“It’s nothing!” Summoning all her will power, she pulled herself back into the swing. And so the dark siren was forgotten, but not for long.
Out on the wide open sea Danny had had a busy day. Where he was the sun came out bright and hot. After breakfast he began studying his watermaking machine, and, in due time, had water that was a little better than city water and not as good as that from the old oaken bucket on his uncle’s farm.
After that he skinned and cleaned his birds. Then he sliced the meat thin and spread it out on the edge of the boat, where the sun shone hot, to dry.
“That will do for dinner tonight,” he told himself. “If I only had a cookstove I’d get along fine.”
He would want something for supper. Perhaps a fish would do.
After attaching a lure to his line he cast out into the deep. At the third cast a gray shadow followed his lure halfway in. Then, rising to the surface, it thrust out a fin like a plowshare.
“Huh!” He hauled in his line. “Seems to me this isn’t Friday after all.” He thought what would happen if that shark threw one flipper over the side of his raft.
“It’s always something, but it ain’t never nothin’,” he murmured.
Setting his coat up as a shade, he lay down to avoid the sun. And there with the raft lifting and falling beneath him, he fell to musing on the width of the ocean, the number of ships passing that way, and the probability of a storm.