“Time’s up,” called Frank Merrill. “Sorry to drive you, but we’ve got to keep at it as long as the light lasts. After to-day, though, we need work only at high water. Between times, we can explore the island—” He spoke as if he were wheedling a group of boys with the promise of play.
“Select a site for our capital city”—Honey Smith helped him out facetiously—“lay out streets—begin to excavate for the church, town-hall, schoolhouse, and library.”
“The first thing to do now,” Frank Merrill went on, as usual, ignoring all facetiousness, “is to put up a signal.”
Under his direction, they nailed a pair of sheets, one at the southern, the other at the northern reef, to saplings which they stripped of branches. Then they went back to the struggle for salvage.
The fascination of work—and of such novel work—still held them. They labored the rest of the morning, lay off for a brief lunch, went at it again in the afternoon, paused for dinner, and worked far into the evening. Once they stopped long enough to build a huge signal fire on the each. When they turned in, not one of them but nursed torn and blistered hands. Not one of them but fell asleep the instant he lay down.
They slept until long after sunrise.
It was Pete Murphy who waked them. “Say, who was it, yesterday, talked about seeing black spots? I’m hanged if I’m not hipped, too. When I woke just before sunrise, there were black things off there in the west. Of course I was almost dead to the world but—”
“Like great birds?” Billy Fairfax asked with interest.
“Exactly.”
“Bats from your belfry,” commented Ralph Addington. Because of his constant globe-trotting, Addington’s slang was often a half-decade behind the times.