"Don't mention it," said Cynthia good-naturedly. "Now, you know, by rights a piece of the old Yankee should come floating ashore with a dozen fowls, a pail of milk, and a keg of butter planted safely on the upper side and——"
"A barrel of flour," added I. "Well, stranger things have happened——"
"Not much," said Cynthia.
This silly badinage served to while away the time while I cut the pork, made the fire, and started the breakfast on its way. I brought the water and hard bread, and then told Cynthia that if she would watch the breakfast I would go and take a bath. I had something on my mind which depressed me greatly. When I took the parrot's cage ashore on the previous evening, I had hung it on the limb of a ceiba too high for Cynthia to reach. That was very well for the night, but this was the next morning, and, like many another next morning, its light ushered in a day of reckoning. I had told Cynthia, I am ashamed to say, that I would give Solomon his food and water, and I am also humiliated to confess that I did actually fill the bird's cup and take it with a bit of hard bread to the secluded place which I had chosen for the scene of my base deception. Let me state here, with the entire reliability of all explorers, that it was not entirely the fear of what Cynthia would think of me for the part which I had played in what was to me a comedy, and which might prove to her a tragedy, but that I really could not bear the thought of seeing her sorrow when she first heard the dreadful news that Solomon had escaped. I had often longed to wring the neck of the feathered brute, for he had repaid me, as many kindnesses are repaid in this world, by biting my finger to the bone when I had tried to tempt him with some dainty. However, Cynthia loved him, and, notwithstanding his viciousness, I had tried to make friends with him for her sake. Kick a man's dog, and he is done with you. Ill treat a woman's parrot, and if that woman is the woman you adore, you had better be dead. I had left the cover drawn tightly over the cage, telling Cynthia that it would protect the bird from the night dews, Facilis descensus Averno. Little Adoniah says that means tell one lie and you will have to tell a hundred. I had stuck to the letter of the truth, but I really cared very little whether the dews of evening or the deluges of the tropics descended in floods upon that wretched bird. When I left Cynthia I walked directly up the bank of the stream, and was soon lost to sight behind the low foliage which fringed its western slope. So soon as Cynthia could no longer see me, I struck to the right, and, circling round, I was again in the vicinity of the camp. I could see that her back was turned toward me as she stooped over the frying-pan, scorching her hands and face doubtless in doing this menial work. I went to the tree where the cage hung, reached up and pulled down the limb, seized upon the cage, loosened the catches, and quietly released the floor. This I laid upon the ground half upon edge, as if it had fallen so. I then returned to the stream and took my bath, which much refreshed me, and appeared in camp with my guilty heart thumping and my pulses ringing in my ears. The Skipper was narrating a wonderful tale to Cynthia, to which she was listening, as if she wished some confirmatory evidence before quite believing him.
"Oysters growing on trees!" Cynthia exclaimed as I joined them. "Uncle Tony, you should not try to practice upon my credulity in that way, and you a member of the church in good and regular standing! But then you don't carry the deacons to sea with you, or——"
The Skipper asserted his discovery in loud and positive tones, which drowned Cynthia's softer ones.
"Don't be a fool, girl! Shows you never travelled. Here's one now! See it? Shell and all! Here's where I broke it off the branch!"
"Well! It beats Robinson Crusoe," said Cynthia. She turned to me. "Do you believe it, Mr. Jones?"
"It is nothing new," said I. "I will take a pail, if you like, and get some for breakfast."
"I will go with you," said Cynthia. "I know there's some catch about it. I never saw oysters growing on trees."