"Not I," I returned grimly. "We won't look for trouble; but if it comes our way we'll meet it."
"Ja," he said, and bent to his oars.
We did not enter the second stream, because the swamps along its course presented no landing-place, but ran our boat aground on a sandy bank on the far side of a point which concealed us from the Walrus. Then we took our guns and walked inland through the trees up a graduated sandy slope to the top of a little hillock whence we could look off through the aisles of pines and see the Walrus, with boats putting off from her sides and pulling into the mouth of the first of the two streams, and over a spur of Skeleton Island the topmasts of the Royal James.
"This would be a good place for a fort," I mused.
"Ja," said Peter. "You got water, too."
He pointed to a streak of green vegetation along the sandy slope of the knoll which we traced to a spring issuing from the summit.
"Now we got water, we better eat," he added.
"But what about the goats?" I cried. "We were to——"
"No," he insisted stubbornly; "we don't shoodt. If we shoodt, der pirates hear us andt come. We waidt until they are all ashore. Then we go back to Murray."
"I'll not be driven from the first pleasure we have had in months," I protested childishly.