They found a considerable amount of damage,—the felling of many banana plants, half the patch in fact, the complete disappearance of every melon vine on the point, every plant in the garden beaten into the ground, the little pig gone, and their carefully gathered woodpile scattered to the four winds. But all this sank into insignificance beside the fact that not one log of the Muggywah was left to them. The tree had been uprooted and washed away bodily, and all search up and down the beaches revealed no trace of it. The great storm had cast many treasures at their feet, but they were so dispirited over their losses that they could not be very joyful over the gains.
Mechanically they lugged the wood up out of reach of the waves, which were still pounding angrily, gathered in a number of new bottles, and took note of the great masses of seaweed that would make fresh carpet when it was dry. But with all the wood there was no log like those of the lost Muggywah, and with all their gazing to sea they could not see anything that might of a bare possibility be an uprooted tree.
They fashioned a poor sort of a raft out of the best pieces of the driftwood, and with its aid explored the outer reefs and esteros and even as far as the egg islands. The raft was clumsy and slow and generally unmanageable, and Delbert said that it made him sick just to look at it, but they wanted to go longer distances than they could swim, and the float was made to serve.
At the end of about two weeks, however, Delbert said: “It’s no use, Marian. We are only wasting time. The Muggywah simply did not lodge anywhere near us. Maybe it didn’t lodge at all; it may be going yet, in three different directions, and our best ropes with it.”
“Yes, more’s the pity, Delbert. I hate losing your hair rope about as bad as losing the Muggywah herself.”
“Well,”—and the boy’s jaw set solid and square,—“there’s not a bit more use crying over a lost boat than there is in crying over spilt milk. We can’t find it, and we haven’t got a stick of timber fit to put into a new one either. We can’t walk back to the Port; it would be hundreds of miles to follow the coast line, and we should be sure to get lost if we tried any short cuts. If Davie was a couple of years older, I’d say to risk it. But we aren’t going to wait two more years. I want to see mother.” His voice broke a little, but he conquered it and went on. “There is only one thing to do; it has been in my head kind of hazy for some time, but now I’ve got it clear; we must fix the old canoe, Marian.”
“How?” asked Marian quietly, for she had never been able to think of any way to do that.
“Well, we must put a framework in the side that is gone, the hole, you know. I’m not sure yet just what is the best material, but I think palm-leaf stems would be,—we can burn holes through the canoe to fasten to,—a solid framework, that will not break and give way at any little tap, and as near the shape of the other side as we can make it. Then we’ll weave in basketwork, strong as we can, and, as we go, pack all the cracks full of fiber and pitalla tar. I’ve got it all studied out, Marian. We’ll weave the basketwork double with a space between, and in that space we can put stones, just enough to make that side of the canoe as heavy as the other. We’ll mix the fiber and tar together and pound it down as we go along, and when it’s all finished, if there come any cracks, we can fill them in with cotton and tar, and if we can’t jam it in tight enough so but what it still leaks some, why, one of us can bail all the time.”
“Do you know how to make pitalla tar?”
Delbert threw up his head.