There was a hint of apprehension in Bristow’s eyes when he looked at Keeton. It was the way a man might have looked at a tiger into whose cage he had been thrust.
‘I believe you would, Charlie,’ Bristow said softly. ‘I believe you’d fight the devil himself if he tried to take it away from you.’
The boat moved sluggishly, making slow progress; it had been built for survival rather than speed. When the wind dropped it lost way and drifted aimlessly.
‘What do we do now?’ Bristow said. ‘Do we row to Fiji?’
‘There’ll be more wind,’ Keeton said. ‘You can’t expect to get there in a day.’
But the days passed and the wind came only in light gusts that died away almost as soon as they had filled the sail. At the end of the first week Keeton reckoned that they had made scarcely fifty miles and had drifted helplessly off the correct course.
‘We should have stayed on board the ship,’ Bristow said. ‘I knew it was a mistake to trust this tub.’
Keeton looked at him with contempt. ‘You could have stayed. You had the choice. You were too damned scared.’
‘You said we would get to Fiji.’ Bristow sounded like a sulky child.
‘And so we shall. In time.’
‘If we don’t die of thirst.’
‘You’d better drink less.’
‘It’s hot,’ Bristow said. ‘I get thirsty.’
‘You’ll be a sight thirstier when the water’s gone.’ There was a furnace in the sky glaring down upon them, and the glare sprang up in reflection from all the shifting mirrors of the sea. A million pricking darts of light plagued the eyes of the men in the boat, and each day they waited for the merciful time when the sun would sink below the horizon and the air grow cooler with the coming of night. The nights were like balm. Keeton would gaze up at the glittering stars and in each one of them he would see the colour of gold. It was as though the treasure of the Valparaiso had been flung up in a great spray to splash like paint on the limitless dome of the sky.
The wind for which he had waited so long came suddenly. It struck the sail of the lifeboat as if with the blow of a fist. The sail billowed, the mast creaked, the boat heeled over and shipped water. Bristow, taken by surprise, was flung off his feet and fell between the thwarts with the salt water pouring over him. He gave a cry of fear, but Keeton snarled savagely at him.
‘Get up, can’t you? Give a hand with this sail. Come on, man; you aren’t dead.’
Bristow struggled up with water dripping from him. The sail was flapping wildly; it seemed to be a live animal fighting with them, striving to break loose. But they gained control and the boat began to move through the water with more purpose than it had previously shown.
Keeton, with the tiller under his hand, was exultant. ‘Now we’re really on our way.’ He was revelling in this contest with the wind; he was using it for his own ends, taming it, making it his servant. ‘Now we’re moving. Why don’t you sing, Johnnie? Why don’t you look happy?’
Bristow was not happy; he was listening to the groaning of the mast and watching the sea as the wind scooped it into hollows and built up the ridges and drove them at the boat. He looked apprehensively at the patched side of their unwieldy craft. He shouted at Keeton.
‘That patch may not stand the strain.’
Keeton was not worried; he had faith in his own carpentry. The boat was as sound now as it had ever been.
But they had shipped a deal of water and it was swilling about in the bottom. ‘Bail it out, Johnnie; bail it out.’
Bristow picked up the handbowl and began to bail, throwing the water over the lee side where it sprayed out in a wide arc as the wind caught it.
The rain came later. It drove at them out of an ink-black sky; it drummed on the stretched sail and played its music on the timbers; it came in a broad slanting river that drenched the men through to the skin. It dripped from the awning and found its way into every corner and every crevice.
Keeton was chilled. He shivered, and he no longer felt like laughing. The water was collecting in the bottom of the boat faster than Bristow could bail it out. Keeton yelled at him to work harder, and for an answer Bristow flung the bailer at his tormentor.
‘Do it yourself then,’
It was no time for argument. Keeton relinquished the tiller to Bristow and began to bail furiously.
The squall was brief. When it had passed the sun came out again and the boat steamed. The wind slackened and the sail hung limply. Keeton stripped to the skin and bailed out the remaining water. A tin of biscuits had burst open and the biscuits had disintegrated and had been scooped overboard.
‘That’s another cut in the rations,’ Keeton said.
Bristow looked at him. ‘Do you still think we’ll get to Fiji?’
‘I’m sure of it.’
‘That makes half of us who’re sure.’
An hour later there was more water in the boat.
‘There’s a leak,’ Bristow said gloomily. ‘What did I tell you? It’s only a botched-up job when all’s said and done. What else can you expect?’
The water seeped in slowly. It was like an insidious disease, scarcely noticeable, yet deadly in its cumulative effect. It became necessary to carry out bailing operations at regular intervals. The sound of the bowl became an integral part of life in the boat, and the flash of water jetting over the gunwale was as familiar as the yellow sail and the salt-rimmed awning over the bows.
‘Suppose it gets worse,’ Bristow said. ‘And suppose we run into another storm. What then?’
‘Suppose the sea opens and swallows us. Suppose the sky rains purple ink. Suppose you pipe down.’
‘I’ve got a right to talk,’ Bristow mumbled.
Keeton struck him on the cheek with the back of his hand. ‘I said pipe down.’ He was sick of Bristow.
Tears came into Bristow’s eyes. He rubbed his cheek but said nothing. He just stared at Keeton venomously.
So time passed, the days dragging away on leaden feet and the two men hating each other and the quirk of fate that had thrown them together in this joint enterprise. Slowly the drinking water dwindled and still Fiji was no more than a dream forever beckoning them towards a horizon that retreated from them at the same distressful, limping pace at which they approached.
Keeton forced Bristow to accept a smaller ration of water. Bristow grumbled and was afraid.
‘We’re going to die in this boat. We’ll never reach Fiji nor nowhere else. Only a madman would ever have thought we could. You know it, don’t you, Charlie? You know it.’
‘I don’t know it,’ Keeton said. He refused to believe that it would end like this, that he would lose the gold.
They developed sores on the skin; their bones ached; they could find no comfort in the boat. They could not eat for lack of water to wash the food down, and they were thirsty always. Keeton no longer made any attempt to trim his hair or beard and he had become as unkempt as Bristow. He had been lean even at the start of the voyage; now, after weeks of privation, his ribs showed under the skin of his chest like the bars of a prison. The skin itself was burned almost black by the sun and the sores and scabs were like a disease.
‘We should have stayed on board the Valparaiso,’ Bristow whined. ‘We were all right there. Now we’re just going to die.’
‘You’d have died anyway. Everybody dies some time.’
‘I’m too young to die.’
‘Don’t kid yourself,’ Keeton said. ‘Nobody’s too young to die. They forgot to fix an age limit.’
Bristow’s lips trembled. He looked ready to weep. Keeton turned his head away contemptuously.
One night Keeton awoke under the awning from a troubled sleep and saw the moon low in the sky beyond the stern of the boat. For a while he lay there staring at it, in that hazy middle state that lies half-way between sleep and wakefulness. The moon looked so close that it was as though he could have stretched out his hand and grasped it. But then a shadow came between him and the moon, and in that moment he became fully awake.