“Yes. I was thinking of how we could get down some cocoa-nuts. There are plenty of bananas.”
“Hapes,” put in Dinny; “and there’s a cabbage growing in the heart of every one of thim bundles of leaves on the top of a shtick as they call palms; but them’s only vegetables, captain, dear, and me shtomach is asking for mate.”
“Can we easily shoot a pig—you say there are some,” said Abel.
“And is it aisily shoot a pig?” said Dinny. “Here, give me the mushket.”
He held out his hand for the piece, and Abel, who bore it, hesitated for a moment or two, and glanced at Jack, who nodded shortly, and the loaded weapon was passed to the Irishman.
“Ye doubted me,” he said, laughing; “but niver mind, it’s quite nat’ral. Come along; I won’t shoot anny of ye unless I’m very hungry and can’t get a pig.”
He led the way through an opening in the rough el if, and they climbed along a narrow ravine for some few hundred yards, the roar of the sea being hushed and the overhanging trees which held on among the rifts of the rocks shutting out the evening light, so that at times it was quite dusk. But the rocky barrier was soon passed, and an open natural park spread before them, in a depression of which lay a little lake, whose smooth grassy shores were literally ploughed in every direction with shallow scorings of the soil.
“Look at that now,” said Dinny in a whisper, as he pointed down at some of the more recent turnings of the soft earth. “The purty creatures have all been as busy as Pat Mulcahy’s pig which nobody could ring. Whisht! lie down, ye divils,” he whispered, setting the example, and crouching behind a piece of rock.
The others hid at once, and a low grunting and squeaking which had suddenly been heard in the distance increased loudly; and directly after a herd of quite two hundred pigs came tearing down through a narrow opening in the rocky jungle and made straight for the lake.
They were of all sizes, from little plump fellows, half the weight of ordinary porkers, to their seniors—the largest of which was not more than half the dimensions of an English pig.