CHAPTER XIV
A FRESH START
Indomitably the human spirit, temporarily beaten down andcrushed by misfortunes beyond all calculation, once more rose inrenewed strength to the tremendous task ahead. And, first of all,Stern and the girl made a camping place in the edge of the forest,close by the spring under the big rock.
"We've got to have a base of supplies, or something of that sort," theman declared. "We can't start trekking away into the wilderness atonce, without consideration and at least some definite place where wecan store a few necessaries and to which we can retreat, in case ofneed. A camp, and--if possible--a fire, these are our firstrequisites."
Their camp they built (regardless of the protests of birds andsquirrels and many little woodland folk) roughly, yet strongly enoughto offer protection from the rain, under a thick-leaved oak, which initself gave shelter. This oak, through whose branches darted many agay-plumaged bird of species unknown to Stern, grew up along theoverhanging face of Spring Rock, as they christened it.
By filling in the space between the rock and the bole of the oak withmoss and stones, and then by building a heavy lean-to roof of leafybranches, thatched with lashed bundles of marsh-grass, theyconstructed in two days a fairly comfortable shack, hard by anabundant, never-failing supply of the finest water ever a human setlip to.
Here Stern piled fragrant grasses in great quantity for the girl'sbed. He himself volunteered to sleep at the doorway, on guard with hisonly weapon--a jagged boulder lashed with leather thongs to afour-foot heft, even in the; very fashion of the neolithic ancestorsof man.
Their food supply reverted to such berries and fruits as they couldgather in the fringes of the forest, for as yet they dared notpenetrate far from the shore. To these they added a plentiful supplyof clams, which they dug with sharp sticks, at low tide, far outacross the sand-flats--toiling for all the world like two of theidentical savages who in the long ago, a thousand or five thousandyears before the white man came to America, had left shell-heapmiddens along the north Atlantic coast.
This shell-fish gathering brought the action of the tides to theircareful attention. The tide, they found, behaved ire an erraticmanner. Instead of two regular flows a day there was but one. And atthe ebb more than two miles of beach and sea-bottom lay exposed belowthe spot where they had landed at the flood. Stern analyzed theprobable cause of this phenomenon.
"There must be two regular tides," he said, "only they're lost in thefar larger flux and reflux caused by the vortex we escaped from. Anymarine geyser like that, able to, suck down water enough from the seato lay bare two miles of beach every day and capable of throwing acolumn of mist and spray like that across the sky, is worth investinggating. Some day you and I are going to know more about it--a lotmore!"
And that was truth; but little the engineer suspected how soon, orunder what surpassingly strange circus stances, the girl and he weredestined to behold once more the workings of that terrible and mightyforce.
On the third day Stern set himself to work on the problem of makingfire. He had not even flint-and-steel now; nor any firearm. Had hepossessed a pistol he could have collected a little birch-bark, soughtout a rotten pine-stump, and discharged his weapon into the "punk,"then blown the glow to a flame, and almost certainly have got a blaze.But he lacked everything, and so was forced back to primitive man'sone simplest resource--friction.
As an assistant instructor in anthropology at Harvard University, hehad now and then produced fire for his class of expectant students byusing the Peruvian fire-drill; but even this simple expedient requireda head-strap and a jade bearing, a well-formed spindle and a bow.Stern had none of these things, neither could he fashion them withouttools. He had, therefore, to resort to the still more primitive methodof "fire-sawing," such as long, long ago the Australian bushmen hadbeen wont to practice.
He was a strong man, determined and persistent; but two days more hadpassed, and many blisters covered his palms ere--after innumerableexperiments with different kinds of woods and varying strokes--thefirst tiny glow fell into the carefully scraped sawdust. And it waswith a fast-beating heart and tremulous breath that he blew his sparkto a larger one, then laid on his shredded strips of bark and blewagain, and so at last, with a great up-welling triumph in his soul,beheld the flicker of a flame once more.
Exhausted, he carefully fed that precious fire, while the girl clappedher hands with joy. In a few moments more the evening air in the dimforest aisles was gladdened by the ruddy blaze of a camp-fire at thedoor of the lean-to, and for the first time smoke went wafting upamong the branches of that primeval wood.
"Now for some real meat!" cried Stern with exultation. "To-morrow I gohunting!"
That evening they sat for hours feeding their fire with deadfalls,listening to the trickle of the little spring and to the night soundsof the forest, watching the bats flicker among the dusky spaces, andgazing at the slow and solemn march of the stars beyond the leafyfretwork overhead. Stern slept but little that night, in his anxietyto keep the fire fed; and morning found him eager to be at his workwith throwing-sticks among the vistas of the wilderness.
