Phil’s shout attracted the others.
They crowded to him. Watched in silence as the length of the boat came into view.
She was a large passenger steamer, and she had been battered by mountainous seas, yet had won through. Her lifeboats were either carried away or were stove in by the high seas. She had a tangle of wreckage on her boat deck, and more wreckage on the bow of the main deck, but she was cutting through the water slowly, majestically.
Professor Parker nodded.
“We could have expected it,” he said. “Most of the larger boats that were afloat when the world swung over were undoubtedly turned topsy turvy by the terrific waves. You will remember that our own craft rolled over and over. But it righted itself because it was small and buoyant. Big boats, once over, would never right themselves, but would go down.
“But somewhere there were undoubtedly boats that won through.
“While the catastrophe was world-wide, it is certain that some sections were spared, just as this island was spared. And the terrific current swept most of the north sea shipping down to this vicinity. It is almost exactly what I expected to find, this boat, and—”
But Phil was not listening to explanations. There was a flag in a flag locker on the top of the castle: Grabbing it out, he tied one corner to the halyard, raised it and lowered it along the stumpy, homemade flagpole.
There came a cloud of steam from the whistle of the boat. The steam stopped. Another cloud followed, then another. As the third cloud of steam was emerging, the sound of the first whistle came to their ears.
“Three whistles!” said Phil. “A salute! They see us!”
Professor Parker nodded his satisfaction.
“Now,” he said, “we can get some authentic news. If there are any unsubmerged continents that have survived the period of stress equalization and tidal inundations, they doubtless have sent out radio broadcasts. And you will notice that the boat retains its radio equipment.”
Phil turned to the girl.
“Suppose,” he said in a low voice, “there are no more continents, and we have to begin life anew. Would you... er... I mean, is there anybody, such as a husband, that you left behind?”
She laughed at him, extended her left hand.
“Not even engaged,” she said.
Phil grinned.
“In that case,” he observed, “you ought to be ready to take things as they come, Miss Ranson.”
She looked at him with that frankness of appraisal which characterizes the modern girl.
“Yes,” she said; “it’s a new world, and I’m ready for it, regardless of what it is. I’m not afraid of the future... and you’d better begin calling me Stella, Phil.”
And Phil Bregg, his face lighted with a zest for life, grinned at her.
“Bring on the new world,” he said. “I like the people in it!”
Rain Magic
Is “Rain Magic” fact or fiction? I wish I knew.
Some of it is fiction, I know, because I invented connecting incidents and wove them into the yarn. It’s the rest of it that haunts me. At the time I thought it was just a wild lie of an old desert rat. And then I came to believe it was true.
Anyhow, here are the facts, and the reader can judge for himself.
About six months ago I went stale on Western stories. My characters became fuzzy in my mind; my descriptions lacked that intangible something that makes a story pack a punch. I knew I had to get out and gather new material.
So I got a camp wagon. It’s a truck containing a complete living outfit — bed, bath, hot and cold water, radio, writing desk, closet, stove, et cetera. I struck out into the trackless desert, following old, abandoned roads, sometimes making my own roads. I was writing as l went, meeting old prospectors, putting them on paper, getting steeped in the desert environment.
February 13 found me at a little spring in the middle of barren desert. As far as I knew there wasn’t a soul within miles.
Then I heard steps, the sound of a voice. I got up from my typewriter, went to the door. There was an old prospector getting water at the spring. But he wasn’t the typical desert rat. I am always interested in character classification, and the man puzzled me. I came to the conclusion he’d been a sailor.
So I got out, shook hands, and passed the time of day. He was interested in my camp wagon, and l took him in, sat him down, and smoked for a spell. Then l asked him if he hadn’t been a sailor.
I can still see the queer pucker that came into his eyes as he nodded.
Now sailors are pretty much inclined to stay with the water. One doesn’t often find a typical sailor in the desert. So I asked him why he’d come into the desert.
He explained that he had to get away from rain. When it rained he got the sleeping sickness.
That sounded like a story, so I made it a point to draw him out. It came, a bit at a time, starting with the Sahara dust that painted the rigging of the ship after the storm, and winding up with the sleeping sickness that came back whenever he smelled the damp of rain-soaked vegetation.
I thought it was one gosh-awful lie, but it was a gripping, entertaining lie, and l thought I could use it. I put it up to him as a business proposition, and within a few minutes held in my possession a document which read in part as follows:
For value received, I hereby sell to Erle Stanley Gardner the story rights covering my adventures in Africa, including the monkey-man, the unwritten language, the ants who watched the gold ledge, the bread that made me ill, the sleeping sickness which comes back every spring and leaves me with memories of my lost sweetheart, et cetera, et cetera.
After that I set about taking complete notes of his story. I still thought it was a lie, an awful lie.
Like all stories of real life in the raw it lacked certain connecting incidents. There was no balance to it. It seemed disconnected in places.
Because l intended to make a pure fiction story out of it, I didn’t hesitate to fill in these connections. I tried to give it a sweep of unified action, and I took some liberties with the facts as he had given them to me. Yet, in the main, l kept his highlights, and I was faithful to the backgrounds as he had described them.
Because he had just recovered from a recurrence of the sleeping sickness, I started the story as it would have been told to a man who had stumbled onto the sleeping form in the desert. It was a story that “wrote itself.” The words just poured from my fingertips to the typewriter. But I was writing it as fiction, and I considered it as such.
Not all of what he told me went into the story. There was some that dealt with intimate matters one doesn’t print. There was some that dealt with tribal customs, markings of different tribes, et cetera, et cetera. In fact, I rather avoided some of these definite facts. Because I felt the whole thing was fiction, I was rather careful to keep from setting down definite data, using only such as seemed necessary.
Then, after the story had been written and mailed, after l had returned to headquarters, I chanced to get some books dealing with the locality covered in the story, telling of tribal characteristics, racial markings, et cetera.
To my surprise, l found that every fact given me by the old prospector was true. I became convinced that his story was, at least, founded on fact.