"You are always right," she said emphatically. "'Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest--'"

She hesitated, as though conscious that her tongue was running away with her. The quotation, though apt, was peculiarly infelicitous. It did not please Sturgess; it reminded Maseden of an extraordinary relationship which he had tried in vain to ignore; it jarred on Nina Forbes's sensitiveness, because it recalled the promise she had made at dawn but had not had any opportunity of fulfilling.

She it was who broke up the conclave abruptly by springing to her feet.

"If we're going sailing the angry seas to-morrow, it's high time we were trying to sleep," she said. "Come, Madge.... By the way, is there to be any more guard-mounting to-night?"

"Yes, and you have no concern therein," said Maseden firmly.

"Who's keeping guard?" inquired Madge. "This is the first I've heard of it."

"Alec has had an attack of the fidgets ever since he saw that empty coracle," said Nina. "But I'm the worst sort of sentry, anyhow, and you would be no better, dear, so let us snooze selfishly, and be ready to help the men in to-morrow's hard work."

"I've never before known a verse from the Bible break up a meeting like that," commented Sturgess thoughtfully when the girls had gone.

"Somebody might have heaved a tin of kerosene into the fire, the way Nina jumped up."

"The words may have evoked distressing memories," said Maseden incautiously.

"As how?"

Sturgess's alert brain was very wide awake at that moment, but Maseden contrived to extricate himself.

"That famous phrase of Ruth's contains the essence of an otherwise uninteresting Biblical story," he said. "If Ruth had not been so faithful to her mother-in-law we might never have heard of her."

"Was Naomi her mother-in-law?"

"Yes. Ruth, herself a widow, married Boaz."

"I guess I was sort of mixed up about it."

"Lots of people are," said Maseden dryly, and the subject dropped.

They were astir early and, when the tide served, put off with as little ceremony as though they were going on a river picnic.

The boat, of course, was far more easily managed than the raft. By keeping in the slack water inshore they contrived to reach the mouth of the gorge about the beginning of the ebb, and their calculations were completely verified by the smoothness and safety of their subsequent passage.

Maseden stood in the bows with an oar in readiness to sheer away from any obstruction in mid-stream. The two girls each took an oar, and Sturgess steered, also with an oar, as the broad-bladed rudder ran a foot deeper than the keel, being intended to act as a center-board when the sail was in use.

So preoccupied were they with their task that they hardly noticed the spot where the cliff had fallen away soon after they had passed beneath.

Even the canopied rock on which they found sanctuary after the loss of the raft merely attracted a momentary glance. Madge, eyeing the fissure which had so terrified her, was about to say something when a warning shout from Maseden caused her to pull a few vigorous strokes.

They sheered past a flat boulder. A couple of vultures, scared by the unwonted apparition of a boat, flapped aloft, and they all saw, stretched on the rock, some portions of a human skeleton which most certainly had not been there when they came that way little more than a fortnight earlier.

The uncanny sight vanished as swiftly as it came. None spoke. The pace of the stream was quickening, and each had to be in instant readiness to obey orders.

At this stage Maseden asked the girls to reverse their positions and pull steadily. In consequence they were backing water, and thus checking the boat's way appreciably. By this means they rounded an awkward corner without any trouble, and again their eyes dwelt on the towering hills and wooded slopes of Hanover Island.

Maseden and Sturgess now began to press laterally towards the eastern channel. Two possible openings were abandoned because of the ugly reefs sighted only a couple of hundred yards away. At last, when practically in the center of a two-mile-wide passage between the three islands, Maseden saw a long stretch of open water.

Shipping a pair of oars, and leaving the steering and general look-out to Sturgess, he called on the girls to pull in the orthodox way. The three bent to the task. After ten minutes of really strenuous effort they were sensible of a greatly diminished drag in the current. Five minutes later they were in slack water, and speedily thereafter the boat ran aground.

"Hooray!" yelled Sturgess, who alone had any breath left to celebrate their victory. Somehow, little as they had gained in actual distance, since Providence Beach was only three miles away, they all felt that their chief enemy was conquered. They had profited by the initial mistake of keeping in mid-channel; they had learned a great deal about the tricks and changes of the Pacific tides; they had secured a first-rate boat, and, lodged in skins as a portion of the ballast, was a treasure of no mean proportions.

Small wonder that they were elated, or that Maseden's strong face softened into a smile of satisfaction as he drove the boat's anchor securely into a crevice in the rocky beach.

But he neither forgot the skeleton on the rock in Hell Gate nor failed to interpret correctly its sinister message, so it was his careful scrutiny that first revealed a figure lying on the shore at high-water mark about a quarter of a mile to the east. He surveyed it steadily for a while until the others, too, saw it. Then he made up his mind as to the only practicable course of action. He unhooked the anchor.

"All hands overboard," he said quietly. "We must get the boat afloat."

They obeyed instantly. The girls returned on board, their task being to steady the boat with the oars. Maseden took a cudgel, which he preferred to a sword, and hurried towards the prone figure. Sturgess followed, some fifty yards behind, with the rifle, his mission being to cover the retreat, if need be.

Neither Nina nor Madge uttered a word. They were becoming hardened to danger. They knew full well that, for some unimaginable reason, a territory hitherto closed to Indians was now open to them, and Maseden had left his companions under no delusions as to the characteristics of the wretched tribes which infest the lower coast and islands of Chile.

But the particular business of the women at the moment was to keep the boat in such a position that the men could jump in and shove off into deep water without delay, and they attended to that and nothing else.

War makes soldiers, and the struggle for life had assuredly made these two girls brave women.

CHAPTER XVII

RUNNING THE GANTLET

Maseden was not greatly concerned about the dead Indian lying on the shore. What he really expected was a sudden rush of savages from an ambuscade, since it was now certain that a party of natives had descended on Hanover Island. Some might have escaped, but others had come to grief.

The mere presence of a body showed that one, at least, must have died quite recently, while the bleaching bones passed in Hell Gate had probably been alive two days earlier. Some vultures were already circling high overhead, and he wondered why the birds had not begun their ghoulish task.

He could not recollect what manner of sepulture the aborigines adopted, but, from every point of view, it was more than strange to find a corpse abandoned on the beach in such conditions, unless, indeed, some drowned man had just been cast up there by the receding tide.

If that were so, why did the vultures wait?

He was on the alert, therefore, for any suspicious movement among the nearest trees and tall grasses, and warned Sturgess to keep a sharp look-out in the same direction.

"These natives are treacherous brutes," he said. "They may have seen that our boat was heading this way, and be simply waiting an opportunity to stick harpoons into us. Don't shoot actually on sight, but be ready to put a stopper on anything like an attack."

The words had hardly left his lips when the body on the beach moved!

Slowly and, as it seemed, painfully, the Indian raised head and shoulders, and turned in the direction of the voice, finally sitting up sideways and using the right arm as a support.

Then, as Maseden drew near, he saw that this was not a man, but a woman, a woman so emaciated and feeble that the first astonished glance he took her to be middle-aged, whereas, in reality, she was not yet eighteen.

She was stark naked, and he soon discovered that her left leg was broken.

The unfortunate wretch had dragged herself to an oyster bed, as an array of freshly opened shells testified; but there was no great supply in that place; the water was too shallow. At any rate, Maseden had no other means of estimating how long she had been there; indeed, he gave little thought to that consideration, because the problem of what to do with her arose instantly.

He argued, however, that the members of her tribe could not be close at hand, since the merest instinct of self-preservation would lead them to assist one of their number rendered helpless by an accident, though, among these wild folk, an old woman might be regarded as of no account.