He was dressed like Montgomery and his white-haired companion, in jacket and trousers of blue serge. As we came still nearer, this individual began to run to and fro on the beach, making the most grotesque movements.
At a word of command from Montgomery, the four men in the launch sprang up, and with singularly awkward gestures struck the lugs.
Montgomery steered us round and into a narrow little dock excavated in the beach. Then the man on the beach hastened towards us.
This dock, as I call it, was really a mere ditch just long enough at this phase of the tide to take the longboat.
I heard the bows ground in the sand, staved the dingey off the rudder of the big boat with my piggin, and freeing the painter, landed.
The three muffled men, with the clumsiest movements, scrambled out upon the sand, and forthwith set to landing the cargo, assisted by the man on the beach. I was struck especially by the curious movements of the legs of the three swathed and bandaged boatmen,--not stiff they were, but distorted in some odd way, almost as if they were jointed in the wrong place. The dogs were still snarling, and strained at their chains after these men, as the white-haired man landed with them. The three big fellows spoke to one another in odd guttural tones, and the man who had waited for us on the beach began chattering to them excitedly--a foreign language, as I fancied--as they laid hands on some bales piled near the stern.
Somewhere I had heard such a voice before, and I could not think where.
The white-haired man stood, holding in a tumult of six dogs, and bawling orders over their din. Montgomery, having unshipped the rudder, landed likewise, and all set to work at unloading. I was too faint, what with my long fast and the sun beating down on my bare head, to offer any assistance.
Presently the white-haired man seemed to recollect my presence, and came up to me.
"You look," said he, "as though you had scarcely breakfasted."His little eyes were a brilliant black under his heavy brows.
"I must apologise for that. Now you are our guest, we must make you comfortable,--though you are uninvited, you know."He looked keenly into my face. "Montgomery says you are an educated man, Mr. Prendick; says you know something of science. May I ask what that signifies?"I told him I had spent some years at the Royal College of Science, and had done some researches in biology under Huxley. He raised his eyebrows slightly at that.
"That alters the case a little, Mr. Prendick," he said, with a trifle more respect in his manner. "As it happens, we are biologists here. This is a biological station--of a sort."His eye rested on the men in white who were busily hauling the puma, on rollers, towards the walled yard. "I and Montgomery, at least,"he added. Then, "When you will be able to get away, I can't say.
We're off the track to anywhere. We see a ship once in a twelve-month or so."He left me abruptly, and went up the beach past this group, and Ithink entered the enclosure. The other two men were with Montgomery, erecting a pile of smaller packages on a low-wheeled truck.
The llama was still on the launch with the rabbit hutches;the staghounds were still lashed to the thwarts.
The pile of things completed, all three men laid hold of the truck and began shoving the ton-weight or so upon it after the puma.
Presently Montgomery left them, and coming back to me held out his hand.
"I'm glad," said he, "for my own part. That captain was a silly ass.
He'd have made things lively for you."
"lt was you," said I, "that saved me again".
"That depends. You'll find this island an infernally rum place, I promise you. I'd watch my goings carefully, if I were you.
He--" He hesitated, and seemed to alter his mind about what was on his lips. "I wish you'd help me with these rabbits,"he said.
His procedure with the rabbits was singular. I waded in with him, and helped him lug one of the hutches ashore.
No sooner was that done than he opened the door of it, and tilting the thing on one end turned its living contents out on the ground.
They fell in a struggling heap one on the top of the other.
He clapped his hands, and forthwith they went off with that hopping run of theirs, fifteen or twenty of them I should think, up the beach.
"Increase and multiply, my friends," said Montgomery.
"Replenish the island. Hitherto we've had a certain lack of meat here."As I watched them disappearing, the white-haired man returned with a brandy-flask and some biscuits. "Something to go on with, Prendick,"said he, in a far more familiar tone than before. I made no ado, but set to work on the biscuits at once, while the white-haired man helped Montgomery to release about a score more of the rabbits.
Three big hutches, however, went up to the house with the puma.
The brandy I did not touch, for I have been an abstainer from my birth.
