Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [82]
"There's another thing to be considered. We have no way of knowing where this island is, but it can't be far from Portsmouth, and Captain Dean has friends in Portsmouth. If anybody's ever going to need friends, we are, when we get ashore. I can't imagine anything more unwise than cutting away from Captain Dean at a time like this.
"And bear this in mind, too. He was willing to leave this shelter so we could vote, but Mr. Langman wasn't. Doesn't that prove something to you? It does to me! It proves the captain plays fair, but Mr. Langman doesn't. I'm going to ask both Hallion and Gray to vote for Captain Dean."
Captain Dean's boots clattered on the rocks outside, and he came crawling back among us with an armful of dripping rockweed clutched to his chest. "The wind's dropping," he said. "Inside half an hour the tide will be as low as it'll go with this wind."
"You got no right coming in here like this," Langman shouted. "We haven't finished voting."
"I vote for Captain Dean," Gray said.
"Me too," Hallion said.
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I told the captain that there had been seven for him and six against.
"I'm surprised," Captain Dean said. "I only expected three against me."
"Mr. Langman voted Cooky Sipper, Graystock and Saver against you," I said.
The captain stared contemplatively at Langman: then got his knife from his pocket and started cutting the rockweed into foot-long sections. The weed was brown and slippery, with little oval bulbs at intervals.
"Here," he said to Neal, "pass these around and I'll cut the cheese. Take a bite of the cheese and right away bite off a piece of rockweed and chew them up together."
"You got no right to tell these people what to eat," Langman said. "You never know what's poison and what isn't."
"You don't have to eat it if you don't want to," Captain Dean said. "It's just a way of making the cheese go further."
He pressed the balls of cheese together to form a single cake, halved it and rewrapped one half in the piece of canvas. The other half he carefully divided into fourteen cubes while all of us rose on our elbows to watch him. He passed a cube to each of us who could stretch out his hand. Cooky Sipper, Graystock and Saver didn't move.
"I'll keep their portions till they ask for 'em," Captain Dean said. Then he turned his head to look at Langman. "On second thought," he said, "I'll let Neal hold it for them."
The seaweed, slippery to the tongue, had something of the sea's freshness about it, and when chewed with cheese it wasn't bad. I could have eaten all the cheese that the
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captain had wrapped in his square of canvas. By itself, though, the weed wasn't good, and when my little square of cheese was gone, I ate no more weed.
On our second journey to the northern shore of the island, the captain, by the grace of God, found a coil of cordage wound around a boulder that could just be reached when a receding breaker went hissing and rattling back over the black seaweed. Twice the captain lowered himself toward that precious rope, only to come scrambling back among us as another breaker churned toward us.
We tried forming a living chain extending from the un-seaweeded rocks down across the seaweed, but that was no good. While the captain tried to untangle the rope from the boulder, a wave surged in; and before we could pull him up over that damnable seaweed, he was soaked to his armpits.
He shivered, slapped himself and stamped his feet. "Think of something," the captain urged. "We've got to have that cordage and canvas! We've got to reach it somehow. The next high tide may rip it loose; it may go out on tomorrow's low tide, when it'll be too dark to see. If we wait twenty-four hours these breakers are sure to wash it away!"
Chips stepped forward to the captain's side. "If we could get a running bowline on the cordage beyond the rock," he said, "it might hold until we caught it."
"Running bowline!" the