“With sticks and stones,” he answered. “He was right there in the path by my last trap, and I settled his hash in a jiffy. Say, Marian, he looks nice and fat. Bobbie’s Uncle Jim says they are as good eating as eel.”
Marian gasped, “Snakes!” But the clams were getting scarce in the immediate vicinity, and she had even begun to imagine that the crabs were not quite so plentiful on the little sand-beaches.
“The history says,” continued Delbert, “that when the Spaniards were conquering this country and South America, sometimes when parties were sent out to go to places and got lost and wandered around, they had to eat roots and snakes and toads.”
Marian was thinking she had certainly heard of people eating rattlesnakes and—well—“All right,” she said, turning away to the construction of the fishline, “you skin it, Delbert, and I’ll cook it.”
The filtered water in the demijohn did not last very long, of course, and when it was gone Marian marshaled all hands to clean out the spring. She usually marshaled all hands when there was anything to be done, because somehow she could not bear to have any of the children out of her sight for any length of time. When they were with her she knew they were safe. True, there seemed to be little danger of any kind, save that they were surrounded with plenty of water to drown in, and there was no knowing how many more rattlesnakes the Island might possibly contain.
She had hoped that when she got the stones cleared away the spring would reveal itself as something extra good in the way of water-supply, but it did not. Indeed, she was reluctantly forced to the conclusion that it was no spring at all, only a shallow little well.
In the rainy season the water falling on these islands sinks into the sand and stays there. One could find fresh water any time by digging at a little distance back from the beach, where the sand lay in hills and hollows, and Marian concluded that the only reason why the water came to the surface in that particular spot was because it was situated in a decided depression of the ground.
So she dug and scooped till she had a hole with about a foot of water in it, and then she smoothed the sides and laid rocks so the sandy soil should not cave in. From the tracks abounding in the vicinity she concluded that the deer and burros both were accustomed to drink there, and while she was willing that they should continue to do so, she did not want them poking their noses into the very pool that she must dip from for her little flock; so she made a cover with some sticks and pieces of driftwood and some stones to keep them in place, and then, to be still surer, she hollowed out another place for her four-footed neighbors. The old dig-spoon and the little spade were her chief tools in these labors.
“Dear me! Delbert,” she said playfully, “why didn’t we have sense enough to bring a hoe and shovel with us?”
“Huh!” he retorted gloomily, “if we had had any sense we’d have stayed at home.”