“Do come along, brother!” he called out after a while. “What a time you are, to be sure; we’ll never be able to unpack our things before it’s dark, unless you look sharp!”
“All right, I’m coming,” replied the other; and he was soon by the side of Eric, who had already begun to overhaul the various articles that had been brought up from the boat by the sailors and piled up in a corner of the hut.
“What a lot of things!” exclaimed the lad. “Why, there are ever so many more parcels than I thought there were!”
“Yes,” said his brother; “it is all that good Captain Brown’s doing, I suppose. When we were parting, he told me that he had left me a few ‘notions,’ besides our own traps.”
“He has too, brother. Just look here at this barrel of beef; you didn’t pay him for that, eh?”
“No,” said Fritz; “I only bought some pork and ship’s biscuits, besides flour and a few groceries.”
“Then he has thought of much that we forgot,” remarked Eric with considerable satisfaction. “I don’t think our groceries included preserved peaches and tinned oysters, Fritz; yet, here they are!”
“You don’t say so—the kind old fellow!” exclaimed Fritz; and then he, too, set to work examining the stores as eagerly as his brother.
Before leaving Providence, the two had purchased a couple of spades and shovels, an American axe, a pick, a rake, a wheelbarrow, and a hoe for agricultural purposes—the skipper having told them that the soil would be fertile enough in the summer at Inaccessible Island for them to plant most sorts of kitchen produce, which they would find of great help in eking out the salted provisions they took from the ship, besides being better for their health; while, to give emphasis to his advice, he presented them with a plentiful stock of potatoes to put into the ground, besides garden seed.
For cooking, the brothers were provided with a large kettle and frying pan, a couple of saucepans, several knives and forks, some crockery, and, in addition, a large iron cauldron for melting down seal blubber; for hunting purposes, to complete the list of their gear, they had two harpoons, a supply of fishing hooks and a grapnel, two Remington rifles—besides Fritz’s needle-gun which he had used in the first part of the Franco-German war, before he became an officer and was entitled to carry a sword—a supply of cartridges, five pounds of loose powder, lead for making bullets, and a mould.