“There!” she cried; “does that look anything like it, Delbert?”
“It does! it does! That’s it exactly! How did you guess?”
“I didn’t guess. I have seen one myself somewhere, but didn’t know what it was for. I think I saw a couple of them down at Doña Luisa’s one morning when I went down for milk. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Let’s see how this complicated machine will work.”
She twisted a little of the tangled fiber round the knob on the driftwood stick and began to twirl. Of course it promptly twisted the fiber into a little strand.
“Here, Delbert,” she said, “you whirl this while I spin out the strand, or else it will all twist up in bunches.” Sitting down by the little pile of fibers, she grasped the twisting strand in one hand so that it should spin out of an even size. “Now, whirl away,” she said, “and back off as fast as it spins out.”
“This is just the way they did it,” said Delbert. “I remember now, there were two of them; one whirled the stick, and the other sat down and pulled the strand out of the pile of fiber just as you are doing it.” And he backed off, whirling vigorously, until the little pile of tangled fibers was all used up.
“There,” she said, “that is a lot better than twisting it just with our fingers, as we have been doing with the banana fiber, and it certainly beats braiding all hollow. We can twist and twist and twist, and then we can put as many strands as we want to into the rope.”
They worked that night till they had used up all their fiber, and then went to bed, agreeing to go next day and gather more mescal plants.
In the morning, when Marian raked open her fire, she raked out the stump of the mescal plant. It was brown and juicy. She began to examine it.
“Looks good. Doesn’t it?” she said to the children, who were rolling out of the Cave.