To watch for the life of poor Jack.”
Trolling out this sailorly reproof of Don's fears, the captain stretched himself in the bottom of the boat, and drawing a tai paulin over his nose, was soon sleeping off the effects of his recent exertions ashore. But upon Don's heart his chum's fate lay like a leaden weight. He could not rest.
“Good-bye, old fellow, till I see you again.” These, Jack's last careless words, repeated themselves in every me urnful sigh of the night-wind; and as he lay, hour after hour, watching the stars climb the heavens; he wondered, with a keen pain at his heart, when that “again” was to be.
As the night wore on, however, he found more and more comfort in the old sailor's words. It was so much easier to believe that Jack had been kidnapped than to believe him dead. This view of his disappearance, too, was altogether in keeping with the shark-charmer's cunning. As for himself, he would gladly have cried quits with old Salambo then and there, if by so doing he could have recalled Jack to his side.
At length he fell into a troubled sleep, unconscious of the fact that another brain than his was busy with Jack's fate. Had he but known it, Bosin deserved more than a passing thought that night.
By daybreak they were again astir, and within an hour the cutter lay snugly ensconced in the shelter of a deep, vine-draped cavern beneath the cliff, some hundred yards down the creek, of which the captain knew. In carrying out this part of the old sailor's plan, the canoe, for which an effective paddle was improvised out of an old oar, proved of signal service; and when the smaller skiff had in its turn been hidden away in the dense jungle bordering the beach, they loaded up with the remaining stores, and took the pathway to the Haunted Pagodas, which they eventually reached just as the sun, like a huge ball of fire, rolled up out of the eastern sea.
As the captain had said, the Haunted Pagodas was indeed “a tidy spot to fall back upon.” Ages before, a circle of massive temples had crowned the summit of this island hill; but for full a thousand years had Nature searched out with silent, prying fingers the minutest crevices of the closer-cemented stones, ruthlessly destroying what man had so proudly reared, until nothing save a confusion of tumble down walls and broken pillars, grotesquely draped with climbing vines and like parasitic growths, remained to mark the site of the erstwhile stately cloisters. A shuddery spot it was!—a likely lurking-place for reptile or wild beast, so uncanny in its weird union of jungle wildness and dead men's work, that one would scarcely have been surprised had the terrible witch-tiger of the native legend suddenly leapt out upon one from some dark pit or sunless recess.
In one spot alone had the walls successfully resisted the action of the insinuating roots. This was a sort of cloister with a floor of stone, upon which the roof had fallen. But when the debris had been cleared away, and the stores scattered about in its stead, this corner of the ruins looked positively homelike and comfortable—especially when Puggles, taking possession of one of its angles, converted it into a kitchen, and began active preparations for breakfast. The captain dubbed their new retreat “the fo'csle.”
All that day the old sailor was in an unusually thoughtful mood. Every half-hour or so he would produce his pipe and take a number of slow, meditative “whiffs o' the fragrant,” after which he would slap his thigh energetically with one horny hand, and stump back and forth amid the ruins in a state of high excitement, until, something going wrong with his train of thought, the pipe had to be relighted, and the difficulty, like the tobacco, smoked out again.
This characteristic process of “ilin' up his runnin' gear” he continued far on into the afternoon, when he abruptly laid the huge meerschaum aside, took a critical survey of sea and sky, and, bearing down on Don, where he sat cleaning the muskets, without further ado planted a resounding thump on that young gentleman's back.