Carey eagerly related how they had passed the morning, not forgetting the fishing and the pearls.
“Well,” said the doctor, “we shall not starve. Pearl shell and pearls, eh? We must collect and save all we can, and I should think that we could collect enough cocoanuts to be very valuable, so that when the time comes for us to leave this place we shall not go empty away.”
The rest of the afternoon was spent leisurely strolling about the shore, for the most part in the shade of the cocoanut grove, a couple of the nuts
being cleverly knocked down by throws with the hatchet, used boomerang fashion, fortunately for the throwers without its displaying any of that weapon’s returning qualities.
They strolled on as far as the mouth of the river, where it glided as a shallow stream into the sea, not without result—a satisfactory one to Carey, who was well in advance, threading his way amongst the masses of bleached coral which here encumbered the shore.
Bostock was about to close up with the lad, but the doctor checked him.
“Let him have the satisfaction of saying that he was the first to discover the mouth of the river,” he said; but the words were hardly out of his lips when they saw the boy begin to stalk something, for he stopped and crept behind a mass of rock, and then after peering cautiously round it he crept to another and another till he was hidden from the lookers-on.
But directly after he re-appeared about a couple of hundred yards away, and signed to them to approach cautiously.
“Look to your gun, sir,” whispered Bostock, cocking the one he carried. “He’s seen a canoe.”