But the examination of the after part of the vessel yielded no fruit. As we have said, that part was sunk deeply, so that only the cabin skylight was above water, and, although they both gazed intently down through the water with which the cabin was filled, they could see nothing whatever. With a boat-hook which they found jammed in the port bulwarks, they poked and groped about for a considerable time, but hooked nothing, and were finally obliged to return empty-handed to the anxious Pauline.
Otto did not neglect, however, to carry off a pocketful of burnt-sheeting, by means of which, with flint and steel, they were enabled that night to eat their supper by the blaze of a cheering fire. The human heart when young, does not quickly or easily give way to despondency. Although the Rigondas had thus been cast on an island in the equatorial seas, and continued week after week to dwell there, living on wild fruits and eggs, and such animals and birds as they managed to snare, with no better shelter than a rocky cavern, and with little prospect of a speedy release, they did not by any means mourn over their lot.
“You see,” remarked Otto, one evening when his sister wondered, with a sigh, whether their mother had yet begun to feel very anxious about them, “you see, she could not have expected to hear much before this time, for the voyage to Eastern seas is always a long one, and it is well known that vessels often get blown far out of their courses by monsoons, and simoons, and baboons, and such like southern hurricanes, so motherkins won’t begin to grow anxious, I hope, for a long time yet, and it’s likely that before she becomes very uneasy about us, some ship or other will pass close enough to see our signals and take us off so—”
“By the way,” interrupted Dominick, “have you tried to climb our signal-tree, as you said you would do, to replace the flag that was blown away by last night’s gale?”
“Of course not. There’s no hurry, Dom,” answered Otto, who, if truth must be told, was not very anxious to escape too soon from his present romantic position, and thought that it would be time enough to attract the attention of any passing vessel when they grew tired of their solitude. “Besides,” he continued, with that tendency to self-defence which is so natural to fallen humanity, “I’m not a squirrel to run up the straight stem of a branchless tree, fifty feet high or more.”
“No, my boy, you’re not a squirrel, but, as I have often told you, you are a monkey—at least, monkey enough to accomplish your ends when you have a mind to.”
“Now, really you are too hard,” returned Otto, who was busily employed as he spoke in boring a hole through a cocoa-nut to get at the milk, “you know very well that the branch of the neighbouring tree by which we managed to reach the branches of the signal-tree has been blown away, so that the thing is impossible, for the stem is far too big to be climbed in the same way as I get up the cocoa-nut trees.”
“That has nothing to do with the question,” retorted Dominick, “you said you would try.”
Otto looked with an injured expression at his sister and asked what she thought of a man being required to attempt impossibilities.
“Not a man—a monkey,” interjected his brother.