“As soon as the house is done, I shall have to see about a spinning-wheel and loom,” said Marian, “and oh! if we had only found them before!”
They cut out the brush systematically, clearing out, as thoroughly as they could, each bush as they came to it. Delbert and the little girls would take sticks and bend back the bushes, so that Marian could get at them to chop them off near the ground with the hatchet; then with ropes they would drag them to the corral and pile them on the fence. They were trying to make it very solid and compact, also a little larger than before.
In this way they managed to release every pole that had been in the fence, and they piled them at one side to await the time when they should be ready for them at the new house.
They were not so very successful with the lime. They burned a good many shells before they produced what was at all satisfactory.
They found that there were not enough shells near by, but off across the bay, at the mouth of one of the esteros, was a bank that had seemed to be composed almost entirely of shells; so they took the Muggywah and made several trips there, coming back loaded down with all the shells they could carry. These shells were very old and broken, but Marian thought they would probably make as good lime as fresh ones would. There were other places, too, where shells were more plentiful than near home, and they made trips after them.
While they were gathering the shells they cut a good many pitalla poles, peeled the green bark off them, and left them to dry before taking them home. Delbert used his stone hatchet for that work; he had made a handle for it, as Marian said probably the first owner had, by splitting a stick down and tying it above and below where the hatchet was inserted, and while he could not, of course, chop wood with it, the soft green pitalla bark yielded to it very well. To be sure, it was no better, even for this purpose, than the other hatchet, but think how much more romantic it is to work with an ancient stone hatchet than with an ordinary little modern steel one!
Delbert thought so much of that hatchet that Marian said he had better give it a name, and told him about King Arthur’s sword Excalibur; but when Delbert asked her if she thought that would be a good name for the hatchet, she said she thought they had better modify it a little and call it the “Exscalper” instead, because, though it might once have been used to scalp with, it was not in that business now.
These pitalla poles are hollow, but durable and comparatively straight, and are much used in building the humbler homes of western Mexico.
EXSCALPER