After dinner there were walks to take, little coves to examine, or ropes to braid. Marian watched over the children with eyes of a most jealous, brooding love. Never had they seemed so dear to her, never so sweet and precious. She was constantly thinking up things to amuse as well as benefit them. Of course, she could not perform impossibilities, and there were some doleful days. There was one perfectly awful day when she found Jennie huddled down behind a rock, crying for her mother. And Delbert would sit for an hour at a time on Lookout Rock, gazing out over the water, so wistful and disconsolate that it made Marian’s throat choke up just to see him, and she would rack her brain for some interesting thing to set him at to keep him busy.
But it is only fair to say that the doleful spots came far less often than one would have supposed they would. Marian was always steadfast in her assurance that some one would find them some day. They would take good care of each other and be as happy as they could till some one should come and take them back to the Port. And she herself always kept a cheerful face. Her loving voice and sunny smile, her merry little ways, inspired confidence. As much as possible she made it appear that a desert-island experience was a very desirable thing to have happen to one. She twisted things till they looked like a joke, and in the process often found herself growing as light-hearted as she wanted the children to be.
The bill of fare was limited, to be sure, but they brought to it appetites sharpened by the constant exercise they were taking in the sea air and the sunshine.
One day up in the pasture they ran across a panal.[3] This is the nest of a kind of wild bee and is made of the same material that our hornets use in constructing their homes, but the bee itself is not so large as a hornet. Marian saw the nest first and pointed it out to the other children merely as a matter of curiosity, but Delbert straightway became excited.
[3] Pronounced pah-nahlʹ; plural, pah-nahʹ-layss. It is the regular Spanish word for honeycomb.
There was honey in that bees’ nest; he knew it; splendid honey. Hadn’t Clarence bought some once of an Indian and given him a lot? And Clarence had told him all about panales. You take all the outside honey and comb away and leave the core, and they will build on again, just as tame bees will.
Marian was a little dubious. Honey was all very well, but stings were not at all desirable. How were they to proceed to get the sweet store?
“We have no bee-smoker,” she reminded him, “and if we had, there are no rags to be burned in it.”
“Huh!” declared Delbert scornfully, “do you s’pose the Indians have smokers?—or rags either? No, sirree! they just build a fire of trash they gather up. Besides, the stings of these little bees don’t amount to shucks!”
It was not in Marian’s policy to discourage him from doing anything not actually dangerous to life and limb, and she was glad he was willing to dare the stings; so she said they would go back to the Cave for the little dishpan and some coals to start a smudge with, and see what they could do.