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The next morning, the fort had become a small town with a watchtower at its center. Two days later, there was only a low wall protecting a woven matting of driftwood sticks. Oliver imagined an art student practicing, seeing what things looked like as he or she made them. On Sunday, Oliver had breakfast at six. The park was empty when he arrived.
Also, she gathered a load of driftwood, and it was nine in the evening when she emerged from the marsh, on her shoulder a bundle of wood and a short-handled spade, in her free hand the pail of clams. She sought the darker side of the street at the corner and hurried across the zone of electric light to avoid detection by the neighbors.
From that moment he also knew that she had taken his heart by storm. Half-an-hour later they were out on the open sea beyond the harbour in a cockleshell even frailer than Quiller's little craft which they had not been able to secure. The sea was very quiet, only broken by an occasional long swell that drove them southward like driftwood.
These have tumbled down from the cliffs above and constitute a vast pile of huge angular fragments. On these we build a path for a quarter of a mile to a small sand-beach covered with driftwood, through which we clear a way for several hundred yards, then continue the trail over another pile of rocks nearly half a mile farther down, to a little bay.
It is probable that the river is nearly as low now as it is ever found. High-water mark can be observed 40, 50, 60, or 100 feet above its present stage. Sometimes logs and driftwood are seen wedged into the crevices over-head, where floods have carried them. About ten o'clock, Powell, Bradley, Howland, Hall, and I start up a side canyon to the east.
We meantime collected driftwood and dry branches from under the trees to make a fire. We placed a pile some way up the beach close to the grove of trees, so that the flames might be concealed by the overhanging cliffs and hills on either side, and thus, although there might be natives in the neighbourhood, we might escape being seen.
"Ay, lad," Amos Swan replied, "you'll find the cove just as they left it. An I mistake not, the place where their fire was is still black upon the beach, and the rum-barrels are lying up among the driftwood. 'Twas there we found them on the second day. Ah, Jeremy, lad little we thought then we'd see you back safe and strong, and that so soon!"
It was a strange, restless populace, the majority here to-day, disappearing to-morrow cowboys, half-breeds, trackmen, graders, desperadoes, gamblers, saloon-keepers, merchants, generally Jewish, petty officials, and a riff-raff no one could account for, mere floating debris. The town was an eddy catching odd bits of driftwood such as only the frontier ever knew.
By the middle of July, the fetid drinking water was so reduced that the crew was put on half allowance; but on the sleepy, fog-blanketed swell of the Pacific slipping past Bering's wearied eyes, there were so many signs of land birds, driftwood, seaweed that the commander ordered the ship hove to each night for fear of grounding.
It had been her playground when she first came there, a motherless girl of twelve, and she had helped her father gather its scattered driftwood as the fortunes of the Millers were not above accepting these occasional offerings of their lordly neighbor. "I wouldn't go far to-day, Jenny," said her father, as the girl stepped from the threshold.
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