Unwilling to accept the failure, Winthrope insisted upon trying in turn, and pride held him to the task until he was drenched with sweat. The result was the same.
“Told you so,” jeered Blake from where he. lay in the shade. “We’d stand more chance cracking stones together.”
“But what shall we do now?” asked Miss Leslie. “I am becoming very tired of cocoanuts, and there seems to be nothing else around here. Indeed, I think this is all such a waste of time. If we had walked straight along the shore this morning we might have reached a town.”
“We might, Miss Jenny, and then, again, we mightn’t. I happened to overhaul the captain’s chart–Quilimane, Mozambique–that’s all for hundreds of miles. Towns on this coast are about as thick as hens’-teeth.”
“How about native villages?” demanded Winthrope.
“Oh, yes; maybe I’m fool enough to go into a wild nigger town without a gun. Maybe I didn’t talk with fellows down on the Rand.”
“But what shall we do?” repeated Miss Leslie, with a little frightened catch in her voice. She was at last beginning to realize what this rude break in her sheltered, pampered life might mean. “What shall we do? It’s–it’s absurd to think of having to stay in this horrid country for weeks or perhaps months–unless some ship comes for us!”
“Look here, Miss Leslie,” answered Blake, sharply yet not unkindly; “suppose you just sit back and use your thinker a bit. If you’re your daddy’s daughter, you’ve got brains somewhere down under the boarding-school stuff.”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Now, don’t get huffy, please! It’s a question of think, not of putting on airs. Here we are, worse off than the people of the Stone Age. They had fire and flint axes; we’ve got nothing but our think tanks, and as to lions and leopards and that sort of thing, it strikes me we’ve got about as many on hand as they had.”