White Fire

by John Oxenham

They set off again very early in the morning, carrying such burden of food as was possible on the rough road they had to travel, and reached the huts by the sea before midday. The brown men had taken possession and received them in sulky silence.

Blair gave the food to the women and children, and to the men some bits of his mind in his own special way. He acknowledged the direness of the catastrophe, but bade them remember that the white men had suffered equally and yet had not lost their heads or their heart. He told them to be grateful for their lives, and assured them that there was no need for despair.

Blair's high spirits in the face of all difficulties, his forethought and far-reaching grip of the necessities of the case, made a deep impression even on Captain Pym's habitual and official phlegm. Under stress of circumstance he found himself under the necessity of rearranging his preconceived ideas. He became decidedly more human, and perhaps more of a man, than he had been for many a year.

He sounded Blair as to his hopes and intentions, and they discussed matters freely. In furtherance of them, when they had rested, they all set to work making another raft, and if the Bonita men could have seen their spick and span, stiff and starched captain, hauling and lashing, with his coat off and his trousers up to the knee, it is certain they would not have known him.

They paddled their raft across the lagoon to the place where the ships had lain before the storm, and after some searching found where the Torch and Jean Arnot were lying. The great wave had probably washed them inshore but the return had carried them out again. The Bonita had disappeared completely. She had probably been carried over the edge of the shelf and lay in unfathomable depths. They could see the other two dimly through the clear water, with the many-coloured fishes darting in and out of their battered sides and broken raffle, and Captain Pym's face pinched at the sight and at thought of it all.

Ha'o was the most expert swimmer of the party, and had long since shown that he could remain under water twice as long as any of the white men. On him therefore the burden of discovery lay, and he appreciated with the rest how much depended on his efforts. They had timber in quantity from the broken boats and ships, but without tools they could turn it all to no account. There were tools below there in the ships. Ha'o was going down to find them. With tools in their hands the door of deliverance would be at all events ajar.

"You will most likely find them in the front part of our ship, Ha'o, underneath where the big gun was," Blair told him. "If the gun has fallen through, so much the better. It will help you," and Ha'o nodded, and shot down through the clear water like a brown streak.

He was up again presently and hung panting to the raft. The big gun had gone out of sight through the side and bottom of the ship. He would get inside next time.

But it took many visits before he discovered anything, and then a ringing cheer went up as he came to the surface with a saw in his hand, and flung it on to the raft.

"There are more things, but they are scattered," he told them, when he had got his breath, and next time he took down with him one end of a thin cord they had unravelled out of rope, and presently sent up by it a heavy hammer, and came up himself with a chisel. It took many hours' hard work, but at last they had enough to go on with, and Ha'o lay panting on the raft, while the others paddled it slowly down the lagoon to the Happy Valley.