Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [125]
He watched Neal coming slowly back to us, picking his way over the icy ledges.
The captain drew four large bundles of meat from beneath the seaweed and piled them in Neal's arms. "Be sure they're covered with three feet of seaweed," he told Neal.
When Neal was out of hearing, the captain asked, with seeming carelessness, "What is it Neal thinks happened to his father?"
"Well," I said, "you know how I feel about Neal. From the moment I saw him, I've thought of him as a brothera younger brother. I wouldn't want you to think that
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there's anything odd about himthat he has hallucinations, or anything of that sort."
The captain sniffed. "I know hallucinations when I see 'em, Miles. The night the Nottingham was wrecked, I was sure none of us would last until morning. Then when morning came, I had a feeling. Not an hallucination. I don't know how you get feelings, or where they come from; but I had the feeling we were going to come safely out of this. I still have it, and I still think I'm right. That's no hallucination. Now what is it that Neal feels about his father?"
"Well," I said, "he thinks he saw his father in a dream, or something like that. His father told him the raft hadn't a chance of getting to shore with two men on it. He told Neal that since he was a good swimmer, he was going to get into the water and swim and push. He thought that if he did that, the raft might get to shore, so he was going to try it."
The captain nodded. "I see."
"Well, that's what Neal thinks, Captain. He thinks his father swam as long as he could, and then just slipped off."
"I can think of worse ways to go," the captain said.
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January 1st, Monday
This was the day we saw the smoke.
Neal saw it first and was less affected by it than the rest of us. He left the tent early, no doubt to make sure that nothing or nobody had disturbed the place where he'd hidden the beef.
When he came back he said, almost idly, "There's smoke on the mainland. It's blowing to the eastward."
We jostled each other to crawl from the tent to see this signthe first hopeful one we'd seen in three long weeks. There it wasa plume of smoke from a fire that must have been newly kindled, for the plume, a mere smudge to begin with, grew constantly longer and longer, drifting ever farther to the eastward as we watched. What it meant, we couldn't know, but Captain Dean insisted that it must be a signala signal to let us know our plight had been discovered.
As near as we could tell, the smoke was rising to the south of west, probably, the captain thought, from somewhere between York and Portsmouth.
Langman insisted it couldn't be a signal, because the
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fire was so far south of the direction in which the raft had been heading when it put out from Boon Island; but the captain said this didn't necessarily follow.
"Why would anyone bother with a signal?" Langman asked. "There's an offshore breeze, and only six or eight miles to go. Any sloop or schooner could sail that distance in less time than it took somebody to start that fire."
"I don't know," Captain Dean admitted, "but I know that raft got ashore. If it got ashore, somebody saw it. Anybody who saw it would recognize it as the work of seamen who had next to nothing to work with. That raft was laced and knotted with everything from bos'n's knots to granny knots. Where else but on Boon Island would a lot of wrecked seamen have nothing to work with?"
All day long we argued the matter. Only Neal refused to discuss it; but the arguments of the rest of us rose and fell like waves. At one moment we were elated in a firm belief that the smoke was a signal: in the next moment we decided it couldn't be a signal: that it must be an accident; a hay barn afire; a farmer clearing land.
One thing was apparent. Before we saw the smoke, my companions were images of Death itself: horrible, haggard, slow-moving