Together they hunted that day. She carried what his skilful aimbrought down from the tangled greenery above. Birds, squirrels,chipmunks, all were welcome. Noon found them in possession of morethan thirty pieces of small game, including two hedgehogs. And for thefirst time in almost a week they tasted flesh again, roasted on asharp stick over the glowing coals.
Stern hunted all that day and the next. He dressed the game with anextraordinarily large and sharp clamshell, which he whetted from timeto time on a rock beside the spring. And soon the fire was overhungwith much meat, being smoked with a pine-cone smudge in preparationfor the journey into the unknown.
"Inside of a week, at this rate," he judged, "we'll be able to startagain. You must set to work platting a couple of sacks. The grassalong the brook is tough and long. We can carry fifty or seventy-fivepounds of meat, for emergencies. Fruits we can gather on the way."
"And fire? Can we carry that?"
"We can take a supply of properly dried-out woods with punk. I'vealready had practice enough, so I ought to be able to get fire at anytime inside of half an hour."
"Weapons?"
"I'll make you a battle-ax like my own, only lighter. That's the bestwe can do for the present, till we strike some ruin or other where acity used to be."
"And you're still bent on reaching Boston?"
"Yes. I reckon we're more than half-way there by now. It's the nearestbig ruin, the nearest place where we can refit and recoup the damagedone, get supplies and arms and tools, build another boat, and ingeneral take a fresh start. If we can make ten miles a day, we canreach it in; ten days or less. I think, all things considered, theBoston plan's the wisest possible one."
She gazed into the fire a moment before replying. Then, stirring thecoals with a stick, said she:
"All right, boy; but I've got a suggestion to make."
"What is it?"
"We'll do better to follow the shore all the way round."
"And double the distance?"
"Yes, even so. You know, this shore is--or used to be--flat and sandymost of the way. We can make better progress along beaches and levelsthan we can through the forest. And there's the matter of shell-fishto consider; and most important of all--"
"Well, what?"
"The sea will guide us. We can't get lost, you understand. With theexception of cutting across the shank of Cape Cod, if the cape stillexists, we needn't ever get out of sight of salt water. And it willbring us surely to the Hub."
"By Jove, you're right!" he cried enthusiastically. "The shore-linehas it! And to-morrow morning at sunup we begin preparations inearnest. You'll weave the knapsacks while I go after still more meat.Gad! Now that everything's decided, the quicker we're on our way thebetter. I'm keen to see old Tremont Hill again, and get my hands on agood stock of arms and ammunition once more!"
That night, long after Beatrice was
sleeping soundly on her bed ofodorous grasses, Allan lay musing by the lean-to door, in the red glowof the fire. He was thinking of the long and painful history of man,of the great catastrophe and of the terrible responsibility that nowlay on his own shoulders.
As in a panorama, he saw the emergence of humanity from the animalstage, the primitive savagery of his kind; then the beginnings of thefamily, the nomadic epoch, the stone age, and the bronze age, and theage of iron; the struggle up to agriculturalism, and communism, andthe beginnings of the village groups, with all their petty tribalwars.
He saw the slow formation of small states, the era of slavery, thenfeudalism and serfdom, and at last the birth of modern nations, thedevelopment of machinery, and the vast nexus of exploitation known ascapitalism--the stage which at one blow had been utterly destroyedjust as it had been transmuting into collectivism.
And at thought of this Stern felt a pang of infinite regret.
"The whole evolutionary process wiped out," mused he, "just as it wasabout to pass into its perfect form, toward which the history of allthe ages had conspired, for which oceans of blood had been spilled andmillions of men and women--billions!--lived and toiled and died!
"All gone, all vanished--it's all been in vain, the woe and travail ofthe world since time began, unless she and I, just we two, preservethe memory and the knowledge of the world's long, bitter fight, andhand them down to strong descendants.
"Our problem is to bridge this gap, to keep the fires of science andof truth alive, and, if that be possible, to start the world again ona higher plane, where all the harsh and terrible phases will no longerhave to be lived through again. Our problem and our task! Were evertwo beings weighed by such a one?"
And as he pondered, in the firelight, his thoughts and dreams andhopes all centered in the sleeping girl, there in the lean-tosheltered by his watchful care. But what those dreams were, what hisvisions of the future--who shall set forth or fully understand?