"I have settled one thing in my own mind," Prime declared, while he was assiduously drying a leaf of the soaked tobacco for the after-dinner smoke. "If I am ever cast away again, I'm going to make dead sure that I have a Domestic Science expert for a fellow sufferer. Lucetta, you are simply great when it comes to making something out of nothing. What are we going to do with this flour-and-meal pudding?"
"We are going to dry it carefully and then grind it up again on a flat stone and go on as before," was the cheerful reply. "That is my part of it, and yours will be a good bit harder; you will have to make some new paddles and contrive some way to patch that big hole in the canoe."
Prime laughed hilariously. His head was still aching, but the disaster had fallen so far short of the ultimate fatalities that the small discomforts were as nothing.
"I can imagine both the paddles and the patch," he boasted. "It remains to be seen whether or not I can turn them into serviceable realities."
While the dunnage was drying and Lucetta was regrinding her flour and meal Indian-fashion on a smooth stone, Prime hacked manfully at a small spruce and finally got it down. It took him the better part of the afternoon to split the tree with wooden wedges and to get out two pieces to be hewn roughly with the axe into the paddle shape. Over the evening fire he whittled laboriously with the sharper of the two hunting-knives, and when the knife grew dull he learned by patient trial to whet it on a bit of stone. To keep him company, Lucetta had recourse to the fish-bone needle. Her clothes had not come scathless out of the cataract disaster and its aftermath.
"You have one of the best of the good qualities, Donald," she said, marking the patience with which the whittling went on. "You are not afraid to buckle down to the necessity and keep on trying."
"'Patient continuance in well-doing,'" he quoted, grinning. "I learned that, up one side and down the other, in the writing trade. It is about the only thing that gets you anywhere."
"You had a hard time making your start in the writing, didn't you?" she offered.
"When did I ever tell you that?"
"You told me something about it the first day we were together, and a good bit more last night."