the Pacific Islands in tramp steamers for amusement. Each was in his twentieth year, stood about five feet ten, and wore a suit of ducks and a cowboy hat; there the likeness between them ended. Trentham was fair, Hoole dark. The former had full ruddy cheeks, broad shoulders, and massive arms and calves; the latter was lean and rather sallow, more wiry than muscular. Trentham parted his hair; Hoole's rose erect from his brow like a short thick thatch. Both had firm lips and jaws, and their eyes, unlike in colour, were keen with intelligence and quick with humour.
Their two companions in misfortune presented an odd contrast to them and to each other. Josiah Grinson, forty-eight years of age, was five feet six in height, immensely broad, with a girth of nearly sixty inches, arms as thick as an average man's legs, and legs like an elephant's. His broad, deeply bronzed face, in the midst of which a small nose, over a long clean upper lip, looked strangely disproportionate, was fringed with a thick mass of wiry black hair. Little eyes of steely blue gazed out upon the world with a hard unwinking stare. He wore a dirty white sweater, much-patched blue trousers, and long boots. His big voice was somewhat monotonous in intonation, and he had been known to doze in the middle of a sentence, wake up and continue without a flaw in the construction.
Ephraim Meek, who had been mate to Grinson's boatswain for about a quarter of a century, was a head taller, but lost the advantage of his inches through a forward stoop of his gaunt frame. Where Grinson was convex Meek was concave. His hollow cheeks were covered with straggling, mouse-coloured hair; his long thin nose made him look more inquisitive than he really was; his faded grey eyes, slightly asquint, seemed to be drawn as by a magnet to the countenance of his superior. Meek was a whole-hearted admirer of the boatswain, and their long association was marred by only one thing--a perpetual struggle between Meek's personal devotion and his conscientious regard for veracity. No one knew what pangs Grinson's frequent appeals to 'Ephraim, me lad,' to 'bear him out' cost the anxious man. But he had always managed to satisfy the boatswain without undue violence to his own scruples, and Grinson had never felt the strain.
'What do I make of it?' repeated Hoole. 'Nix!'
'Where do you suppose we are, Grinson?' asked Trentham.