Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [80]
His hands had been concealed beneath his long vest. He held them out to us so that we could see them, front and back. Every finger had been cut almost to the bone by barnacles. Four of his fingernails were torn off. The finger ends were raw but, perhaps because of the cold, were not bloody.
"That's what a fall can do to you," the captain warned. "You can't afford to break an arm or a leg. Now spread out and hunt for those scraps of cheese."
He spoke heavily to Langman. "If you can't make Cooky and Saver and Graystock pick oakum, you and Mellen and White do it yourselves. There's just a chance that we can get fire out of it somehowif it'll ever dry." For the benefit of the rest of us he said, "I've got a pistol and some wet powder. They're no good till the powder's dry."
We crawled over that slippery brown seaweed like animals nosing around a midden. We found fragments of cheese forced into and under the brown wet weed. Every piece of weed had to be lifted up to expose the rock hol-
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lows beneath. The coldness that went with handling that weed was unbearable. After two minutes of it, the pain in my hands forced me to hug myself until the sharp agony subsided. Tears ran down my cheeks, but there was nothing I could do about it.
Acting on the captain's orders, Neal went from one to another, with his square of canvas, collecting the fragments of cheese we pressed together in apple-sized pellets as boys make snowballs. After a search that seemed endless, we had picked up about as much as would have made three whole cheeses.
Neal, making a final round, passed us the captain's orders. "He says to go back to the hole and rest," he told us. "We'll hunt again at dead low tide."
On hands and knees we dragged ourselves back to the hollow in the rock. Perhaps something about the salt water in the wet seaweed had added to the pain in our feet, but so intense was that pain that our faces were contorted to the semblance of gargoylessomething not human.
At the hollow, we found that Langman, Mellen and Chips had fixed two short planks over the ledges on either side, folded the ragged piece of sail across them, and weighted both sail and planks with boulders.
There was room to lie flat beneath it, packed close together. Flimsy as it was, it partly screened us from the pelting snow and rain. It wasn't much of a shelter, but it was a shelter; and we crawled beneath it to lie inert. My brain, as numb as my hands, moved slowly.
Captain Dean's voice was calm and full. "We've got to find some way to reach the canvas that's afloat. We must have that cordage for making oakum." To Langman he said, "What did you do about oakum?"
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"Nothing," Langman admitted. "By the time we rigged the shelter, we were so close to frozen we crawled under it."
"Now look," Captain Dean urged, "we've got to have oakum. We can lie on it. We can braid it into something to pull over our heads and faces. Maybe we can dry it so a flint and steel will work on it."
"Where's that cheese?" Langman asked.
"All right," the captain said. "We picked up twenty-six balls of it. I'll cut 'em, in even parts. We'll eat half today and half tomorrow."
"Why should you cut 'em?" Langman asked. "Why should you say how much we can have? Since you ran us on this rock, I don't trust you to do anything right. Anyway, you promised we could take a vote today on who'd be captain. You shouldn't be captain, now there's no ship."
Captain Dean was long silent. When he did speak, his voice was placid. "How long do you think it'll take you to decide?"
"Not long," Langman said, "especially if you go outside. It won't be a fair vote if you don't."
Captain Dean seemed unruffled. "I suppose you'd like my brother Henry to go outside, too."
"Yes," Langman said, "if it's going to be really fair, your brother should go. So should Whitworth. They're all on your side." There seemed to be no end to his effrontery.