Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [126]
After they'd seen the smoke, they stood straighter: their voices were stronger: their eyes less wild and staring.
What was worse, they were hungrier than ever, and quick to demand more meat from the captain.
"If you're so sure that smoke's a signal," Langman said, "you must be equally sure that they'll send a ship for us. Why shouldn't we divide half of the meat that's left?"
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The captain shook his head. "When they say they want more," he said, "they want three times what they've been getting. That's too much for half-starved men to have.
"There's another thing: we've none of us ever had meat like this. There's no telling what it may do to us. You must know what happens to half-starved men when they eat too much. They get sick. Sometimes they die."
He lifted the seaweed covering from the store of meat, drew out a generous chunk and sliced it quickly into ten parts, each part almost twice the size of those we'd hitherto received. With each slice went a handful of seaweed from the pile that had covered our little stock.
They crawled off in two groups: Langman, Mellen and White in one group: Graystock, Saver and Gray in another. All of them scraped diligently at their meat, and chewed at their seaweed; and from time to time they turned their heads to gaze covertly at the captain, Neal, Henry Dean and me.
There was no doubt about it: each group was plotting something.
Captain Dean shuffled his feet on the icy rock. "I don't like it," he said. "We'll have to put a guard over this meat. I said I was sure the smoke was a signal, but I'm not sure at all. I'm not sure of anything but this: if they steal this meat and eat it all, they won't hesitate to kill someone in order to have more."
The rest of that day was a nightmare. The wind cut cruelly, but all day long we were in and out of the tent, not only to scan the far-off coast line in the hope of seeing a sail outlined against it, but to keep watch on the spot where our beef was stored.
By midafternoon, while the smoke continued to drift
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from west to east, the tide was half out and it was apparent to all of us that no vessel would venture out in the short time remaining.
That night the captain lay across the tent-flap. Neal lay between the two of us, and in the early dark I could feel Neal shaking, feel him swallow, as people do when their minds are not at rest. His shaking may have come from the cold, but I somehow knew he was thinking about his father. Remembering how Neal had shrunk from me when, on that long-gone summer day in Greenwich, I had inadvertently touched him, I did nothing; but the captain said, "Neal, roll over on top of me and keep me warm. And Miles: come closer, Miles."
We huddled together.
I could feel rather than hear the soft patting of the captain's hand against Neal's shoulder. Neal's shudderings and swallowings lessened. I suppose we slept.
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January 2nd, Tuesday
When, because of bad weather, there was little or nothing to do on Boon Island except pick at that loathsome oakum, or stumble around the island on our eternal patrols, the days sometimes seemed endless because of their monotony and the biting cold.
Probably the very monotony was so deadening that the time passed more rapidly than we thought.
There was no monotony, God knows, to that second day of January; and the endlessness of that one day, by comparison with other memorable days of my life, went on and on until, at nightfall, I felt as though I had lived years.
The captain, as usual, was first out of the tent, and the tent-flap had no sooner fallen behind him than sounds came from him, a sort of hiccuping and gasping, broken by quavering hootings, such as come from a loon.
Thinking he might have caught epilepsy from his brother, I crawled out to help him. He was on all fours, pawing feebly at the rocks, as if trying to return