Chapter 2 THE MYSTERY AND BOBBY

Abel had often seen death before. He had seen men drowned, men who had frozen to death, men accidentally shot to death, and men who had died naturally and comfortably in their beds. It was, therefore, not the sight of death that startled him, but the horror and tragic appeal in the dead man's staring eyes. It was uncanny and supernatural.

This, at least, was Abel's first intuitive impression. Though he could not have defined this impression or put his thoughts into words, he felt much as one would feel who had heard a dead man speak.

He pushed his skiff a few yards away and, resting upon his oars, viewed the derelict from a respectful distance. His impulse was to row back to Itigailit Island at once and leave the boat and its ghastly, silent skipper to the mercies of the sea. But the mystery fascinated him. The beseeching gaze that had met his had roused his imagination. And so for a long time he sat in silent contemplation of the boat, wondering from whence it and the thing it contained had come, and how the man had met his death.

Abel Zachariah was a Christian, but he was also an Eskimo, and he had inherited the superstitions of untold generations of heathen ancestors-superstitions that to him were truths above contradiction. He held it as a fact beyond dispute that all unnatural or accidental deaths were brought about by the evil spirits with which his forefathers had peopled the sea and the desolate land in which he lived. It was his firm belief that evil spirits remained to haunt the place where a victim had been lured to violent death, as in the present instance had plainly been the case. He had no doubt that the boat was haunted, and therefore he kept his distance, for unless by some subtle and certain charm the spirits could be driven off, none but a foolhardy man would ever venture to board the derelict, and Abel was not a foolhardy man.

These superstitions seem very foolish to us, no doubt; but, after all, were they one whit more foolish or groundless than the countless superstitions to which many educated and seemingly intelligent Christian people of civilization are bound? As, for instance, the superstition that where thirteen sit together at table one will die within the year.

And so Abel Zachariah, being a man of caution, held aloof from the boat which he had so eagerly set out to salvage; and sitting engrossed in contemplation, he in his skiff and the dead man in the derelict drifted for a while side by side toward Itigailit Island. And thus he was sitting silent and inactive when suddenly he was startled by the cry of a child in distress.

Abel for a moment was not at all certain that this was not some wicked plot of the spirits, intended to lure him within their reach, and he seized his oars, determined to increase the distance between himself and possible danger. But when the cry was repeated, and presently became a frightened wail, Abel hesitated. If it was a spirit that emitted the succeeding wails it was surely a very corporeal spirit, with well developed lungs and also a very much frightened spirit; and a frightened spirit could not be dangerous.

Abel had never heard of a spirit that cried like this one, or of a spirit that was frightened, and he rose to his feet that he might look over the gunwale and into the derelict. From this vantage he beheld the head of a little child, and he could see, also, that this very real child, and not the much feared spirits, was the source of the loud and piteous wails.

The spirit of evil, then, had not tarried after striking down the man. Doubtless God had interposed to save the child, else it, too, would have been destroyed, and no spirit of evil could remain where God exerted His power. Here was a subtle and potent charm in which Abel Zachariah had unwavering faith, for, after all, his faith in God was greater than his faith in the religion of his fathers. And so, vastly relieved and no longer afraid, he rowed his skiff alongside the boat, made his painter fast and stepped aboard.

Standing in the forward part of the boat was a little boy, perhaps three years of age. He was fair haired and fair skinned and handsome, but as a result of privations he had suffered he was evidently ill and his cheeks were flushed with fever.

Abel's great, generous heart went out to the child in boundless sympathy. He forgot the dead man aft. He forgot even the boat. The coveted prize of his ambition an hour before, had small importance to Abel now. His one thought was for this distressed little one that God had so unexpectedly sent down to him upon the bosom of the sea.

The child ceased crying, and with big blue tear-wet eyes looked with wonder upon his dusky faced deliverer.

"Oksunae" (be strong), said Abel with a reassuring smile, as he stooped and took the little one's hand into his big rough palm.

The child did not understand the word of greeting, but he did understand, with the intuition and instinct of little children and dumb creatures, that Abel was his friend.

