“When we’ve got more time,” Ken said, “I’ll remember to laugh at the sight of you complaining at the appearance of food. But right now I’m more interested in the next cupboard. Try again.”
Sandy braced himself as the barge twisted in a corkscrew dive. Then he closed his teeth around the knob of the next cupboard and pulled that one open. A row of cups hanging on hooks swayed violently with the movement of the barge, and small piles of plates and saucers would have flown into the room except for the guard rails that held them in place. Sandy’s glance fell on a flat traylike box on the upper shelf, above the level of his eye.
Ken saw it too. “That’s it!” he said excitedly. “It’s just like the box Mom keeps knives and forks in—in a drawer in the kitchen table. Can you get it down?”
“I’m certainly not going to leave it there,” Sandy told him.
There was one other chair in the cabin, besides the one that Ken was using. Sandy hooked a foot over one rung and dragged it along the floor, hopping painfully on the other foot. When the chair was beneath the cupboard he crawled up onto it, straightened up, and gave a shout of triumph.
“Plenty of knives!”
But the cupboard shelf was too shallow for him to poke his head in and pick one knife up with his teeth. After pondering for a moment Sandy finally clamped his teeth over the edge of the box, turned around, jumped down from the chair and made it to the table just as the box tilted forward. There was a rattle of cutlery on the floor, but there were still several pieces of battered kitchenware inside when the box thudded to the table.
Sandy grinned, massaging his aching jaw muscles against one shoulder. “I feel like a retriever,” he said, bending over to study the contents of his prize.
“Good doggie,” Ken applauded. “What luck?”
“One knife coming up,” Sandy assured him. He turned his back to the box and felt among the contents with his bound hands until he located the object he had noted there.