Chapter 8

Van Deventer was eying Arthur Chamberlain keenly.

“It isn’t a question of your wanting pay in exchange for your services in putting us back, is it?” he asked coolly.

Arthur turned and faced him. His face began to flush slowly. Van Deventer put up one hand.

“I beg your pardon. I see.”

“We aren’t settling the things we came here for,” Estelle interrupted.

She had noted the threat of friction and hastened to put in a diversion. Arthur relaxed.

“I think that as a beginning,” he suggested, “we’d better get sleeping arrangements completed. We can get everybody together somewhere, I dare say, and then secure volunteers for the work.”

“Right.” Van Deventer was anxious to make amends for his blunder of a moment before. “Shall I send the bank watchmen to go on each floor in turn and ask everybody to come down-stairs?”

“You might start them,” Arthur said. “It will take a long time for every one to assemble.”

Van Deventer spoke into the telephone on his desk. In a moment he hung up the receiver.

“They’re on their way,” he said.

Arthur was frowning to himself and scribbling in a note-book.

“Of course,” he announced abstractedly, “the pressing problem is food. We’ve quite a number of fishermen, and a few hunters. We’ve got to have a lot of food at once, and everything considered, I think we’d better count on the fishermen. At sunrise we’d better have some people begin to dig bait and wake our anglers. They’d better make their tackle to-night, don’t you think?”

There was a general nod.

“We’ll announce that, then. The fishermen will go to the river under guard of the men we have who can shoot. I think what Indians there are will be much too frightened to try to ambush any of us, but we’d better be on the safe side. They’ll keep together and fish at nearly the same spot, with our hunters patrolling the woods behind them, taking pot-shots at game, if they see any. The fishermen should make more or less of a success, I think. The Indians weren’t extensive fishers that I ever heard of, and the river ought fairly to swarm with fish.”

He closed his note-book.

“How many weapons can we count on altogether?” Arthur asked Van Deventer.

“In the bank, about a dozen riot-guns and half a dozen repeating rifles. Elsewhere I don’t know. Forty or fifty men said they had revolvers, though.”

“We’ll give revolvers to the men who go with the fishermen. The Indians haven’t heard firearms and will run at the report, even if they dare attack our men.”

“We can send out the gun-armed men as hunters,” some one suggested, “and send gardeners with them to look for vegetables and such things.”

“We’ll have to take a sort of census, really,” Arthur suggested, “finding what every one can do and getting him to do it.”

“I never planned anything like this before,” Van Deventer remarked, “and I never thought I should, but this is much more fun than running a bank.”

Arthur smiled.

“Let’s go and have our meeting,” he said cheerfully.

But the meeting was a gloomy and despairing affair. Nearly every one had watched the sun set upon a strange, wild landscape. Hardly an individual among the whole two thousand of them had ever been out of sight of a house before in his or her life. To look out at a vast, untouched wilderness where hitherto they had seen the most highly civilized city on the globe would have been startling and depressing enough in itself, but to know that they were alone in a whole continent of savages and that there was not, indeed, in all the world a single community of people they could greet as brothers was terrifying.