That morning, out on one of the salt reefs, they found a log in among the mango bushes, where it had hitherto lain unseen. Marian judged that it had been tossed there by the storm the night of their arrival, for it did not appear to have lain there so very long.
Of course, they worked and tugged till they had it in the water, and it was so much of an improvement over the old canoe that they straightway discarded that,—Marian later working it into the corral,—and every day they went out on the log.
It floated in shallower water than the canoe and was easily poled or paddled wherever they wished to go, but it had two drawbacks; first, it had nothing to which the rope could be tied to moor it,—but that really did not matter much for they could roll it up on the beach out of reach of the water; but for the second, it was so round and smooth that it was forever rolling over and spilling some one off into the water, and this drawback simply had to be put up with.
One morning, down in the cove, Delbert found a small watermelon. Probably it had been lost overboard from some steamer passing by out in the Gulf, for it was many a long league to where such things were grown, yet in any case it seemed a wonderful thing that, with all that waste of tossing water, that little melon, scarce as large as Marian’s head, should have drifted into San Moros and then into their cove. It was ripe and they ate it, gnawing down the rind to the very outside. Ordinarily Marian would not have allowed that, but so small a melon divided into five pieces did not give a very large piece to each one, and they were hungry for something besides animal food, and had not found a really good bunch of bananas yet.
They saved the seeds of the melon and decided to plant a patch with them, though they hoped to be rescued long before they could eat of the fruits of their labor. To plant the patch would give them something new to do, and perhaps some one else would be benefited by the crop even if they were not.
Marian had never been much of a gardener, but she thought the long, low, sandy point would be a good place to plant, for by digging down a little there they would reach soil that was always damp with the fresh water underneath; so the garden would not need irrigation, and she had heard some one say that sandy soil was good for melons.
Delbert remembered reading in his history that the North American Indians used to put a fish in each hill of corn for fertilizer, and he wanted to try it. But fish were not so easily secured as to warrant that; they were growing scarce in High-Tide Pool, and in other places they were not very hungry somehow, and it was rare, indeed, when Delbert could manage to spear one with his one-pronged spear.
However, the traps were gathering in rabbits pretty frequently, and the discarded portions of these could be used instead. So they planted their melon-patch, digging holes down to the damp soil and planting the seeds in the bottoms with a little fertilizer near. Marian saved half the seeds in case the planting should not prosper and should have to be done over again.
When they had finished that labor and were proudly viewing their neat rows of melon holes, Delbert suddenly exclaimed, “Say, Marian! I bet I know where we could get some more vegetable seeds.”
“For pity’s sake, where?”