The prow being under water, they could not very well use the hole in it to tie the rope to, but at one place in the bottom there was a knothole, and Marian firmly wedged a stick into that. With a rope fastened to this stick they could tie the canoe where it would float out quite a little distance from shore, and then they could swim out to it. She soon found her little flock were improving in their swimming lessons. With the old canoe at hand it did not matter so much if one did get beyond one’s depth a little; it gave one security.
Then pretty soon, when they began to get the knack of making the old thing move along in the water where they wanted it to, they would go out to the little sandbars and reefs that had before been beyond their reach.
Some of these had mango bushes where a certain variety of small oyster attached themselves to the stems and rocks, where they could be easily gathered at low tide. One had an outcropping of rock in one place which had several basin-like depressions, which Marian cleaned out and made use of. She would boil down sea-water in her kettle, till it was about a saturated solution, and then put it into the demijohn, and when that was full would take it over and empty it into those shallow rock basins, where the sun evaporated it till nothing was left but the salt.
Close on the heels of the food problem had come that of clothing. Marian thanked her stars that the soil of the Island was sandy and brushed off easily, but even with that in their favor they had not been on the Island so very long before their clothing sadly needed washing. She put her whole flock into their bathing-suits and washed everything else. But that made such inroads on her lone cake of soap that she decided things must do without soap in the future, and what dirt would not come out with water and sunshine would have to stay in. That went sorely against the grain, for Mrs. Hadley was a notoriously neat and clean woman and had trained her daughter in her own spick-and-span ways; but it could not be helped.
Before long it became plain that the question of washing was not all there was to it either. Clothes constantly worn will in time wear out, and Marian’s little flock soon became shabby as well as dingy. She staved off the evil day for a while by decreeing that the bathing-suits must be worn all the time, and so the other clothes were folded away up at the Cave, to await the blest day when some one should wander into San Moros and take them all back to the Port.
The children were willing enough. It did away with the need of dressing and undressing, for they had so little bedding that Marian let them sleep in their suits too. Davie could not see any use in clothes anyway, except when he was cold. Before long he rebelled against even the little bathing-suit, and as there was no one to see and criticize, his sister let him run from morning till night absolutely naked. He was so fat and dimpled and sweet that the other children liked him best that way, and his little body became so tanned that Marian called him a little Indian, and because he strutted about in such a lordly way she dubbed him Hiawatha. That tickled Delbert, who then tied his little brother’s hair in tufts and stuck them full of feathers.
Delbert himself began to need the barber’s services, but when Jennie told him so one day he declared he was not going to have his hair cut, he was going to let it grow long and make fishlines of it.
“You’ll look fine,” said she, scornfully; “a boy with pigtails; you’d better cut it, Marian.”
But Marian, with a mental vision of how fine he would look after she had barbered him with the buttonhole scissors, decided in favor of pigtails.
So Delbert tied a string about his forehead, stuck feathers in it, and demanded an Indian name. Marian named him Chingachgook. Of course the little girls wanted Indian names too, so she told Jennie she could be Wahtawah and Esther Pocahontas.