“'The Ancient Britons were little better than Barbarians. They painted their bodies with Woad, and, seated in their light coracles of skin stretched upon slender wooden frames, must have presented a wild and savage appearance.'”
“A coracle! That's a boat! Can't we make a coracle, Mr. Dawes?”
CHAPTER XIII. WHAT THE SEAWEED SUGGESTED.
The question gave the marooned party new hopes. Maurice Frere, with his usual impetuosity, declared that the project was a most feasible one, and wondered—as such men will wonder—that it had never occurred to him before. “It's the simplest thing in the world!” he cried. “Sylvia, you have saved us!” But upon taking the matter into more earnest consideration, it became apparent that they were as yet a long way from the realization of their hopes. To make a coracle of skins seemed sufficiently easy, but how to obtain the skins! The one miserable hide of the unlucky she-goat was utterly inadequate for the purpose. Sylvia—her face beaming with the hope of escape, and with delight at having been the means of suggesting it—watched narrowly the countenance of Rufus Dawes, but she marked no answering gleam of joy in those eyes. “Can't it be done, Mr. Dawes?” she asked, trembling for the reply.
The convict knitted his brows gloomily.
“Come, Dawes!” cried Frere, forgetting his enmity for an instant in the flash of new hope, “can't you suggest something?”
Rufus Dawes, thus appealed to as the acknowledged Head of the little society, felt a pleasant thrill of self-satisfaction. “I don't know,” he said. “I must think of it. It looks easy, and yet—” He paused as something in the water caught his eye. It was a mass of bladdery seaweed that the returning tide was wafting slowly to the shore. This object, which would have passed unnoticed at any other time, suggested to Rufus Dawes a new idea. “Yes,” he added slowly, with a change of tone, “it may be done. I think I can see my way.”
The others preserved a respectful silence until he should speak again. “How far do you think it is across the bay?” he asked of Frere.
“What, to Sarah Island?”