CHAPTER X.
“MISSING AT LLOYD’S”
Elsie had slept long and soundly: she found herself in a new world of sunshine and calm. When she looked over the side to examine the crudely fashioned canoe, she was astonished by the limpid purity of the water. She could see white pebbles and vegetation at a vast depth. It seemed to be impossible that a few hours should have worked such a change, but Suarez assured her that the streams which tumbled down the precipitous gorges of the hills ran clear quickly after rain, owing to the sifting of the surface drainage by the phenomenal tree-growth.
“Wherever timber can lodge on the hillsides,” he told her, “fallen trunks lie in layers of fifteen or twenty feet. They rot there, and young saplings push their way through to the light and air, while creepers bind them in an impenetrable mass; in many places small trees and shrubs of dense foliage take root amidst the decaying stumps beneath, so that even the Indians cannot pass from one point to another, but are compelled to climb the rocky watercourses or follow the slopes of glaciers. When you see what appears to be a smooth green space above the lower brown-colored belt of copper beech, that is not a moss-covered stretch of open land, but the closely packed tops of young trees, where a new tract has been bared by an avalanche.”
She was in no mood this morning to assimilate the marvels of Hanover Island. Her brain had been cleared, restored to the normal, by refreshing sleep. With a more active perception of the curious difficulties which beset the Kansas came a feeling akin to despair. The brightness of nature served rather to convert the ship into a prison. Storm and stress, whether of the elements or of the less candid foes who lurked unseen on the neighboring shores, made the Kansas a veritable fortress, a steel refuge seemingly impregnable. But the knowledge of the vessel’s helplessness, and of the equally desperate hazard which beset her inmates, was rendered only more poignant by the smiling aspect of land and sea.
Elsie was not a philosopher. She was just a healthy, clean-minded Englishwoman, imbued with a love of art for art’s sake, a girl whose wholesome, courageous temperament probably unfitted her to achieve distinction in the artistic career which she had mapped out for herself. So the super-Alpine glories surrounding that inland sea, and the prismatic hues flashing from many a glacier and rainbow of cataract mist, left her unmoved, solely because the rough-hewn Indian craft bobbing by the side of the great ship called to mind the extraordinary conditions under which she and all on board existed.
But she was hungry, and that was a saving sign. She guessed that many of the men, after mounting watch until broad daylight, were asleep. Others were at work below, as was testified by a subdued sound of hammering, with the sharp clink of metal against metal. Walker was tinkering at the engines. With him, in all likelihood, were the captain and Tollemache. She and Suarez were the drones of the ship, and Suarez, poor fellow, had earned an idle hour if only on account of the scrubbing he had given himself to wash away the tokens of five years of slavery.
Before going in search of the cook, she walked a few steps towards the bridge. At the top of the companion she saw Joey, sitting disconsolately on his tail, a sure indication that Courtenay was occupied in depths approachable only by steep iron ladders whither the dog could not follow.
She whistled softly to her little friend, knowing that Christobal, and perhaps Mr. Boyle, would be on the bridge, keeping the lookout, and she was not inclined for talk at the moment. The doctor would have understood at once that the girl was below par, owing to the strain of the preceding days, and the lethargic rest which exhaustion had imposed on her. Yet, there are times when science does not satisfy. . . .
But Joey, who recked naught of philosophy, and to whom the alarms and excursions of fights on deck came as a touch of mother earth to the sole of Antaeos—Joey, then, sprang down the stairs, barking joyously, and leaped into her outstretched arms.
He honored no other person on board, except his master, with such extravagant friendship, and, as the girl carried him aft to the cook’s galley, she asked herself why the dog had taken such a liking to her.