“I guess I do,” said the boy slowly; “but you haven’t got near enough thread to make a line strong enough to amount to shucks. That colored silk would be all right, but you’ve got only a teenty bit of that.”
Marian smiled. “Why is your rope better than a common one?” she asked him.
“’Cause it’s hair and it won’t rot and wear out like the fiber ones.”
Marian was unbraiding one of the long braids that hung over her shoulder and with the scissors she snipped out here and there, where it would not show, quite a number of tresses.
“Here,” she said, “you get busy now and let’s see if you know how to braid a nice, smooth, round line, and then you can show me how, too.”
“O Marian, your pretty, pretty hair!”
“Yes, I know; it has been my pretty hair all my life, and it’s high time it was useful as well as ornamental.”
But it took a long time to braid the line, and food had to be secured meantime. Food!—that was the main topic of conversation,—to find clams, to get big crabs, to make traps and set and watch them afterwards. Never a fish was sighted but they wondered if it was good to eat; never a bird flew over but they discussed whether or not it would cook up tender. Delbert used to go twice a day, at least, to look over his traps. Simple things they were, made of sticks fastened together with strips of rag torn from the towel that had been wrapped around the bread, and afterwards of the fibrous stems of the banana leaves. Every day he saw rabbits, and one day he threw a stone that hit one on the head and stunned it, and he despatched it with his knife. He did not seem to mind killing the things that got into his traps, and Marian was glad he did not, since it had to be done.
It was after the rabbit incident that the little boy came in one day from making the round of the traps, holding by the tail a good-sized rattlesnake.