“A boat! A boat!” Florence fairly shrieked this as she went racing away.
She was not wholly wrong. It was a boat. But one of those heavy, flat bottomed affairs, used only by commercial fishermen, it lay bottom up, displaying three stoved-in planks.
“Let’s turn her over.” Tillie’s tone was wholly practical. She had been brought up in a boat.
They put their shoulders to the craft, and over it went.
Tillie tapped it here and hacked at it there with the axe. “Not so bad,” was her final judgment. “Sides are sound. Stern, too. Have to give her three new planks in her bottom. We can calk up the seams with moss and rosin. Make some oars out of cedar poles, and there you are. It’ll be a stiff pull. All of two miles to shore. But we’ll make it.”
“How long will all that take?”
“Maybe two days.”
At once Florence became downcast. She was beginning to think of Petite Jeanne. She had come to this place for rest. “Little rest she’ll get while I am missing!” she thought gloomily. “We ought to get away from here at once. But how can we?”
“All right,” she spoke in as cheerful a tone as she could command. “Let’s get to work at once.”
They did get to work, and made famous progress, too. Lunch forgotten, supper forgotten, they toiled on until, just as the sun was dropping low, Tillie declared the clumsy craft would float.