Two fair-sized streams ran from the hills into the straits on that side. Near the first was pitched the camp. Well hidden near the second was the boat.
Now, these rivulets, though fairly deep and swift, were not torrents; that is to say, they drained a watershed by no means so steep as Hanover Island. Their volume was more regular, inasmuch as they were not wholly the outcome of the latest downpour of rain. To avoid the necessity of fording them, one had to walk a long way seaward until their waters began to spread over the reef in a hundred little runnels, and one could leap from rock to rock.
Indeed, it was while Sturgess was so doing that he barked his shin, a most painful if not dangerous operation; in this instance, it evoked language which the girls pretended not to hear.
Having crossed the stream, however, Madge examined the damage, and would have it that the sufferer take off his boot and sock, and forthwith lave the wound in fresh water.
What he really wanted to do was to wander away out of earshot and relieve his feelings by the spoken word. He obeyed, however, and all four went up the right bank (which, as Sturgess and Madge jointly cited in their contention, they certainly would not have done otherwise) to a point where the river was free of salt-water.
In the result, curiously enough, Sturgess’s excoriated wound was left absolutely to its own devices. Both he and Madge, not to mention the other two, were startled out of any further thought of such a minor casualty by coming full tilt on to a ship’s boat, trimly sheeted in gray canvas, dry-docked, one might say, behind a sandhill.
After an incredulous stare, Maseden answered Nina’s eager question.
“It is one of the life-boats of the Southern Cross,” he said, and his voice was hushed, almost reverent. “There is her number, with the ship’s name. She was carried on the starboard side, just behind the forward rail on the promenade deck. I used to look up at her and admire her lines.”
By this time they had raced up alongside the craft. She appeared to be undamaged. Maseden unlaced a portion of the canvas cover. She was dry as a bone inside.