Beneath the deck, forward, were blankets, in which the boy had doubtless been sleeping when Abel first looked into the boat and discovered the dead man. Beneath the deck Abel also found among other things, a jug partly filled with tepid water, a tin cup, and a bag containing a few broken fragments of sea biscuits. He gave the child a sip of the water and selected for it one of the larger fragments of biscuit. Then, patting it affectionately upon the cheek he tenderly tucked it among the blankets, beneath the deck, that it might be sheltered from the breeze. And the little one, content with the ministrations and attentions of his new guardian, quietly acquiesced.

Abel was greatly excited by his wonderful discovery, and he was eager to surprise Mrs. Abel Zachariah and to present to her the fair-skinned boy, and therefore he lost no time in further exploration of the boat. Unafraid now of evil spirits, and disregarding the dead man lying aft, he undid the painter of his skiff and secured it astern, where the skiff would tow easily. And so, with the mysterious child under the deck at his back, and the mysterious dead man lying in the boat at his feet, and his own skiff trailing behind, Abel, with a strong arm and a stout heart and a head filled with perplexing questions, rowed the mysterious boat to the low ledge of rocks that served as a landing place on Itigailit Island.

Of course Mrs. Abel Zachariah, keenly interested in his quest of the prize, was there to meet him, and looking into the boat she saw the ghastly passenger and was duly shocked.

"The man has been killed!" she exclaimed, stepping backward as though afraid the thing would injure her. "It is a boat of evil! Come away from it! Why did you bring it in from the sea?"

For answer Abel reached beneath the deck, lifted out the child, and stepping ashore placed it in Mrs. Abel's arms.

"A boy," said he. "God sent him to us and he is ours."

Mrs. Abel was taken completely by surprise. For a long moment she looked into the child's flushed and feverish face, and it looked into her round and eager face, and smiled its confidence, and from that instant she took it to her heart as her own. She pressed it to her bosom with all the mother love of a good woman, for Mrs. Abel Zachariah, primitive Eskimo though she was, was a good woman, and her heart was soft and affectionate.

The child was ill and neglected. It was evidently suffering from exposure and lack of nourishment. Mrs. Abel's instincts told her this at a glance and forgetful of all else, she hurried away with it to the tent. It drank eagerly from the cup of clear cold water which she held to its lips, and ate as much fresh-caught cod, boiled in sea water, and of her own coarse bread, as she thought well for it.

All the time she fondled the boy and talked to him soothingly in strange Eskimo words which he had never heard before, but which nevertheless he understood, for she spoke in the universal accent of the mother to her little one. And when he had eaten he nestled snugly in her arms, as he would have nestled in his own mother's arms, and with his head upon her bosom closed his eyes and sighed in deep content.

Abel when his wife had gone with the child into the tent, anchored the boat of tragedy a little way from shore, that the big wolf dogs prowling about might not interfere with the peaceful repose of its silent occupant. Then rowing ashore in his skiff, he selected a secluded spot upon the island, and dug a grave.

In the rocky soil the grave was necessarily a shallow one, and he had finished his task when Mrs. Abel reappeared from the tent to announce that the boy was sleeping and seemed much better after eating. Then while they sat upon the rocks and ate their own belated dinner of boiled cod and tea, Abel told the story of his discovery.

"What do you suppose killed the man?" Mrs. Abel asked.

"I do not know," said Abel. "It looks like a gunshot wound but I have not searched for a gun yet. It is a fine boat, and did not belong to a schooner. I never saw a boat like it and I never saw so fine a boat before. The man was not a fisherman, either."

"The boy's clothing is finer than any I ever saw," declared Mrs. Abel. "It is not like any I ever saw and is finer and prettier than the missionaries' children wear and on one of his fingers there is a beautiful ring."

"I cannot get it through my head where the boat came from," said Abel.

"It was God's messenger, and His way of sending us the boy," asserted Mrs. Abel. "He sent the boat with the boy out of the farthest mists of the sea, from the place where storms are born, and He sent the boat on a clear day, when we could see it, and He kept you near the boat when you would have gone away, until the boy cried. God meant that we should have a child."

"Yes," agreed Abel. "It was God's way of giving us a child for our own. But why did He send a man with the boy and a dead man, at that?"

"I do not know," said Mrs. Abel, "but there was some reason, I suppose. The child has a skin so white and its clothes are so fine, I am sure it must have come from Heaven. We know it came from the Far Beyond, for you say the man was not a fisherman, and the boat is not a fisherman's boat."

