Only a meal of little hot roasted potatoes, without butter, pepper, or salt, but no banquet of the choicest luxuries could have tasted half so good. They were done to a turn, and though very small, of the most desirable flavour, and satisfying to a degree.
“Try another, sir, try another,” Ned kept on saying; but Jack needed no urging, and as he sat there eating one after another, the sun seemed to be less hot, the place around more beautiful, the shore less distant, and the possibility of their reaching the yacht that night more and more of a certainty. But that certainty began to grow into doubt when, well satisfied by their meal, the pair lay back to rest a little before making a fresh start.
“Must give the second batch time to get well done, sir, and to cool a bit, before we toddle, and then we ought to be on the look-out for water. A good drink wouldn’t come amiss.”
“No,” replied Jack slowly; “but hadn’t we better get some more wood to put on? The fire’s getting very low.”
“No, sir, it’s just right. There’s a good heap of embers now, and by the time the wood’s all burned the potatoes will be about done. Think any one planted them here first?”
“I should say they were planted by the captain who left the pigs.”
“Then I say he ought to have a monument, sir, for it was the finest thing he ever did in his life—much finer than anything I shall ever do. My, how different everything looks after you’ve had a good feed!”
Jack made no reply to that, but said, a minute or so later—
“Think the savages have seen our fire, Ned?”
There was no reply.