“Ise know where chopper, but de hut all gone away.”
The wood-shed was standing though, and before very long, with Hannibal’s help, a good basketful of dry wood was cut; and after a long struggle and several dryings in the hot sun, the tinder and matches acted, and big fires were blazing in the house, whose floors were now only covered with mud.
Already the thatch and shingle roof had ceased to drip, and was rapidly drying, while by midday Sarah was busy at work with brush and pail cleansing the floors, and keeping the two blacks and myself busy bringing things out to dry, while Morgan was removing mud from the various objects within the house.
The main difficulty we had to encounter was how to find a dry resting-place for the night. Sheets and blankets promised to be quite fit for use by sundown, but the question was where to lay them. Every one naturally objected to the trees, and the ridge of the roof was no more inviting than on the first night. But a little ingenuity soon put all right. Timber was so plentiful with us that poles and planks lay piled up at the back of the house, and after a number of these had been hunted up, from where they had floated among the trees, and laid in the full sunshine, a platform was built up high above the muddy earth, and then another upon which pine boughs were laid, and good, dry resting-places contrived for our weary bones.
Chapter Twenty.
It is needless to relate the shifts and plans adopted to restore the place to its former state, but we were favoured by the weather, a long spell of hot sunshine working wonders, and the rapid drying and the work of many hands soon produced a change. In two days we could go about on dry ground. In four, mud was scaling over everything in cakes, and being cracked into dust it regularly powdered off the trees, and a couple of tremendous tropical showers sufficed to clear off the remainder from twig and leaf, so that what with the rapid vegetation, and the clearing effects of rain and dew, a month had hardly passed before the place began to look very much as it did before the misfortune, Morgan informing me smilingly that the soft mud was as good for the garden as a great dressing of manure.
Our furniture in the house was of the simplest, and though Sarah declared that the place would never be the same again, I very soon began to forget all about our trouble, and was only reminded of it by the wisps of dry grass and muddy, woody twigs that clung here and there among some of the trees.
On one occasion I found Pomp busy with a bucket of water and a brush down at the bottom of the garden, where he was scrubbing away at something black.