The baby was calling “Aye” most lustily.
“There,” declared Delbert, “that’s a m’jority, Marian. Three out of five’s a m’jority.”
Marian drew Jennie tenderly to her. “Delbert wants to go to Smugglers’ Island to-morrow. It is a long way, but perhaps you would not be seasick in the launch. Do you want to go?”
The little girl’s shining eyes were answer enough. Marian laughed and kissed her. “Delbert,” she said then, “take that bill that is in my purse down to Mr. Cunningham now and refund him for the duties on these packages and thank him for me,—don’t forget that,—and then see if he can let us have the launch to-morrow. It may be let to some one else, but if it isn’t, and if we can have it, why, pay him for that too, and don’t forget that. But I warn you children there’s not a thing for lunch but bread and butter. I haven’t so much as a cooky in the jar, and it’s too late for me to bake now.”
Previously there had lived at the Port for some years an American boy whose chief joy in life had been found on the water, and, having been blest with a small sailboat of his own, he had been able to indulge his sailor propensities to the utmost. Sometimes with other boys, often alone, he had sailed up and down the coast for miles, exploring the shallow bays and winding esteros,[1] and he knew all the sandbars and islands.
[1] An estero (pronounced es-tāʹ-ro) is an estuary, an arm of the sea.
A few miles out from the Port was a group of islands known to the Americans thereabouts as the Rosalie Group. The natives gave them another name, unpronounceable, and certainly unspellable. They consisted of quite an assortment of rocky knolls and stunted trees, and little beaches, fine for bathing. Most people confined their seaward excursions to trips of greater or less duration of time to these islands, some half-dozen in number, but Clarence had ventured much farther; he had even gone as far as San Moros, many miles down the coast.
San Moros was a wide-mouthed, shallow bay, full of rocks and sandbars, but at its farther extremity the young explorer had discovered an island that gave unmistakable evidence of having once been inhabited,—probably by smugglers, as in times past they had flourished like the bay tree all up and down the west coast, as everybody knows.
Boy-like, Clarence had kept his discovery a secret, or at least had revealed it only to a chosen few, Marian and Delbert being among the elect. And when afterwards he had made a second trip to the place, Mrs. Hadley had allowed Delbert to go with him. Clarence had been fond of children and of Delbert in particular, and often took the little boy with him on his all-day trips on the water. On this occasion they had camped over and explored the Island and its surroundings.
It was long months now since Clarence’s family had moved from the Port, but Delbert had always been anxious for a second trip to the Island in San Moros, being eager to show it to Marian and his little sisters.