“Course, that’s the first thing; and then your vyge ends, and we’ve got to arrange a fresh one.”
“Well, can we start to-day?” asked Tom.
“To-day? No, sir! Look at me! Why, I’d give anythin to git away from this here place! Think of me here for two long weeks, livin on shell fish, pacin up and down the beach, and keepin my signal-fire a burnin all the time, and feelin myself every day gradooly growin ravin mad! Think what I’ve ben an suffered here! Yet I wouldn’t leave to-day, ’cos it’s goin to blow harder, and that there cockle-shell don’t do to beat against a wind like this.”
“But can’t we row?”
“You hain’t got no oars.”
“There are those in the boat.”
“Them things! Them’s poles, or paddles; do to push the boat a little way through smooth water, but not with the wind this way. No; we’ve got to wait.”
Arthur and Tom both felt the force of this, and urged the point no longer.
“I don’t see,” said Arthur, “how you managed to light a fire.”
“O, with my jackknife and a bit of flint,” said Bailey. “No trouble to get flint hereabouts. I got some cotton wool out of the paddin of my collar, and some dry moss, and coaxed some sparks into a blaze. O, you give me a knife, and I’ll draw fire out of any stone anywhars. The night I was drove ashore, I crept somewhar under the cliff, and staid there till mornin, and in the mornin the first thing I doos is to kindle a fire. I found the drift-wood, and this seemed to be the best place. Sea shells isn’t the best fare in the world, and sick am I of all sorts and kinds of shell fish; but glad was I when I lit on them that first day, when I walked about nearly starved. If it hadn’t ben for them thar shells it would ha’ ben all over with me. That’s so. And this here den wasn’t a bad place, considerin. In fact, I ben a lucky man in some things, seein that this is Anticosti, and fust and foremost, that I got off with my life; for every one of the rest was drownded, and I’ve never seen even a splinter of the boat since.”