Wednesday the Tenth by Grant Allen

Time went on, and the boys began to grow visibly fatter. It was Tuesday evening, and we hoped, putting on all steam as we were doing, to reach Tanaki by the small hours of Wednesday morning, in good season to relieve the four unhappy souls still, as we believed, detained there in captivity. We were strained on the very rack of excitement, indeed, with our efforts to arrive before the savages could take any further step; and the boys' anxiety for their parents' and their sister's safety had naturally communicated itself to us, as we listened to their story. Why, it was that very evening that Martin had told us the rest of his strange tale -- how his father and mother, with his younger brother Calvin and his sister Miriam, had been confined by the savages in the grass-hut temple, while he and Jack were put to lie in an open out-house hard by, guarded only by a single half-intoxicated Kanaka.

Well, in the middle of the night, those two brave boys had silently gnawed their ropes asunder, and creeping past their guard had stolen away to the beach in the desperate effort to escape in search of assistance. There, they luckily found the mission boat hauled down on the shore; and waiting only to take a can of water from the spring close by, and a bunch of half-ripe bananas from a garden on the harbor, they had put forth alone on their wild and adventurous voyage across the lone Pacific. I can tell you, it brought the tears to our eyes more than once, rough sailors as we were, to hear the strange story of their hopeless sail, and it made our blood boil to learn how these ungrateful savages had repaid the earnest and devoted life-labor of the unhappy missionaries.