“No; they dig a certain kind of rock out and burn it, and it turns into lime; and they burn shells, and that makes lime too.”
“Shells? Well, we can get plenty of shells.”
“Yes, but I don’t know how to burn lime,—how long it takes or how it ought to look when it is right,—and I don’t know exactly how to work it afterwards either.”
“Can’t we experiment and find out? Burn just a few at first and see how they work?”
“I guess we’d better, for I don’t want this house falling down on us in a storm, and if I can get the frame of it absolutely solid, I’ll risk but what we can manage the rest of it all right.”
“What will you make the roof of?” asked Jennie.
“Thatch,” promptly responded Marian. “Don’t you remember all that tall thatch grass out beyond the lagoon? The Mexicans at the Port sometimes make their whole houses of it. And, Delbert, there is another big job ahead of us. We are going to need every pole that is in the corral fence; we must build a good brush fence to hold in the burros, so that we can have every stick and pole there, every piece of driftwood. I guess we’d better clear that patch of brush beyond the garden. It will be nicer cleared away, and we can pile it all on to the fence.”
They gathered a lot of shells that day, and, after a few experiments in their cooking-fire, made a little pile of alternate shells and wood and started it burning. Marian thought the shells ought probably to burn slowly; her idea was to rake out a few every now and then and see how things were going. Her only safe way was to mix a little mortar and see if it set hard.
Between times they worked on the brush fence. They had not progressed very far before they wished they had got at it at least two years sooner, for in the midst of the tangled growth of bushes, choked and stunted but still struggling to keep alive, they found a goodly number of cotton plants.
These must have been, along with the palms and the bananas, a part of the smugglers’ garden. There were three straggling rows, and most of the bushes had a few sickly-looking cotton bolls on them. They are never very large on that particular variety of plant, but none of these were larger than a small hen’s egg; indeed, most of them more closely resembled marbles. But they contained actual cotton, and with care and some cultivation the plants would produce more and larger bolls. They gathered them—what few there were—and put them with the cotton-tree pods.