“When you are completely recovered, captain, and not before,” replied Fritz firmly. “It will be several days yet before——”
“I am getting better, Fritz,” the captain declared; “how could it be otherwise, with all the attention I have? Mrs. Wolston and your wife and Dolly would have cured me merely by looking at me. We will put to sea in forty-eight hours at latest.”
“Westward or eastward?” Fritz asked.
“According to the wind,” the captain replied.
“And I have an idea that this trip will be a lucky one,” the boatswain put in.
Fritz, Frank, and John Block had already done all but the impossible in their attempts to scale the promontory. They had got about two hundred feet up, although the gradient was very steep, by slipping from one rock to the next in the very middle of a torrent of landslides, with the agility of chamois or ibex; but a third of the way up they had come to a stop: It had been a highly dangerous attempt, and the boatswain had come within an ace of breaking some of his bones.
But from that point all their attempts to continue the ascent were in vain. The promontory ended here in a vertical section with a smooth surface. There was not a foothold anywhere, not the tiniest projection on which the boat’s ropes might have been caught. And they were still six or seven hundred feet from the top of the cliff.
When they returned to the cave Captain Gould explained the decision which had been reached. Two days hence, on the 27th of October, the boat was to leave her moorings to go along the coast. Had a trip of several days’ duration been involved, everybody would have gone in the boat. But as only a general reconnaissance was contemplated, he thought it would be better that only he should go with Fritz and the boatswain. They three would be enough to handle the boat, and they would not go farther away to the north than they must. If they found that the coast-line bounded nothing more than an islet they could make the circuit of it and be back within twenty-four hours.
Short as their absence might be, the idea of it excited great uneasiness. The rest of the party would not be able to see their companions go without much anxiety. How could they tell what might happen? Suppose they were attacked by savages—suppose they could not get back soon—suppose they did not come back at all?
Jenny used these arguments with characteristic energy. She insisted that the many anxieties they endured already should not be added to by others arising from an absence which might be prolonged. Fritz sympathised with her arguments, Captain Gould accepted them, and ultimately it was agreed that they should all take part in the projected exploration.