The Young Stagers/The Rafters
XI.
THE RAFTERS.
"I wonder how you Cast Lots, Bo'sun?" remarked the President, turning to the Vice who was scanning the weary horizon for a sail. (They were shipwrecked mariners on a raft in mid-ocean, and their provisions were reduced to three chocolates in silver paper, a lunch biscuit and a slice of apple rapidly losing its healthy pallor in favour of an unwholesome brownness.)
"I thuppothe you cast lots of things overboard," was the sensible reply. "But there's nothing to cast," he added, in the weak, faint, hopeless voice proper to one who has suffered the last extremes of hunger and thirst for thirty days (including thirty nights).
"Don't be a Fat-head, Bo'sun," said the Captain, with some asperity. "When you Cast Lots, you don't cast lots of something, you just Cast Lots."
"Lots of nothing?" inquired the Bo'sun patiently. "Why?"
"Why, to see who eats the other," was the reply.
"We have only one more meal for you and me and none for the crew, so we must Cast Lots, and the one who wins is eaten by the rest—unless of course anybody is decent enough to offer himself."
"A lot of himself?" asked the Bo'sun, and added, "Perhaps the Crew would," as he turned and patted the Crew's head.
Venus was the Crew, and was understood to decline to play the rôle of Universal Provider in addition. Certainly he shook his head violently when invited to have his throat cut.
"Anyhow," said the Captain, "we can Cast the Lot on him, so he might just as well have been a sport and died to save us, with a smile."
"How could he save us with a smile?" inquired the Bo'sun.
"You've been drinking salt water, my lad," was the unkind reply. "I told you you'd go mad if you did that."
The Crew got up, yawned, shook himself again and took a stroll around the raft—which looked uncommonly like an inverted four-legged table.
"Oh, look at that wretched Crew, he's gone and sat on the food. He did that on purpose so that we should give it him," yelped the anguished Bo'sun, pointing to where Venus was apparently playing at being a hen with chicks.
"That settles it," said the Captain wrathfully.
"The Crew shall be fattened up on the lunch biscuit and the slice of apple, and then the Lot shall be Cast upon him. We can still eat the chocolates as they're wrapped in silver paper."
The Crew, either ignorant of its fate, or truly philosophic, disposed of the offered biscuit in two gulps, but apparently reserved the slice of apple for even more parlous times. And as with fatuous smile and self-satisfied tail waggings the Crew perambulated the raft, the Captain laboriously scrawled with fateful pencil upon an old luggage label the ominous words LOT I. Having done this to his satisfaction, the Captain directed the Bo'sun to seize and secure the Crew preparatory to the ceremony of casting. Nothing loth, the Bo'sun precipitated himself upon the Crew, who in the joy of his heart that such charming activities should break the monotony of the terribly weary life upon the raft, dived between the Bo'sun's legs, upset him and proceeded to roll upon him, with snuffling snorts. And as Crew and Bo'sun grappled in a terrible struggle, the Captain standing aloof, mystic, sibylline, murmured the words, "Behold, I Cast Lots," and flung the fateful document at the Crew. But the Crew was in the very act of leaping back for a fresh rush-and-worry at his prostrate assailant, and the Lot fell on the Bo'sun.
Petrified with horror, the three froze to a dreadful silence, even the Crew apparently impressed with a sense of the magnitude unmeasured, of some great disaster. The Captain was the first to speak.
"Golly!" he cried. "I'm awfully sorry, Bo'sun, but you're It. You're luck's clean out to-day. What rotten Kismet you do have. The Lot fell on you all right, smack in the middle of your chest."
The Bo'sun fetched a deep groan.
"Never mind," quoth he. "If you're going to eat me I may as well eat the chocolates."
"Not at all," replied the Captain, appalled at such faulty logic. "Is it likely I should want to eat you while I've got chocolate?"
"But if I eat the chocolates and you eat me, you'll get 'em all the same," argued the Bo'sun.
"Don't be a Funny Dog," growled his incensed senior. "And anyhow, I shall want the chocolates to take the taste of you out of my mouth."
"And the slice of apple?" asked the doomed man.
"The Crew 'll want that," was the reply. "Besides, he sat on it."
"Is the Crew going to have some of me too?" asked the Bo'sun, with morbid interest.
"Of course," was the reply.
"Then I don't see why he should have the apple," continued the Bo'sun. "Crews don't mind nasty tastes; they don't care what they eat. Besides, he only sat on one side of it and I can eat down to that."
"Then take your last meal on earth, unhappy man," said the Captain, in voice appropriate.
"On water," corrected the Bo'sun, with irritating precision, as he reached for the apple. "I'm not an unhappy man," he added, munching appreciatively.
"You soon will be," promised the Captain, as he ceased peeling a chocolate, to tap significantly the heavy sheath knife (or paper knife) at his belt.
No further word broke the brooding silence of the raft until the Captain had finished peeling the chocolates, laid them out before him, a post-prandial bonne bouche, produced his pipe, struck a match, affected to light it and cast an experienced eye at the weather.
"Prepare to die, Bo'sun," said he suddenly.
"Haven't finished my apple," replied the Bos'un. "If you wait a little while I shall taste all the sweeter. Eat a couple of chocolates now and keep one to take my taste away afterwards."
The Captain considered the request, and seemed to be viewing it and the chocolates with favourable eye.
"Which joints of me will you eat, and which will you give the Crew?" asked the Bo'sun, meditatively eyeing his fat legs and arms.
"Oh, cutlets, steaks, leg of Bo'sun, shoulder of Bo'sun, and that sort of thing for me, you know," replied the Captain. " The crew can have scrag end, head, liver and bacon, devilled kidney. . . . There'll be plenty."
"Wonder if I shall be tough," mused the Bo'sun. "Anyhow, I'll be as tough as I jolly well can," he added.
"That's a nice spirit to die in," commented the Captain coldly, selecting his second chocolate. "A real sportsman would trail over the side in the water and soften himself."
"Yes, and get eaten by a shark," sneered the Bo'sun.
An idea struck him even as he spoke, and the somewhat peevish and petulant look (with which he had watched the Captain's sharpening of his sheath-knife and his setting forth of plate, knife and fork) changed to one of bright hope.
"I will do it," he cried, and rolling off the raft clung to the side thereof, while the Captain set about the preparation of a fire.
A blood-curdling shriek and bubbling cry as of some strong swimmer in his agony brought him to the side of the raft as the Bo'sun, like Yser, rolling rapidly, toward the door, howled: "A whale! A whale! I am being eaten alive; the beastly thing has bitten me in halves."
"How rotten," said the Captain, eyeing the rotating Bo'sun dubiously. "I suppose I must eat the Crew now," and turned in time to see the last chocolate disappear, enfolded in the long, pink tongue of that treacherous and greedy insubordinate. With a yell of rage the Captain drew his sheath-knife and sprang at the Crew with so flashing an eye and menacing a mien that the Crew leapt overboard and swam in the direction of the body of the Bo'sun, namely, towards the door which—even as the Captain smote his forehead with a cry of "Ruined! Starvation stares me in the stomach"—opened to admit Buster beneath whose arm there shone refulgent a mighty box of butter-scotch.
"Saved!" cried the Captain, raising his hands and upturned beatific face to Heaven.
"Golly! So am I," echoed the Bo'sun, rising like Venus from the waves, or a second Jonah from the temporary accommodation afforded by the whale.