The Wings of the Morning by Louis Tracy

Author:Louis Tracy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2013-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER X

REALITY V. ROMANCE—THE CASE FOR THE PLAINTIFF

NIGHT after night the Pleiades swung higher in the firmament; day after day the sailor perfected his defences and anxiously scanned the ocean for sign of friendly smoke or hostile sail. This respite would not have been given to him, were it not for the lucky bullet which removed two fingers and part of a third from the right hand of the Dyak chief. Not even a healthy savage can afford to treat such a wound lightly, and ten days elapsed before the maimed robber was able to move the injured limb without a curse.

Meanwhile, each night Jenks slept less soundly; each day his face became more careworn. He began to realize why the island had not been visited already by the vessel which would certainly be deputed to search for them—she was examining the great coast-line of China and Siam.

It was his habit to mark the progress of time on the rudely made sun-dial which sufficiently served their requirements as a clock. Iris happened to watch him chipping the forty-fourth notch on the edge of the horizontal block of wood.

“Have we really been forty-four days here?” she inquired, after counting the marts with growing astonishment.

“I believe the reckoning is accurate,” he said. “The Sirdar was lost on the 18th of March, and I make this the 1st of May.”

“May Day!”

“Yes. Shall we drive to Hurlingham this afternoon?”

“Looked at in that way it seems to be a tremendous time, though indeed, in some respects, it figures in my mind like many years. That is when I am thinking. Otherwise, when busy, the days fly like hours.”

“It must be convenient to have such an elastic scale.”

“Most useful. I strive to apply the quick rate when you are grumpy.”

Iris placed her arms akimbo, planted her feet widely apart, and surveyed Jenks with an expression that might almost be termed impudent. They were great friends, these two, now. The incipient stage of love-making had been dropped entirely, as ludicrously unsuited to their environment.

When the urgent necessity for continuous labor no longer spurred them to exertion during every moment of daylight, they tackled the box of books and read, not volumes which appealed to them in common, but quaint tomes in the use of which Jenks was tutor and Iris the scholar.

It became a fixed principle with the girl that she was very ignorant, and she insisted that the sailor should teach her. For instance, among the books he found a treatise on astronomy; it yielded a keen delight to both to identify a constellation and learn all sorts of wonderful things concerning it. But to work even the simplest problem required a knowledge of algebra, and Iris had never gone beyond decimals. So the stock of notebooks, instead of recording their experiences, became covered with symbols showing how x plus y equaled x2 minus 3,000,000.

As a variant, Jenks introduced a study of Hindustani. His method was to write a short sentence and explain in detail its component parts.

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