“Look!” Stew pointed to tangled masses of logs, seaweed, and broken palms that lay on the rocks far above their heads. “Some storm to do that!”
“Yes, and another storm may do the same to us. We’d better ramble.”
To the right the beach ended abruptly in a stone wall, but to the left it broadened. Tramping over the rocks for a quarter of a mile, they came at last to a spot where the land sloped away, offering enough soil to support coconut palms and other tropical trees.
“This will do,” Jack decided.
Climbing up the slope, Stew gathered ripe coconuts from the ground. After striking off the husks, he bored holes through the eyes with his sheath knife and drank the milk.
“Um-m-m!” he breathed. “Not bad.”
When they had drained four coconuts dry, they turned their attention to other matters.
They broke open their rations and ate sparingly. They cracked a coconut and ate its meat. Then they stretched out side by side on the rubber raft, pillowed their heads against the round outside, drew a mosquito-bar canopy over themselves, and lay there looking at the stars.
“If we were on the shore of Lake Superior,” Jack sighed, “I could like this for a long time.”
“I suppose it’s great,” said Stew. “I’ve never been there.”