Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 2 (1925-02).djvu/119

 recollection. The next day, at noon, engrained habit prevailing over his resolution, he took a tablet. The day following, after reasoning the problem out afresh, he swallowed his last tablet and flung the metal box far out among the creaming breakers of the nearest reef.

He stood, looking after it out to sea. Far beyond the breakers, beyond the great expanse of blue ocean which was their background, there swam into the scope of his vision the clear-cut outline of a spar. He lost it. He shaded his eyes with both hands against the intolerable glare. Again he picked it out standing up against the horizon. He wondered why he had not noticed it before. This was because, he reasoned, occupied with his introspections, he had glanced only indifferently out to sea. Besides, he had probably, he told himself, not looked in that precise direction. One looked out to sea from any spot on the tiny, almost circular, coral island.

Down under that spar, if chance had been only reasonably kind, lay the hull which supported it, and in the hull reposed in small, watertight cartons the thyroids which meant life, sanity, Marian!

Then, as he looked, his heart bounding with hope, all his young instincts, stimulated to vigorous, action, he saw, very faintly and indistinctly at that great distance, the unmistakable sign of the sea-wolves of the South Pacific—the rakish dorsal fins of great sharks. He looked long at them as they moved about in the vicinity of the spar, and shuddering, he turned inland and walked back to the hut.

Here on the island there was no means of procuring even crude thyroid. There were no animals. The atoll was utterly self-contained. Its simple inhabitants subsisted on fruit and fish. There was no settlement within hundreds of miles.

He interviewed the English-speaking islander. It had been the chance of a ship's crew putting in for water that had taken this man on his travels. Did such crews ever put in nowadays? Very seldom. Once in a year, perhaps, or two years—who could tell? The lull was a long chance. The sharks would go away when they had cleared up what was edible from the wreckage out there. At any rate there was the possibility of a solution out there; a solution first vaguely imagined, horrifically rejected, then avidly taken up again as Renwick tossed through, the interminable tropic night on his coco matting, the night of the day on which he had taken his last capsule.

There was no help to be procured. He had sounded his friend the islander on the subject of summoning the men of the settlement with their primitive outriggers to go out there and loot the wreck. But the islander had said^ indifferently, that there was no hurry about that. Some of it might come in anyway, as Renwick and Marian had come in, almost miraculously, through the jagged reefs. The sharks were thick out there now, and they would remain for some time; Time enough to go out there when they had dispersed and made it possible to dive! They might remain a week or a month. Who could explain the avidity or the patience of a shark? They would follow ships day after day in these seas, apparently subsisting on nothing, waiting! There was something in that wreck they were waiting for now, and they would remain until they got it. Besides, it was far, almost too far for outriggers!

Renwick tried to argue. It was not so very far. One could see the spar. The islander only smiled. There appeared to be something unaccountably amusing to him in Renwick's idea of distance. But he did not explain. Perhaps what was clear enough to him was beyond his limited powers of expression, and realizing this, he only smiled.