“Here,” protested Mac. “I don’t mind cookin’; but that don’t mean dish washin’. Get busy.”
It wasn’t much dishwashing that was done, but Bob did recall that the dish rag had to be washed and hung out to dry. When that had been stretched over a palmetto the three members of the club set out on their tour. Mac was leader. His main discovery had been a little projecting arm of the island on the gulf side on which the wash of the sea fell. It was literally a mine of small shells. They were not mixed with sand or gravel, but lay, many feet deep, a solid bank of sea shells.
Bob was anxious to reach Oak Tree Point, and, at first, he was somewhat indifferent to sea beans, shark’s tears, conchs, wave-worn sponges, sugary-like corals of endless forms and the broken fragments of yellow and blue and purple fans from the distant Indies. But, once started on the quest, in a few moments, he and his companions forgot their excursion and the fleeting hours.
After seven o’clock, the three boys, with cramped backs, ceased their search.
“Ain’t you goin’ to the end of the island?” exclaimed Bob, as Tom and Mac started toward camp again. Mac shook his head and Tom sighed.
“All right,” laughed Bob, “I’ll see you later.” And while his companions made their weary way back to Joe’s Inlet, the indefatigable Bob set out in search of still further adventures.
It was the hour of twilight—later there would be a moon, but, instead of dimming the view, the fading day only seemed to lend sharper details to the lonesome Key. As Bob followed the beach toward the far end of the island, stopping now and then to impale on a long stick the body of a dead jelly fish and hurl it splashing back into the sea, the boy at last came to the point of the trees.
That such ancient and sturdy woodland monarchs should be growing on the stony island was inexplicable. Some act of nature had parted the coral foundation of the Key and made a little inlet—in form something like the one terminating the bay where the camp was located. Into this fissure, the light waves rushed, welling up at the apex of the cleft like a fountain and then rushing out again like the exhaust of a pump. At the very mouth of this, stood a smaller tree, its gnarled roots reaching down through fissures and entwining great blocks of the broken coral stone. At the far end of the fissure—as if stopping further inroads of the rupture—rose the larger tree.
As Bob, after a circuit of the trees, threw himself on the soft sand and settled himself to enjoy the darkening blue of land and sky, far to the east over the black of the mainland pines rose the silver rim of the full moon.