Bill and I flew for our paddles as soon as Tom assented to our wish, and taking with us some smoked fish and a dozen of green cocoanuts to drink on our way, we started off, Bill and I paddling, while Tom was busy in the stern hammering and chopping at something which, as to paddle we faced forward, we could not see.
“What are you making all that row about, Tom, old man?” asked Bill.
“Never you mind. You’ll see in good time,” he answered.
“Oh!” I cried; “Tom has an old head on young shoulders. I wonder his hair ain’t grey. He’s doing something good, you may be sure.”
When we left off paddling once or twice to open a cocoanut and drink its juice, Tom hid what he had been doing from us, and it was not until we landed on the weather part of the reef that we found what he had been doing, when he proudly loaded a musket he had brought with him with slugs, and firing, knocked over a couple of green pigeons.
Bill was so delighted with this that he begged to be allowed to pluck and cook them at once, saying he cared more for a roast pigeon than for all the discoveries we were going to make.
Leaving him intent on his culinary labours, Tom and I pushed on through the cocoanut trees, and after walking some fifty yards we came to a small mound or protuberance of a different sort of rock from the coral of which the rest of the island was composed, and from this gushed forth, more precious in our eyes than a gold mine or all the diamonds of Golconda, a tiny rill of crystal-bright water.
We both saw it at the same moment, and, rushing forward, drank, and bathed our hands and faces, and set up a great shout to call Bill to come to us.
So absorbed were we in the delight of finding this spring—for we had not the slightest hope of finding one on this reef—that it was not till after Bill, attracted by our shouts, had come up to us that we noticed the signs of man’s handiwork close to the spring.
On the ground we saw lying some troughs made of hollowed palm trunks, which had evidently once conveyed the waters of the spring to some place where they were required.