“Is there a bright side?” asked Mr. Ryder.
“Wal, I should ruther say so! Not sunlight, maybe, but bright enough to steer by. To begin with, a bidarkie is one of the best sea-boats there is long’s ye keep her head to the sea or scudding, and especially if ye have kamleikas aboard. Did the lads have kamleikas, do ye know, sir?”
“Yes,” replied the inspector; “Phil had his own, and Serge borrowed one from the native who owned the bidarkie.”
“And how was they off for grub?”
“I don’t believe they had any, except a few eggs that Phil insisted on taking as specimens for Miss Matthews.”
“Then they couldn’t have been better fixed!” cried the mate. “Eggs is meat and drink, both in one shell. Why, old Kite Roberson, who was one of the likeliest navigators as ever trod a deck, uster consider eggs the main part of a ship’s stores. He knowed every egg island in three oceans, and uster visit ’em regular. Besides that, he carried along sich a stock of fowls that, no matter what ship he sailed in, she was allers called the ‘Hen-coop.’
“So what’s to hender two able young seamen, like Phil and Serge, with a good sea-boat under their feet and a locker full of the best of grub, from making a cruise to some one of the islands lying up here to the nor’ard? Nothing at all, I say. It would be right in the line of sich lads as they be, and I wouldn’t be one mite surprised ef they was setting on some handy pint of rock this very minute, straining their eyes watching for us, and wondering why we didn’t come along.”
“Are there islands to the north of this?” asked Mr. Ryder, with a show of interest.
“To be sure. There’s St. Matthew, and St. Lawrence, and Nunivack, and then up in the very middle of the strait, where the United States and Russia is less’n forty mile apart, is the Stepping Stones, two little islands with the line running between ’em, and so close together that an able-bodied biscuit-tosser, standing on the American island, could toss a biscuit over into Asia. To be sure, they’re nigh on to a thousand miles from here, and there ain’t no show for the boys to have fetched up there, nor yet on St. Lawrence, but it’s jest possible they’ve brung up agin St. Matthew.”