LITMIR.BIZ

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boots in the house. They were too large, and one was burst at the toe, but they were stoutly made, and she stuffed them till they would fit sufficiently. When the foot healed she went bare again. What life was left in the boots should be kept for the winter days....

      That night they talked of nothing but the failure of the well and what it might mean.

      Milk was plenty, and salt water must do for washing. But milk must fail unless the cows were watered.

      They knew that there was a small and muddy pool about half a mile away, where they supposed that the sheep drank, and where the cows had drunk till they commenced to fill the cask as an inducement to them to come for the milking. But they knew that this pool had been shrinking, and it might now be dry entirely.

      It had been infested with gulls, of which there had been many thousands round the island after the storm. There were fewer now; many must have found a more congenial home, which proved that there was land within the distance that their flight covered. But many remained. They settled in great flocks on the lower island during the day, returning at night to roost on the hill-sides of the higher land.

      Norwood said that there was one place on the lower island around which they always flew most thickly. Perhaps there was fresh water there. It was a poor chance, but it was worth trying. He proposed that Claire and he should go in the morning to inspect it. Claire had answered that one was enough. She would go to look at the state of the pool where the cows used to drink.

      Jephson said that he would go there himself. If it were full there was no need for immediate worry. If not, he might want them all to work at opening the well. He had an idea that it might be possible to locate the place where the salt water entered, or to tap the fresh separately. It did not sound hopeful.

      Norwood had pressed Claire to go with him in the morning. She had answered shortly, and gone to her room. It had been the only one on the upper floor which had withstood the storm. A solid room. And there was a good lock on the door.

      The securing of that room had been the one success she had scored on the day she arrived. It had been unfurnished, except for a heavy wooden bedstead, which might almost have been regarded as a part of the house itself. Now the appearance of the room was something between that of a marine store and a broker’s shop.

      She walked over to one of the windows, and as she leaned out she heard the voices of the men disputing through the open window of the room beneath her. She knew, as it seemed instinctively, that the water was forgotten, and that she was the cause of their anger.

      Norwood’s voice was the louder, but it was not one that carried well, and she could not hear the words. It rose once or twice in defiant tones, but more often it sounded sulkily, or as though he were giving way with reluctant expostulation. Once she heard Jephson clearly: “You’ll keep off the wench till...” The remainder of the sentence was lost. Till what? Of the word “till” she was sure.

      Tired though she was, she had lain awake for a long time that night, restlessly questioning the future and seeing no tolerable issue. She had courage, and the quality of mind that is frank with itself, as with others. She was woman, with a full experience of life behind her. Isolated as they were, she knew that it was natural that the thoughts of the men should turn to her, and hers to them for that matter. But she knew that she loathed them both, so far as any physical contact was concerned. Yet how could it end? The ocean showed no land. It showed no sail. She was the only woman of her world as far as she could know it. Was it natural that she should hold them off forever? Was it right?

      There were two of them, and perhaps in that lay her immediate safety. It gave some choice also. But she had no wish to exercise it. She doubted whether the greedy coarseness and physical deficiencies of Jephson repelled her more utterly than the invertebrate dullness of her more frequent companion. Perhaps it did; and yet she knew that there was more manhood in the house-builder, however ugly and brutal it might be. Probably if it came to open violence between them Jephson would win, though he was the older and smaller man. So she had thought that night. Now she knew.

      But she had no wish that they should quarrel concerning her. Only a vague thought that, at the worst, she might play one off against the other.

      Then she had been startled at a sudden aspect of baseness in this atavistic instinct, that she should think of appealing to either against the other when she had no thought to reward him for his championship.

      It might be hard to avoid. At best it was a mean and perilous way. Yet what else was there to hold to? She had fallen asleep with this enigma unanswered.

      CHAPTER VII

      The following morning she had risen early, and because the sun shone and the air was buoyant, she was able to face the future more hopefully. Whatever of sinister meaning might be in the words she had overheard, at the worst they implied a respite.

      “Brave men die once, but cowards die many times,” she had thought gaily enough. And how many dead there were! Surely she should be able to laugh in the sunlight.

      She found the cows were smelling round the cask, but the supply of milk was undiminished. Either they had found water, or its failure had not yet affected them.

      She carried in the milk carefully, with an added sense of its value. The men were waiting, and while they ate and drank they agreed on the plan that had been proposed the night before.

      Jephson would go to inspect the pool on their own island. She and Norwood would explore the lower one, only they would separate and each take half the work of surveying it thoroughly. Jephson had plans already, if all else should fail, of the building of cisterns for rainwater. He was calculating on a change of weather, and wished to be ready to take full advantage of it.

      Norwood seemed more cheerful than usual. He made trivial jokes and laughed at his own wit. The difference of the previous night appeared to be forgotten.

      Claire and he had started out together intending to do their work of salvage before crossing the channel, which they could only do when the tide was at its lowest, some hours ahead.

      They found little to occupy them. The sea was smooth, and the wind off the shore. There were two more of the dead sheep floating in, and they were of one mind to start them out again on their interrupted voyage. They had found that if any unsavoury items that the ocean brought were dismissed again through the narrow entrance of the bay, the next tide would often return them unless they were started round the southern side, when the current caught them and they were seen no more. They had no use for dead sheep, however recent their decease might be. There was a difference on that point. Jephson said that they might have come from some land left just above the sea-level, to which they clung till the sea washed them off one by one. It was impossible to disprove it. He had even suggested that they might be fit for eating. If they were, their looks belied them.

      Anyway, Claire and Norwood had been of one mind in poling them out of sight and reach before a fresh debate could rise. What remained of the tide’s largess had been only the broken remnant of a wicker chair, a wooden hay-fork, also damaged, and a battered chicken-coop that had a long dead hen entangled in the bars, against which it must have struggled frantically when the flood swept over it.

      It was the poorest haul they had had, and took little time to deal with. So they crossed the island at leisure, Norwood still in unusual spirits and talking of the game in which he excelled. He seemed to forget that the very grounds of his triumphs were beneath the ocean, and that few things were more certain than that he would never handle a bat again, as he expounded his theory of the best method of playing back to a swerving ball or of the result of bowling “round the wicket” to a left-hander. As he became absorbed in his subject she almost liked him, and she was well content to lead him on, and able to do so, for she had captained a cricket team in her college days, though she would have given all the cricket grounds that were ever rolled for a tennis racquet and net, with a good opponent beyond it.

      So they had come to the channel, and being anxious to commence their exploration, they had waded over while the water was still knee-deep and with a pull that nearly took their footing more than once as they struggled against it.

      She

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