Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [97]
The glimpse we'd had of those people on shore must have made each one of us, even the captain, worse than desperate; for he took out a piece of black oakum from next to his skin. He let us feel the oakum. "Is it dry?" he asked us. "Feel it!" He passed it around. Swede and Neal and I said that to us it still felt damp; but all the others, Langman included, pretended to find it dry. Langman was always wrong, and the captain knew it, but this time he wanted to take Langman's opinion.
So he took a pinch of gunpowder from the canvas pouch, produced his useless pistol and cocked it; then did what he'd already done a thousand timesput powder in the pan, wrapped the lock and the pan with the oakum, snapped the flint ... snapped it: snapped it: snapped it, over and over.
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We could see the spark inside the oakum: smell a delicious, tantalizing odor of tarry scorching. There was even a faint hint of smoke. He kept on pulling the hammer back and snapping it; pulling it back and snapping it.
Then he passed it to Langman, who did the same. Then Langman passed it to me, and I tried and tried.
All we got was a faint wisp of tarry-smelling smoke.
Another thing I learned to dislike on Boon Island were the wiseacres who are forever saying, "Where there's smoke there's fire." At Oxford I often heard Latin-speaking donsthe worst kindthrow that remark at each other. Flamma fumo est proxima. Where there's smoke there's fire.
It's not so; but there's no more use arguing with people who quote that saying than there would be in wrangling with the old Roman who is credited with first uttering it. The old Roman is dead: the others nearly so. "Where there's smoke, there's fire," indeed! I'd have liked to hear them talk like that on Boon Island!
Since this was Sunday, we held services in the tent. Captain Dean led us in a prayer that thanked God for His mercy in letting us stay alive; that thanked Him for granting us ice to chew and mussels to eat; that implored God to let us be seen from the mainland; that begged Him to send a ship near this dreadful rock.
All of us repeated his words in a hoarse and shivering chorusall except Langman and White and Mellen, who, having decided the day wasn't Sunday, refused to pray with us.
I think, though, Langman was somehow helped by those Sunday services, in spite of being so certain that our Sun-
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day was the wrong one; because when Neal and I made our last patrol of the day at dead low tide, around three o'clock in the afternoon, Langman came with us, and so did George White. They helped us in our daily search for mussels, so that we were able to bring back eight for each man.
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December 18th, Monday
I know how a condemned man must feel when he is about to die for no sin of his own: then is half promised a reprieve that never arrives.
Seven oars for seven men we'd planned for the boat, and a longer steering oar. In order to make them we had to saw planks to the proper length: then split the planks with the sharpened rocks Chips Bullock had discovered.
That was a labor undertaken by Neal and Swede and me while the captain and Langman planned the fastening of the boat's sides.
The cutlass-saw was the instrument we used to saw those planks; and for incarnate devilishness that saw was perfectly designed to plague persons already plagued to the limit of endurance.
The handle was too small to allow the use of both hands; and the starting of a cut with those jagged teeth was a trial. All the wood was wet, and there seemed to be no way of holding the planks firm. We succeeded at last, after a fashion, by wedging one end of the plank beneath a boulder and forcing the opposite end upward.
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Then the wielder of the saw, stretching himself under the plank, would haggle at it, always drawing the saw toward himself, until enough wood had been gnawed away to allow the plank to be broken.
We called the different days of the week by the names of occurrences, and I thought for a time that