“There was a cliff that went right up straight from the rocks, and we could not climb it, we were so weak from hunger and the cramped position we had had to keep in the boat.  We laid down a while, and then it was decided that the first and second mates should have a good feed and try to get up the precipice.  We were taking risks, because we had very little grub left.  It was about a hundred feet up, and we watched them closely as they went slowly up.  They did not come back, and we were much afraid of what they might find.  We did not know but there might be savages there.  During the day the other sailors also got up, leaving the old man and me to watch the boat.

“Help arrived for us.  The mates had walked all night, and at daybreak they reached the house of the head man, employed by the owner of Easter Island.  It was a sheep and horse island.  The mates were fed, and then they went on to the house of the manager.  Horses were gotten out, and bananas and poi sent to us.  The water just came in time, because we were all out.  They brought horses for all of us then, and after we had started the people of the island went ahead and came back with water and milk, which did us a world of good.  At the house of the governor we had a mess of brown beans, and then we all fell asleep on the floor.  God knows how long we slept, but when we waked up we were like wolves again.  We then had beans with fresh killed mutton, and that made us all deathly sick because our stomachs were weak.”

* * * * *

Underneath us, while the red-cheeked and golden-haired Steve uttered his puzzling sentences in English, I heard from time to time the heavy tread of Captain Benson.  He was, doubtless, living over again the hours of terror and resolution on the El Dorado and in the boat, and seeking to find words to amplify his log by his memories.  I heard him sit down and get up more than once; while opposite me in an easy-chair, with his glass of Schiedam schnapps beside him, was the virile Dutchman, hammering in his breast-swelling story of danger and courage, of starvation and storm.  I sighed for a dictaphone in which the original Dutch-English might be recorded for the delight of others.

Alex Simoneau came back after a night of the hospitality of M. Lontane, and soon was joyous again, telling his wondrous epic of the main to the beach-combers in the parc de Bougainville or in the Paris saloon, where the brown and white toilers of land and sea make merry.

“A man that goes to sea is a fool,” he said, with a bang of his fist on the table that made the schnapps dance in its heavy bottle.  “My people in Massachusetts are all right, and like a crazy man I will go to sea when I could work in a mill or on a farm.  They must think I’m dead by now.”

Alex was corroborative of all that Steve said, but I could not pin him down to hours or days.  He was too exalted by his present happy fate—­penniless, jobless, family in mourning, but healthy, safe, and full-stomached, not to omit an ebullience of spirits incited by the continuing wonder of each new listener and the praise for his deeds and by the conviviality of his admirers.