Grant Allen - Wednesday the Tenth, A Tale of the South Pacific стр 4.

Tom Blake and I turned to the elder lad. His was a harder and more desperate case. Perhaps he had tried more eagerly to save his helpless brother; perhaps the sense of responsibility for another's life had weighed heavier upon him at his age for he looked fourteen; but at any rate he was well-nigh dead with exposure and exhaustion. The first few drops we poured down his throat he was clearly quite unable to swallow. They gurgled back insensibly. Tom Blake took out his handkerchief, and tearing off a strip, soaked it in brandy and water in the cup end of the flask; then he gently moistened the inside of the poor lad's mouth and throat with it, till at last a faint swallowing motion was set up in the gullet. At that, we poured down some five drops cautiously. To our delight and relief they were slowly gulped down, and the poor white mouth stood agape like a young bird's in mute appeal for more water more water.

We gave him as much as we dared in his existing state, and then turned to the boat for some clue to the mystery.

She was an English-built row-boat, smart and taut, fit for facing rough seas, and carrying a short, stout mast amidships. On her stern we found her name in somewhat rudely-painted letters, Messenger of Peace: Makilolo in Tanaki. Clearly she had been designed for mission service among the islands, and the last words which followed her title must be meant to designate her port, or the mission station. But what that place was I hadn't a notion.

"Where's Tanaki, Tom Blake?" I asked, turning round, for Tom had been navigating the South Seas any time this twenty years, and knew almost every nook and corner of the wide Pacific, from Yokohama to Valparaiso.

Tom shifted his quid from one cheek to the other and answered, after a pause, "Dunno, sir, I'm sure. Never heerd tell of Tanaki in all my born days; an' yet I sorter fancied, too, I knowed the islands."

"There are no signs of blood or fighting in the boat," I said, examining it close. "They can't have escaped from a massacre, anyhow." For I remembered at once to what perils the missionaries are often exposed in these remote islands how good Bishop Patteson had been murdered at Santa Cruz, and how the natives had broken the heads of Mason and Wood at Erromanga not so many months back, in cold blood, out of pure lust of slaughter.

"But they must have run away in an awful hurry," Tom Blake added, overhauling the locker of the boat, "for, see, she ain't found; there ain't no signs of food or anything to hold it nowheres, sir; and this ere little can must 'a' been the o'ny thing they had with 'em for water."

He was quite right. The boat had clearly put to sea unprovisioned. It deepened our horror at the poor lads' plight to think of this further aggravation of their incredible sufferings. For days they must have tossed in hunger and thirst on the great deep. But we could only wait to have the mystery cleared up when the lads were well enough to explain to us what had happened. Meanwhile we could but look and wonder in silence; and indeed we had quite enough to do for the present in endeavoring to restore them to a state of consciousness.

"Any marks on their clothes?" my brother Jim suggested, with practical good sense, looking up from his charge as we rowed back toward the Albatross, with the Messenger of Peace in tow behind us. "That might help us to guess who they are, and where they hail from."

I looked close at the belt of the lads' blue shirts. On the elder's I read in a woman's handwriting, "Martin Luther Macglashin, 6, '87." The younger boy's bore in the same hand the corresponding inscription, "John Knox Macglashin, 6, '86." It somehow deepened the tragedy of the situation to come upon those simple domestic reminiscences at such a moment.