"Well, I don't think it likely that we'd find any visible remains of a well in the other place, and if we did we'd have to dig it all out again. Why not dig here?"
After some discussion, and the examination of the shore for a short distance in each direction, this suggestion was adopted. The building of a shelter was easy work. It was necessary only to erect a framework of poles, to cut bushes and place them against the sides for walls, and to cover the whole with palmete leaves—that is to say, with the leaves of a species of dwarf palm which grows in that region in abundance. These leaves are known to persons at the North only in the form of palm-leaf fans. On the coast of South Carolina they grow in all the swamps and woodlands.
A little labor made a bunk for the boys to sleep upon, and while Ned and Charley filled it with long gray Spanish moss, Jack got dinner ready, first rowing out from shore and catching fish enough for that meal while his companions finished the house.
"Now," said Jack, when dinner was over and the boys had stretched themselves out for a rest, "it's nearly sunset, and we're all tired. We've got the best part of two kegs of water left, so I move that we don't begin digging our well till morning."
"Agreed," said the other boys, glad enough to be idle.
"Now, I've got something I want you to tell me about," said Jack. "Two things, in fact." With that, he went to the boat and looked about. Presently he came back and said:
"One of 'em's dried up. Here's the other."
He handed Ned a queer-looking fish, almost black, about eight inches long, very slender, and very singularly shaped.
"See," he said; "its jaw protrudes in so queer a way that I can't make out which side of the creature is top and which bottom. Turn either side you please up, and it looks as if you ought to turn the other up instead; and then the thing has a sort of match-lighter on top of his head, or on the bottom—I don't know which it is. Look."
He pointed to the creature's head. There was a flat, oval figure there, made by a ridge in the skin, and the flat space enclosed within this oval line was crossed diagonally by other ridges, arranged with perfect regularity. The whole looked something like the figure on the opposite page.