An examination disclosed that five of our erstwhile opponents were dead and the
sixth, the Neanderthal man, was but slightly wounded, a bullet having glanced
from his thick skull, stunning him. We decided to take him with us to camp, and
by means of belts we managed to secure his hands behind his back and place a
leash around his neck before he regained consciousness. We then retraced our
steps for our meat being convinced by our own experience that those aboard the
_U_-33 had been able to frighten off this party with a single shell—but
when we came to where we had left the deer it had disappeared.
On the return journey Whitely and I preceded the rest of the party by about a
hundred yards in the hope of getting another shot at something edible, for we
were all greatly disgusted and disappointed by the loss of our venison. Whitely
and I advanced very cautiously, and not having the whole party with us, we
fared better than on the journey out, bagging two large antelope not a
half-mile from the harbor; so with our game and our prisoner we made a cheerful
return to the boat, where we found that all were safe. On the shore a little
north of where we lay there were the corpses of twenty of the wild creatures
who had attacked Bradley and his party in our absence, and the rest of whom we
had met and scattered a few minutes later.
We felt that we had taught these wild ape-men a lesson and that because of it
we would be safer in the future—at least safer from them; but we decided not to
abate our carefulness one whit, feeling that this new world was filled with
terrors still unknown to us; nor were we wrong.
The following morning we commenced work upon our camp, Bradley, Olson, von
Schoenvorts, Miss La Rue, and I having sat up half the night discussing the
matter and drawing plans. We set the men at work felling trees, selecting for
the purpose jarrah, a hard, weather-resisting timber which grew in profusion
near by. Half the men labored while the other half stood guard, alternating
each hour with an hour off at noon. Olson directed this work. Bradley, von
Schoenvorts and I, with Miss La Rue’s help, staked out the various buildings
and the outer wall. When the day was done, we had quite an array of logs nicely
notched and ready for our building operations on the morrow, and we were all
tired, for after the buildings had been staked out we all fell in and helped
with the logging—all but von Schoenvorts. He, being a Prussian and a gentleman,
couldn’t stoop to such menial labor in the presence of his men, and I didn’t
see fit to ask it of him, as the work was purely voluntary upon our part. He
spent the afternoon shaping a swagger-stick from the branch of jarrah and
talking with Miss La Rue, who had sufficiently unbent toward him to notice his
existence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account