'Dad-burn it!' ejaculated the old man, 'I durn near got my feet wet that time, as the feller said.'
'Are you all right?' David asked.
'Never felt so fit in my life,' replied Ah-gilak. 'Say, you come after me, didn't you? Why, you dod-burned fool, you might have been washed overboard.' That was all he ever said about it.
That last wave marked the height of the storm. The wind continued to blow a gale, but the hurricane was past. The sea still ran high, but was diminishing. After what the Amoz had withstood, she seemed safe enough now. With no headway, she wallowed in the trough of the sea; often standing on her beam ends, but always righting herself.
'It'd take a dod-burned act of Congress to upset this tub,' said Ah-gilak. 'You can't sail her, an' you can't steer her; but, by gum, you can't wreck her; an' if I'd a had her instead o' the Dolly Dorcas I wouldn't be down here now in this dod-burned hole-in-the-ground, but back in Cape Cod, probably votin' for John Tyler again, or some other good Democrat.'
David went below, at the risk of life and limb, to see how the men there had fared. With the coming of the storm, they had closed all ports, and fastened the guns down more securely. Fortunately, none of them had broken loose; and there were only a few minor casualties among the men, from being thrown about during the wild pitching of the ship.
The Mezop sailors above had not fared so well; all but twenty-five of them had been washed overboard. And the boats were gone, the mast was gone, and most of the sail. The Amoz was pretty much of a derelict. Neither of the other ships was in sight; and David had given them both up for lost, especially the little Sari.
Their situation looked rather hopeless to these men of the Stone Age. 'If the boats hadn't been lost,' said Ghak, 'some of us could get ashore.'
'Why can't we break up the deck and build a raft—several of them?' suggested Hodon. 'We could paddle rafts to shore, but we couldn't ever paddle the Amoz.'
'You dod-burned landlubbers give me a pain,' snorted Ah-gilak. 'We got the stub of a mast, part of the sail, and plenty cordage; we can jury rig the dod-burned tub, an' get to shore twice as fast an' ten times as easy as buildin' rafts an' paddlin'. Give me some hands, an' I'll have her shipshape in two shakes of a dead lamb's tail, as the feller said. How fer is to port?'
David shrugged. 'That depends on how far the hurricane carried us and in what direction. We may be fifty miles from port, or we may be five hundred. Your guess would be better than mine.'
'How's the fresh water?' demanded Ah-gilak.
'We've enough for many sleeps,' said Ja.
'Dod-burn it!' cried the old man; 'how in tarnation's a fellow goin' to do any figurin' with a bunch of landlubbers that ain't never knowed what time it was they was born.'
'On the contrary,' said David, 'they always know what time it is.'
'How come?' demanded Ah-gilak.
'It is always noon.'
Ah-gilak snorted. He was in no mood for persiflage. 'Well,' he said, 'we'll do the dod-burndest best we can. We may run short of water, but we got plenty food,' he cast his eyes on the warriors coming up from the lower deck.
VIII
O-AA WAS AWAKENED by the pitching of the canoe, and opened her eyes to see a wall of water towering above her. She lay in a watery canyon, with another wall of water hemming her in on the other side. This was a harrowing situation that was quite beyond her experience; nothing could save her; one of the walls would topple over on her. But nothing of the kind happened, Instead, the wall came down; and the canoe was lifted to the summit of one just like it. Here, O-aa could see a tumbling mass of wind-torn water as far as the eye could reach. The sky was black with angry, rolling clouds that were split by vivid flashes of lightning to the accompaniment of peals of earth shaking thunder. The wind howled and shrieked in a fury of malign hate. Then the canoe sank into another canyon.
This went on and on; there seemed to be no end to it. The cockpit was half full of water; but La-ak had built well-the canoe could neither capsize nor sink and it was so light that it rode the crest of even the most mountainous waves; nothing short of a bolt of lightning could destroy it. This, however, O-aa did not know; she thought that each wave would be the last, as far as she was concerned; but as wave after wave lifted her upon its crest and then dropped her into a new abyss that was exactly like the last one, she took courage; until presently she was enjoying the experience. O-aa had never been on a roller coaster; but she was getting the same sort of thrill out of this experience; and it lasted much longer, and she didn't have to buy any tickets.
THE SARI, BEING a lighter ship than either of the other two, was blown along before the hurricane much faster; also, as it carried a much smaller sail, its mast did not go by the board as quickly as had that of the Amoz. The third ship had lost its mast even before that of the Amoz had gone; so when the wind abated a little, the Sari, while also by this time a demasted derelict, was far ahead of her sister ships.
Having but a single, open deck, she had lost most of her complement; but she was still staunch of frame and timber—for Perry and David had built her well, much better than the first ship Perry had designed, and for which she was named, which had turned bottomside up at its launching.
The continuing gale, which persisted after the worst of the hurricane had past, was blowing the Sari merrily along to what fate or what destination no man knew. The survivors were only glad that they were alive; like most men of the Stone Age, they had no questions to ask of the future, the present being their only immediate concern; though, belying that very assertion, they did catch what rain water they could to augment the supply already aboard.
The deck of the Sari was still a more or less precarious resting place, when one of the Mezops sighted something floating dead ahead. He called his companions' attention to it, and several of them worked their way around the rail to have a look at what he had discovered.
Now, anything floating on this lonely sea was worthy of remark; it was not like the waters off the coast of California, where half the deck loads of Oregon lumbermen bob around to menace navigation and give the Coast Guard the jitters.
'It's a canoe,' said Ko, the big Mezop who had discovered it.
'Is there anyone in it?' asked Raj, the captain of the Sari and a chief among the Mezops.
'Wait until it comes up again,' said Ko.
'It must be a wonderful canoe, to have lived through such a storm,' said Raj.
'It had a most peculiar look,' said Ko. 'Here it comes again! I think I see someone in it.'
'It is a strange canoe,' said Raj. 'There are things sticking out from its sides.'
'I once saw one like it,' said another Mezop; 'perhaps many thousand sleeps ago. It was blown to our island with a man who said that he came from an island called Canda, far out on the Lural Az. The canoe had bamboo floats on either side of it. It could not capsize. It had watertight compartments; so it could not sink. We killed the man. I think this canoe is from Canda.'
Presently the Sari, which presented a larger surface to the wind than the canoe, overhauled it. O-aa was watching it. Having heard about the great ships of the Sarians from Hodon and David, she guessed that this must be one of them; and she was not afraid. Here was rescue, if she could get aboard. She waved to the men looking over the rail at her.
'It is a girl,' said Raj. 'Get a rope; we will try to get her aboard.'
'She is from Canda,' said the sailor who had seen the man from Canda, 'she wears the same feather loin cloth that the man from Canda wore. We had better let her drown.'
'No,' said Raj; 'she is a girl.' Just what were the implications of this statement, you may guess as well as I. Raj was a man of the Stone Age; so, in many respects he was probably far more decent than men of the civilized outer world; but he was still a man.
One of the outriggers of the canoe bumped against the side of the Sari just as Ko threw a rope to O-aa. The girl seized it as the ship heeled over to starboard and rose on another wave while the canoe dropped into the
