“Don’t you girls want to sit right up to the table and have a bite before you take the walk over to the Knob?” asked Mrs. Carey suddenly. “You’ll be famished before you get back to the hotel. Of course you will. Guess I knew all about girls and their appetites before you were born. Nancy, you get some plates, and those fresh-baked biscuits covered over on the bread board there, and I’ll get a bottle of my Chili sauce. I wouldn’t give two cents for fish balls unless I could trim them up with Chili sauce.”
Taste good? The girls hoped all along the road to Lost Island, after it was over, that Mrs. Carey made fish balls often.
“Tom says she can make clam pies, too, girls,” Crullers said, eagerly. Crullers was always radiant when the subject came up of feeding the inner girl. “And clam chowder, and fritters, and Indian puddings.”
“What are Indian puddings?” asked Isabel.
“Hush,” warned Polly. “Don’t ask questions, Isabel. You make Indian puddings out of cornmeal, and cream, and molasses, and spice. Anybody knows that. Whenever I used to feel sad after Aunty Welcome had scolded me, she’d always turn around and coax Mandy to make me an Indian pudding just piled full of raisins. Oh, girls, look! There it is.”
She stopped short, and pointed ahead of them. They had come to a path leading up over the rocks. The high-water mark could be plainly seen, where the tide had left a little fringe of shells, and driftwood, and seaweed. There were pools here and there, too, and these were half full of water. Tom was striding ahead down the rocks to where a narrow neck of land joined Lost Island to the mainland. But the girls paused for a minute on the rocks, and looked down with happy eyes on the future haven of the Polly Page Yacht Club.
CHAPTER VIII
DROPPING ANCHOR
“I told you it was just a knob of land sticking out from the shore,” said Tom. “It’s nearly a quarter of a mile long.”
Polly lifted her head, and drew in a deep, long breath of the cool, salty air that blew in from the southeast. She looked down at the “Knob,” as they soon grew accustomed to calling the island. There was a fine incurved beach for bathing, with a great, tumbled mass of rocks at the farther end that rose higher and higher at the end pointing towards the bay. Young willow and scrub pine grew short and thick wherever they could get a footing in the rock crevices, and there was plenty of grass, but it was tall and sharp pointed and tinted queer colors from the tide.