“Marian,” said Delbert, “I can’t think of a thing between Mr. Pearson and Mr. Cunningham, except that Mr. Cunningham didn’t like his work when he first came and discharged him from the shop. But he has been working somewhere else ever since; that needn’t have made him mad.”
“Probably there is something that we don’t know about,” she said.
“Well,” he persisted, “I bet Mr. Cunningham didn’t know about it either. He wouldn’t have sent him out with us if he hadn’t thought he was all right. There was a fishline and hooks, too, in the locker,” he continued. “Did you see anything of them, Marian?”
She shook her head. “He only left us the crackers and canned stuff—oh, and a box of matches, and I had another one in our basket.”
“How many fires can we build with them?” he asked.
“A good many, but we don’t need to use them; we can keep live coals over from one time to another, as papa does in the fireplace winters. That is what we’ll do and use the matches only when we really have to. On a sunshiny day I could light a fire with the crystal from my watch.”
They had never heard of such a thing, and Jennie and Esther wanted her to take it off and show them how at once.
Marian declined. “We have a fire now,” she said. “The thing for us to do is never to let it go out, day or night. If it goes out in spite of us, because of something we cannot help, then we can build one some other way.”
“Don’t people on desert islands build signal fires?” asked Delbert.
“Yes, and put out flags of distress, too. We couldn’t keep a fire going all night, but we could put up one of the towels or the tablecloth daytimes, and we can build our fire nights where it can be seen out at sea. And I think about the first thing we’d better do is to get up a woodpile.”