“It all depends on how we find that poor boy,” answered Cousin Jasper. “If he is all right, and doesn’t mind staying a little longer, we can make a camp on the island. There are some tents on board and we can live in them while on shore.”
“Oh, that’ll be almost as much fun as Blueberry Island!” cried Nan.
“It’ll be nicer!” Bert said. “Blueberry Island was right near shore, but this island is away out in the middle of the ocean, isn’t it, Cousin Jasper?”
“Well, not exactly in the middle of the ocean,” was the answer. “But I think, perhaps, there is more water around it than was around your Blueberry Island.”
After supper, which, like their lunch, was eaten on the beach under the palm trees, the Bobbsey twins and the others went back to the Swallow. The men working for the engineer, Mr. Chase, had not yet gotten the engine fixed, and it would take perhaps two more days, they said, as the break was worse than they had at first thought.
“Well, we’ll have to stay here, that’s all,” said Cousin Jasper. “I did hope we would hurry to the rescue of Jack, but it seems we can’t. Anyhow it would not do to go on with a broken engine. We might run into a storm at sea and then we would be wrecked. So we will wait until everything is all right before we go sailing over the sea again.”
“It seems like being back home,” said Mrs. Bobbsey, as she sat down later in a deck chair.
“Didn’t you like it on the island?” asked Bert.
“Yes. But after it got dark some big turtle might have come up out of the sea and pulled on you, as one did on Flossie,” and Bert’s mother smiled.
“Well, no mud turkles can get on our ship, can they?” asked the little “fat fairy.”