The three rooms in Captain Eli’s cottage were devoted to hospital purposes and Jack and Ray and Mr. Warner shared the bunk-house with the rest of the crew for the time. Old Mitchell, the lobsterman, and Captain Eli took turns as physician and nurse to the unfortunate swordfishermen and worked diligently to restore them to normal health. Daily Jack and either Mr. Warner or Big O’Brien visited the cottage to learn how the patients fared, and on several occasions they entered the sickrooms and tried to cheer up the men. But Ray, for reasons of his own, would not accompany them.
Indeed, since the day he saved his uncle from drowning Ray had been acting very peculiarly. He seemed undetermined what to do and Jack and Mr. Warner could not help sympathizing with him. Somehow, seeing his uncle close to the point of death, had made the lad forgive him for his past brutality. In truth, his heart had softened to the point where he would have been quite willing to do anything he could for the old swordfisherman. But though his intentions were good, he was quite timid in carrying them out, for, as he explained to Jack, he was not sure how his kinsman would receive him. For that reason he refrained from going near his uncle’s bedside or communicating with him in any way. He satisfied himself by visiting the cottage occasionally and inquiring from Mitchell or Captain Eli as to the state of his uncle’s health.
The lightkeeper and the fisherman proved efficient physicians, however, for they rallied the men gradually and by the end of the week had them so that they could hobble downstairs and sit out in front of the cottage in the sunshine. Duncan and Beck seemed to regain their strength faster than Ray’s uncle, and in a short time after their first appearance downstairs they were going about the camp as hale and hearty as ever. Vance Carroll, however, did not find his strength as rapidly as the younger men, and for many a day he went hobbling about with the assistance of a cane which Captain Eli loaned him.
As soon as the storm had subsided the camp turned its attention to repairing the damage that the breakers had done out there on Cobra Head. The steel tower of the cableway needed repairing, new derricks had to be erected, new tool boxes constructed, and tremendous quantities of kelp and rockweed cleared away before the men could begin their building where they had left off before the storm. Of course, with these added tasks to be accomplished, Jack and Ray found that their duties increased in proportion. They, too, were very hard at work carrying out little details that Mr. Warner entrusted to them.