CHAPTER XII
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
The next four days slipped by almost unheeded. Blake saw to it that not only himself but his companions had work to occupy every hour of daylight. When not engaged in cooking and fuel gathering, Miss Leslie was learning by painful experience the rudiments of dressmaking.
At the start she had all but ruined the beautiful skin of the mother leopard before Blake chanced to see her and took over the task of cutting it into shape for a skirt. But when it came to making a waist of the cub fur, he said that she would have to puzzle out the pattern from her other one. Between cooking three meals a day over an open fire, gathering several armfuls of wood, and making a dress with penknife, thorn, and catgut, the girl had little time to think of other matters than her work.
Winthrope had been gazetted as hunter in ordinary. His task was to keep Miss Leslie supplied with fresh eggs and each day to kill as many of the boobies and cormorants as he could skin and split for drying. Blake had changed his mind about taking him when he went for cocoanuts. Instead, he had gone alone on several trips, bringing three or four loads of nuts, then a little salt from the seashore, dirty but very welcome, and last of all a great lump of clay, wrapped in palm fronds.
With this clay he at once began experiments in the art of pottery. Having mixed and beaten a small quantity, he moulded it into little cups and bowls, and tried burning them over night in the watch-fire. A few came out without crack or flaw. Vastly elated by this success, he fashioned larger vessels from his clay, and within the week could brag of two pots suitable for cooking stews, and four large nondescript pieces which he called plates. What was more, all had a fairly good sand glaze, for he had been quick to observe a glaze on the bottoms of the first pots, and had reasoned out that it was due to the sand which had adhered while they stood drying in the sun.
He next turned his attention to metallurgy. The first move was to search the river bank for the brown bog iron ore which he believed he had seen from the farther side. After a dangerous and exhausting day’s work in the mire and jungle, he came back with nothing more to show for his pains than an armful of creepers. Late in the afternoon, he had located the hæmatite, only to find it lying in a streak so thin that he could not hope to collect enough for practical purposes.
“Lucky we’ve got something to fall back on,” he added, after telling of his failure. “Pass over those keys of yours, Win. Good! Now untangle those creepers. To-night we’ll take turns knotting them up into some sort of a rope-ladder. I’m getting mighty weary of hoofing it all around the point every time I trot to the river. After this I’ll go down the cliff at that end of the gully.”
Winthrope, who had become very irritable and depressed during the last two days, turned on his heel, with the look of a fretful child.
To cover this undiplomatic rudeness, Miss Leslie spoke somewhat hurriedly. “But why should you return again to the river, Mr. Blake? I’m sure you are risking the fever; and there must be savage beasts in the jungle.”
“That’s my business,” growled Blake. He paused a moment, and added, rather less ungraciously, “Well, if you care, it’s this way–I’m going to keep on looking for ore. Give me a little iron ore, and we’ll mighty soon have a lot of steel knives and arrow-heads that’ll amount to something. How’re we going to bag anything worth while with bamboo tips on our arrows? Those boar tusks are a fizzle.”