"What makes you think I am quarreling with her?"
"Hoo! I've got eyes, I guess. Of course, you've been decently polite to her, but a blind person could see that it was just put on. The veneer wasn't cracked then. I shudder to think what will happen when it gets all cracked and peelly."
I thought it was time for a diversion, so I turned the tables upon her.
"How will it be with you after the veneer glue lets go?"
"Oh, me?—I'm just a crude little brute, anyway. I don't just see how I could change for the worse. I'm saying this because I know it is what you are thinking. But there's one comfort. Billy won't see any difference in me, no matter what I do. And Billy himself won't change; he's too obvious."
We prolonged our watch until nearly noon, when the professor and his wife came out to relieve us. It may say itself that during our two hours or more of horizon-searching we saw no signs of a rescue vessel. In the wide three-quarters of a circle visible from the western point of the island—a point where I had spent many weary hours after the shipwreck of the Mary Jane—there had been only the calm expanse of sea and sky with nothing to break the monotony.
At the camp under the palms we found things settling into some sort of routine. A fire was going in the rude fire place built of rough chunks of the coral, and Mrs. Van Tromp and her athletic eldest were cooking dinner. The major and Holly Barclay were still loafing on the beach, both of them smoking as though we had a Tampa cigar factory to draw upon instead of a strictly limited supply of Van Dyck's "perfectos." Madeleine and Beatrice Van Tromp, working together, were trying to fashion a basket out of stripped palm fronds—though just what purpose a basket would serve I couldn't imagine.
Billy Grisdale, suddenly become useful, was gathering bits of wood for the cooking fire. Jack Grey, who, besides being a rising young attorney, had a flair for building things, was adding to the thatch of the dunnage shelter, and Annette was helping him. Ingerson was invisible, and so was Van Dyck. Miss Mehitable, whose health may or may not have been all that it should be, was lying in her hammock, and Conetta, ever dutiful, was fanning her with a broad palmetto leaf. Among the workers it was Jerry Dupuyster who appeared in the most original rôle. In the nattiest of one-piece bathing suits—supplied, as I made no doubt, out of the luggage of one of the Van Tromp girls—he had swum the lagoon to the wreck of the Mary Jane, where he now appeared, a symphony in cerise stripes and bare legs, hacking manfully at the wreck with a hand-axe to the end that we might increase our scanty stock of firewood.
After the noon meal, at which Van Dyck appeared just as we were sitting down to it, Jerry and I were told off to go on sentry duty at the eastern end of the island, where we were to establish another distress signal.
"Us for the sentry-go, old chappie," said Jerry cheerfully, and together we took the beach trail for our post.