ng those who had listened so intently.

Then the few English-speaking people from the steerage began to whisper
hoarsely to their bewildered companions.

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER I.

The warm, summer season was well-advanced in this far southern land
before the strenuous, tireless efforts of the marooned settlers began to
show definite results.

Some six weeks after the stranding of the Doraine, staunch log cabins
were in course of completion along the base of the hills overlooking the
clear, rolling meadow-land to the north and east. Down in the lowlands
scores of men were employed in sowing and planting. The soil was rich.
Farmers and grain-raisers among the passengers were unanimously of
the opinion that almost any vegetable, cereal or fruit indigenous
to Argentina (or at the worst, Patagonia), could be produced here.
Uncertainty as to the duration of the warm period, so vital to the
growing and maturing of crops, was the chief problem. No time was to be
lost if there were to be harvests before the cold and blighting weather
set in.

It was extremely doubtful if the spring and summer seasons combined
covered more than five months in this latitude. Assuming that the
climate in this open part of the world was anything like that of the
Falkland Islands, the rainy season was overdue. Midwinter usually comes
in July, with the temperature averaging between 35 deg. and 10 deg.
above zero over a period of four or five months. At the time of the
wreck, the thermometers were registering about 70 deg. during the day,
and dropping to 50 deg. or thereabouts after nightfall. This would
indicate that spring was fairly well-advanced, and that midsummer might
be figured on as coming in January. It was now the end of November. Warm
weather probably would last until February or March. Possibly they
would be too late with their planting, but they went about it speedily,
determinedly, just the same.

All of them had had crop failures before. All of them had seen the
labour of months go for naught in the blight of an evening's frost, or
the sweep of a prairie fire. So here on this virgin isle, in soil whose
sod had never been turned, they sowed from the bins of the slumbering
ship. Wheat and oats and flax, brought from the Argentina plains;
potatoes, squash and beet-root; even beans and peas were tried, but with
small hope. And there were women ready to till the soil and work the
gardens, women to draw the strangely fashione