This was an awe-inspiring solution of the mystery, and Abel and his wife accepted it with due solemnity. A suggestion of the miraculous appealed to them, for they did not in the least believe that the days of miracles were past, as indeed they are not. They had already, with big, hospitable hearts, accepted the child as their own. Now, believing that it was a gift from Heaven, sent directly to them by God, as a token of particular favor, they would not have parted from it for all the riches in the world.

The afternoon was far spent when, at last, Abel, in his skiff, rowed out to the anchored derelict and brought it in again to the landing place. Here a search of the boat discovered, in addition to the blankets which had formed the boy's bed, the water jug, the tin cup, and biscuit bag, a quantity of loaded shotgun shells and a double-barreled shotgun. The shotgun, which had been hidden in the bottom of the boat by the folds of a sail, called forth an exclamation of delight from Abel. It was a marvel of workmanship, and its stock and lock were beautifully engraved. And with the sail, which would prove useful, was a tarpaulin and a quantity of rope.

In the pockets of the dead man were a jackknife, a small notebook, a piece of pencil, and an empty wallet. Nothing which seemed important, but all of which Abel preserved carefully as a future heritage for the boy.

There were no boards from which to fashion a coffin, so they wrapped the unknown in an old sail, and that evening, when the western sky was aglow with color buried him in the grave Abel had made. And over the grave Abel read in Eskimo a chapter from the Testament, and said a prayer, and to the doleful accompaniment of lapping waves upon the shore he and Mrs. Abel sang, in Eskimo, one of the old hymns for, as Christians, they must needs give the stranger a Christian burial, the only service they could render him.

Abel and his wife looked upon the advent of the little boy as a Divine blessing. They firmly believed that God had sent him to them to increase their happiness, and they lavished upon him all the love and affection of their simple hospitable natures. They were deeply solicitous for his health, and responding to gentle care the fever quickly left him, for he was, naturally, a strong and well-developed child.

They understood few words of English, but they soon discovered that the boy called himself "Bobby," and Bobby was accepted as his name. Bobby, on his part, spoke English indifferently, and of all other tongues and especially the Eskimo tongue, he was wholly ignorant. At that period of his life it was quite immaterial to him, indeed, what language he spoke so long as the language served to make his wants known; and he began to acquire an Eskimo vocabulary sufficient for his immediate needs, and his efforts in this direction afforded his foster parents a vast deal of pleasure.

Mrs. Abel Zachariah, considering the clothing Bobby wore quite too fine for ordinary use, and unsuited to the climate and the conditions of his new surroundings and life, fashioned for him a suit of coarse but warmer fabric. When this was finished to her liking she dressed him in it, and washed and folded and laid away in a chest the things he had worn, as a precious souvenir of his coming.

From the skins of Arctic hares, which Abel killed with the wonderful shotgun, she made him a warm little jacket with a hood; for his feet she made sealskin moccasins, with legs that reached to his knees, and sewed them with sinew to render them waterproof, that his feet might be kept quite dry when the rocks were wet with rains, or when the first moist snows of autumn fell, as they did with the coming of September. And when the great flocks of wild ducks and geese came flying out of the North, the feathers of all that Abel shot were carefully hoarded in bags for Bobby's winter bed.

And so the weeks passed until early October. The land was now white with snow, and steadily increasing cold warned them that winter was at hand and that presently the bays and sea would be frozen. It was time now for Abel to set his fox traps, and time for them to move to their winter cabin on the mainland.

This cabin was situated at the head of a deep bay which the Eskimos call "Tissiuhaksoak," but which English-speaking folk called "Abel's Bay," because Abel was the first to build a cabin there; and we, being English-speaking people, shall also call it Abel's Bay.

The bloody record of the tragedy had long since been washed from the boat. From two of the six long oars with which the boat was fitted, Abel improvised two masts. The tarpaulin was remodeled into a second sail, and, one blustery morning, with their tent and all their belongings stowed into the boat, and the dogs in the skiff, which was in tow, they set sail for Abel's Bay, and left Itigailit Island and the lonely grave to the Arctic blasts that would presently sweep down upon it from the icy seas; and late on the following afternoon they reached the cabin which for many years was to be Bobby's home.

Thus it was that Bobby, amid adventure and mystery, made his advent upon The Labrador and found a home among strange people. And in such a land it was quite plain that as the years passed he should have other adventures.

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