“We get a fair amount of shelter from the wind, you see,” remarked Thad, as he looked around him.
“But, Thad, it took that tree over like a shot,” remonstrated Bumpus.
“Yes, because it had a clear sweep at its top,” he was told, “for these other trees are not nearly so tall as the one that went down. Then if you examine the stump you can see that it was rotten at the heart, though it didn’t show outside to any extent. That’s the way with lots of men who, as they say, can smile and smile again, and yet be villains.”
“When we go to write up this trip for our log book,” Davy observed at this juncture, “I think it ought to go down as a sort of Robinson Crusoe story. Because right now we’re wrecked on a desert island, with a limited amount of stuff along, and may be compelled to resort to all sorts of things for a living.”
“I wonder if there’s any game over here to help out, if we have to stay a long time?” ventured Giraffe, the hunter instinct strong within him. “Course we couldn’t expect to find wild goats, like Robinson did, but then there might be rabbits, and even squirrels and raccoons.”
“Ugh! I’d just like to see myself eating a part of a raccoon!” exclaimed the particular scout, lifting both hands to further indicate his disgust.
“Well, you may have that pleasure, if we stay here long enough, Smithy,” he was assured by Giraffe; “now, as for me, I’d as soon partake of a ’coon as I would a young pig. ’Possum I know is fine, and I reckon the other would go all right.”
“And I happen to have several fishhooks in my haversack that I forgot to remove after our last trip, when we went South with Thad; so you see we might pull in some fish if we got real hard pressed,” and Bumpus smiled contentedly as he made this statement, for which he was applauded by Giraffe and Davy.
“Speaking about Robinson Crusoe,” said Thad, “our case runs along a good deal like his for other reasons than that we’re stranded on an island. You know he hewed out a boat so big that he couldn’t get it down to the water; and we’ve got one on our hands so heavy that all of us couldn’t budge her an inch when we tried to drag the same further up on the shore.”
“Wonder if the case is going to keep on in parallel lines,” mused Bumpus; “for you know how old Robinson found the footprints of savages on the sand one morning. What if we do here on our island?”