“For amateur sportsmen, gentlemen,” said I, “you’re doing pretty well. Your funny little turtle, Jimmy, is nothing but a diamond-back terrapin. There are perhaps more of them on this coast than anywhere else in the world to-day. And Partial, here—that friend of ours now leaping excitedly and joyously before them, barking at this little turtle of Jimmy’s—will perhaps be able to help you find some more of them in the grass—the market hunters here hunt them with dogs, as perhaps you did not know.”
“We got some oysters, Sir,” said Willy, coming forward shyly and shamefacedly; and showed me the cockpit of the duck boat pretty well filled. The boy had, it seems, found a reef of these in a brackish arm which made inland, and dug them by the simple process of stooping down below the surface of the water, since he had no oyster tongs.
“Well,” said I, “it looks as if we would fare pretty well for lunch. John”—and I called my China boy—“again I find renewed cause for felicitations on your rescue.”
John stood looking at me blankly.
“You savee, John?” said I, showing him one of the canvasbacks, and he remarked mildly, “All litee.” If anything, his lunch was better than his breakfast, and when I saw him take Jimmy’s funny little turtle from him and examine it with appraising eye, I felt fairly well convinced that we should not suffer at the dinner hour.
But though a certain gaiety now came to others of the party as we sat about our midday meal, warm now and well fed, and although the boys excitedly made plans about putting up the tent and furnishing it and going into camp for the winter, I could not share their eagerness. There was one other reticent figure at our fireside. Helena sat silent, the head of Partial in her lap. I felt resentment that she should steal from me even my dog. At last, having nothing better to do, I picked up my gun, and slipping on my coat, started down the beach, telling the boys that I was going alone, perhaps too far for them to follow, with the purpose of making some sort of an exploration of the island.
Moody and depressed, not in the least well satisfied with life, even with matters thus so far more fortunate than we had so recently had reason to expect, I walked along the hard sand, sometimes looking at the long lines of wild fowl streaming in above the fresh-water lagoon, but in reality thinking but little of these. I did not at first hear the light step which came behind me on the sand.