“Sure she did, and how!” Slim answered unsuspectingly, then his companion knew that there was at least two ways of getting in and out of the Indian woman’s home, and she resolved that sometime she would explore it if she were ever left alone.
“In my luggage I have some strings of colored beads,” the white girl went on. “They are not much, just sort of attractive. You must let me give her some of them right away because it will be a long time before you and Wat can get your presents here, won’t it?”
“Be a few weeks,” Slim admitted cautiously. “Sure, give her some of yours if you like. Can’t be any objection to that.”
“All right, Natell, tomorrow you shall have a nice long string of red beads, the prettiest ones I have.”
“Good,” the girl replied softly, apparently understanding that Roberta had overcome the necessity for secrecy regarding the string she already had.
“If you like one of the others, you may have two strings,” Roberta added, no end relieved that the matter of the gift was so simply settled.
“Better walk carefully here,” Slim warned, as he changed places with her so that she was on the inside of the beach. “Sort of treacherous at night; beastly in the fog.”
“It feels good to be out,” Roberta told him as they went on. For half an hour they walked, saying little, until the density of the mist began to chill the white girl, then they returned to the dugout, which except for the wetness of the recent “swabbing,” and strips of new boards nailed over the broken furniture, looked exactly as it had before the invasion of the belligerent captain. They found Wat smoking thoughtfully before the door, and after bidding the women good-night, the two men strode off into the darkness. The walk had tired her, so Roberta was really glad to go to bed and in spite of the horrors of the night, she soon dropped off into a sound sleep. When she awakened in the morning, the two Indians were already busy with some task, and Nomie lost no time in preparing food for her charge.
“Go fishing,” she informed Roberta when the meal was finished, so, after adding a string of blue beads to the red ones Natell was proudly showing that morning, and adding a storm coat to her costume, the girl Sky-Pilot followed the women out into the sunlight, for every bit of fog had been dispelled. They cut across the island toward the northwest and on a smooth little cove, tugged a deep canoe, which certainly had not been there the day before when the white girl did her exploring.
“The island must be full of hiding places,” she remarked to herself, and wondered how much it concealed. By that time Roberta was so full of the mystery of the place that being marooned or imprisoned there was receding further back in her brain; although nothing could make her forget the anxiety she knew must weigh down her own home in far away Long Island, but she determined that if she ever succeeded in getting away, she would be able to give some real information as to what enterprise was conducted there. She thought of Mr. Howe, and then it occurred to her that she was to have had a mission with him. “It couldn’t have been more exciting than this thing I’ve stumbled, or been piloted into.”