"I guess your college class didn't include a course of heavy seas washing through a deck-house every half minute during a whole day. What sort of feminine rig would stand the tearing rush of tons of water hour after hour? Man alive, I had the devil's own job to keep any of my own clothes on, and would never have succeeded if I wasn't well buttoned up in an oilskin. As for the girls' skirts and things, they simply fell off 'em. At first they made frantic efforts to save a few rags, but they had to give up. I saw Madge's skirt washed overboard in strips. All the seams parted. I'm in pretty bad shape myself. Look here."

Sturgess opened his oilskin coat, and showed how the lining had fallen out of his coat and the back had parted from the front of his waistcoat.

"If it hadn't been for the oilskins we would all have been stripped stark naked," he went on. "Gee! It's marvelous what one can withstand in the shape of exposure when one is pushed to it good and hard. I should have said that those two girls would have died fourteen times on the wreck, let alone the hour before dawn yesterday."

Maseden, meanwhile, was pulling the trunk free from the twisted frame of the bunk, which, screwed to the deck, had carried a precious argosy nearly a mile from the reef; then, most luckily, it had caught in a clump of seaweed, and remained anchored during two ebbs.

"We needn't bother to open it here," he said. "I know exactly what is inside--rough stuff, bought to maintain my disguise as a _vaquero_, but all the better for present purposes."

He paused dramatically, and said something which might, perhaps, sound better in Spanish. When a man who has not been perturbed in the least degree by grave and imminent danger shows signs of real excitement, his emotion is apt to be contagious, and his companion's eyes sparkled.

"Holy gee! What is it?" he almost yelped. "Spit it out! Don't mind me!"

"This trunk contains a gun and cartridges!"

"Gosh! I thought it must be either a steam launch or an aeroplane! What is there to shoot, anyhow?"

"Don't you understand? Waterproof cartridges mean fire. We'll have a roaring fire within five minutes."

"Put it there!" shouted Sturgess, holding out his right hand. "There's millions of tons of iron-stone in that hill above the wood. Let's start a ship-yard!"

They were so elated that they forgot to gather any oysters, and even neglected to take away the iron and wires of the bunk, scraps of metal which might prove of inestimable worth in the days to come. Luckily, however, they had plenty of time, because the tide would fall during another couple of hours.

Maseden's hands almost trembled as he undid the straps. Now that fortune had proved so kind he feared lest the cartridges might be spoiled. But a bullet torn from a brass case was followed by grains of dry, black powder.

Soon he had manufactured a squib. Dead branches off the pines--always the best of fire-wood, and far preferable to dead wood lying on the ground--were heaped in a suitable place, and, in less than the specified five minutes, a good fire was crackling merrily.

There were logs in plenty. Had they chosen, the two men could have built a furnace fierce enough to roast an ox whole.

It was good to see the wonderment on the faces of Madge and Nina when they awoke to find an array of coarse flax and woolen garments steaming in front of the blaze, and a dozen big oysters, cooked in the shells, awaiting each of them. About that time, too, the sun appeared, and his first rays changed the temperature of the land-locked estuary from biting cold to an agreeable warmth.

So the four breakfasted, and, at the close of the meal, held a council of war. With a charred stick, Maseden drew on a rock a rough map of Hanover Island.

"I overheard from one of the crew of the _Southern Cross_," he said, "that the ship was supposed to be drifting towards Nelson Straits, which is the only opening into Smyth's Channel ever attempted hereabouts, even in fine weather, by small sealers and guano-boats. Now, it happens," he went on reflectively, "that this coast has always had a strange fascination for me."

"It was a treat to see you clinging to it lovingly for hours at a time yesterday," put in Sturgess.

"We want to hear what Mr. Maseden has to say," cried Madge sharply.

"Sorry. I shan't interrupt again. But, before the court resumes may I throw in a small suggestion? How about dropping these formal Misters and Misses? My front names are Charles Knight, usually shorted by my friends and admirers into C. K. What's yours, Maseden?"

"Philip Alexander, otherwise 'Alec.'"

"Got you. Now, girls, what do Nina and Madge stand for?"

He little guessed the explosive quality of that harmless question, but he did wonder why both Nina and Madge should blush furiously, and why their eyes should flash a species of appeal to Maseden.

Nina was the first to recover her composure.

"Nina and Madge should serve all ordinary purposes, C. K.," she said with a rather nervous laugh.

"They'll do fine," agreed Sturgess. But he did not forget his own surprise--and the cause of it.

