“Yes,” replied Frank, “we can row the keg off to the Carrier Dove, get some duffle ashore and camp here in the jungle for a night. There’s no use trying to navigate this coast in the dark. Who says—yes?”
Of course they all did,—hailing his suggestion with acclamation,—and, after Frank and Harry had rowed off to the sloop, Lathrop and Billy Barnes set about getting in a supply of firewood and laying a fire between two green logs set parallel, in a manner that did credit to Bill’s training as a woodsman in Nicaragua.
Frank and Harry were too tender-hearted to resist Ben Stubbs’ pleadings to be made one of the party—moreover he promised to cook them what he called a bush supper if allowed to come ashore, so that when the boys shoved off in the placid water on their return trip to the Island Ben made one of the Squeegee’s load.
As soon as they got ashore Ben approvingly commended Billy’s camp-fire arrangements, at which the reporter glowed with pleasure. Somehow in the wilderness a small tribute to a boy’s handiness will send him into the seventh heaven of gratified pride. Under Ben Stubbs’ orders the party had soon secured several bunches of oysters from the mangroves,—which were laden with the bivalves where they dipped into the water at low tide,—as well as half a dozen turtles, small fellows which Ben declared made as good eating as the terrapin of the northern restaurant and banquet. To crown the feast, Frank, who had been scouting about with one of the shot-guns, brought down a couple of small ducks.
The oysters Ben roasted in their shells, laying them when finished on plantain leaves on previously heated rocks. The turtles he prepared by scalding them and then, after cutting down the center of the lower shell, the meat was easily got at. Salted and peppered inside and out and the meat removed from the shell after a half-an-hour’s boiling with onions and the young campers had a meal fit for a president, who, as Billy observed, “is a heap more particular than a king.”
The ducks were incased by Ben in a sort of matrix of clay—feathers and all,—having first been cleaned. Thus enclosed they were placed in the glowing embers and more hot coals raked over on top of them. When in half an hour Ben drew out the hard-baked clay casings and cracked them free with a hatchet,—which automatically skinned the birds and plucked them at the same time,—the boys were ready to acclaim him a very prince of chefs. The meal was eaten with pilot bread and washed down with lemonade made from spring water and lemonade tablets. For dessert they had bananas and wild oranges. Many times after that when they were plunged in hardships and difficulties the boys talked over that first meal on the lone Florida Key.
After supper there was no washing up to do; big plantain leaves having served as plates and hunting-knives as table utensils. The little party sat round the big camp-fire and sang songs and talked and laughed till Pork Chops out on the Carrier Dove muttered to himself as he tried to sleep.
“Dem white boys done bein’ as clean crazy as loons,—yas, sah.”
However, at last even the boys’ spirits began to flag and they tucked themselves up in their blankets and lulled by the croaking and snoring of a big tree lizard in a near-by custard apple-tree, sank into dreams which were more or less tinctured by the happenings of the last few days.
Frank, more wakeful than the others, lay awake perhaps half an hour after Ben Stubbs’ nasal performances had begun to rival those of the tree-lizard; who was himself no mean performer. The boy-leader’s brain was busy turning over their momentous expedition. In a few days now they would be in the Archipelago and the plunge into the unknown would have to be taken. As he gazed about him at the sleeping party—Harry and Billy, light and careless, Lathrop, apparently made of far better metal than Frank had believed, and at old grizzled Ben Stubbs sleeping, like most woodsmen, as soundly as an infant, he felt a sensation of heavy responsibility steal over him.