Maseden, quite unprepared for this verbal bombshell, plunged into generalities somewhat hurriedly.

"Barring the polar regions, the southern part of Chile is the wildest and least known part of the world," he said. "It is extraordinary in the fact that every ship which sails to the west coast of both the Americas from Europe, and vice versa, either passes it in the Pacific or winds among its islands for hundreds of miles along Smyth's Channel; yet it remains, for the greater part, unexplored and almost uncharted. Darwin came here in the _Beagle_, and the sailor to-day depends on observations made during that voyage, taken nearly three-quarters of a century ago.

Darwin's Journal, and other of his works containing references to South America, shortened many an evening for me on the ranch."

He paused a moment, before adding, in an explanatory way:

"My place, Los Andes, was a good twelve miles from Cartagena, and I had no English-speaking neighbors. I told you last night, if you remember, how I came to settle down there?"

Sturgess, though evidently burning to ask a question, merely nodded, grinning cheerfully when he caught Nina's eye.

"I only want you to understand why I claim some knowledge, such as it is, of this locality," continued Maseden. "At the southwest corner of Hanover Island is a ten-mile patch called Cambridge Island, and the two form the northern boundary of Nelson Straits. But in the channel between them are two smaller islands, and, unless I am greatly mistaken, there they are."

He pointed across the estuary, and indicated a break in the coast-line, beyond which other more distant hills were visible.

"It follows," he went on, "that when we sail up this channel to the left, we shall find ourselves in Nelson Straits, and, after covering fifty or sixty miles of fairly open water--open, that is, in the sense that there is plenty of it--we shall be in Smyth's Channel, and in the track of passing ships."

He paused, but did not try to ignore the plain demand legible on three intent faces.

"Yes; that is the only way," he said quietly. "We are here. We are alive. There is plenty of wood, and we have brains, hands, and fire. We must construct some sort of a raft, something in the style of the lumber-rafts built on big rivers, and take advantage of the tides. Our present position is quite inaccessible by land, and, I fear, equally unapproachable by water.

"And I'll tell you why I think so. Within quarter of a mile of us are some splendid oyster-beds. The coastal aborigines live mainly on shell-fish, and this store would have been visited by them times out of number if they could get at it. But I have seen no heaps of shells, such as must have remained if the savages came here.

"What has stopped them? Impassable forests, glaciers, and precipices on land, dangerous reefs and fierce tidal currents by sea. The geological feature which helped our climb yesterday must create reef after reef across the track of the channel.

"You see those pathways there?" and he stretched a hand towards the series of rock outcrops lining the shore like groins. "They have been almost leveled by the storms of centuries. But the _Southern Cross_ was lost on one of them, and there must be scores of others between here and Smyth's Channel. There may be passages between many if not all, but it is self-evident that navigation is far too risky for the small coracles of the natives. We must go slowly and safely, if possible. If our raft will not cross a reef, we must abandon it, and build another on the far side. We may have to do that six times, a dozen times, even in sixty miles. There is no other means of escape. We may be weeks, months, in winning through, but that is our only practicable plan."

"Gee!" murmured Sturgess. "And I'm due in New York on February 10!"

The sheer absurdity of naming a date relaxed the tension. They all laughed, though not with the light-hearted mirth which four young people might reasonably display after dodging death continuously during twenty-four hours.

"By the way, what day is it?" inquired Nina Forbes wistfully.

"Sunday, January 23," said Sturgess. "I know, because it was my birthday yesterday. Somewhere about eleven o'clock a. m., I was twenty-seven. I didn't make a fuss about it. Just at that time, wise Alec here was holding on to a rock by his teeth and one toe, and telling us we had to go back carefully after a beastly difficult climb."

"Sunday!" repeated the girl.

Her thoughts traveled many a thousand miles to the quiet little New Jersey township where her mother was living during the absence of husband and daughters in South America. It was winter in the North, and there might be snow on the fields and ice on the streams, but snow and ice conforming to New Jersey notions of order and seemliness.

What a contrast between the white mantle marked out in rectangles by the country roads and ditches, with here and there a group of trees, a trim shrubbery, a red-roofed farm or dwelling house, and this chaos of rock, forest, cliff and ocean!

"Will the loss of the _Southern Cross_ be reported?" she asked suddenly.

The query was addressed to no one in particular, but Maseden answered.

"Her non-arrival will be noted at Punta Arenas," he said. "After a time the insurance people will post her as 'missing.' Then she will be assumed to be lost. Possibly some of the wreckage may be picked up. Or a boat. What became of all the boats?"