Ben Stubbs to “keep her up a bit,” to which suggestion Ben with an air of ineffable contempt replied:
“I never knowed they taught navigation on a newspaper but it’s a good school for nerve.”
CHAPTER VII
A NIGHT ATTACK
Most of that day they dropped leisurely down Hawk Channel and at night anchored off a small key covered with a luxuriant tropical growth and topped by the feathery crowns of a group of stately royal palms. It was early afternoon when they let go the anchor and the boys lost no time in getting into the Squeegee and rowing ashore. They carried with them the Carrier Dove’s water keg which held ten gallons and which had been discovered by them to be half empty the first time they went forward for a drink. What water there was in it was so stale as to be almost undrinkable. Pork Chops was summarily sent for and arraigned on the “quarter deck.”
“I done declar I clean forgit all about deh watah,” he gasped, as Frank read him a lecture on his carelessness. Indeed everything about the Carrier Dove bore witness to Pork Chops’ shiftless ways. Her rigging was spliced in innumerable places and her halyards badly frayed so that they wedged in the blocks sometimes. Her paint was peeled off her sides in large flakes and altogether she was quite as disreputable a proposition as her owner; but in her, Pork Chops had navigated the waters about Miami for many years and was accounted a skilful mariner.
The boys uttered a cry of delight as the Squeegee’s nose grated on a beach of white sand and they sprang out. The key was a veritable fairyland. Lime, lemon and guava trees grew almost down to the water’s edge and further back were several wild banana plants with their yellow fruit hanging temptingly for the boys to pluck. And pluck it they did and declared they had never known what real bananas were like before, – which is hardly surprising as the fruit is picked for the northern market long before it is ripe and shipped in a green state.
After they had fairly gorged themselves on fruit, they set out to look for a spring. They were not long in finding it and Billy Barnes, dipper in hand, started in to fill the keg. He had ladled out a few dipperfuls when he started back with a yell. The others, who had been roaming about in the vicinity, hurried back and found the reporter gazing petrified at a huge cotton mouth moccassin. Frank, who had one of the sixteen gauge guns with him, quickly despatched the creature, which was about three feet long.
“Ugh, what a monster,” exclaimed Lathrop, as he gazed at the ugly, dirty-brown colored body.
“He is a pretty sizeable reptile and that’s a fact,” remarked Frank, “But what would you say to a serpent twenty feet long?”
The others looked at him incredulously.
“Twenty feet long – Oh come, Frank,” laughed Billy. “That sounds like the fish that got away.”
“Lieutenant Willoughby, who explored the Everglades in 1897, reports that he heard from Indians and believed himself that in the southern portions of the Everglades there are snakes bigger than any known species,” replied Frank, “his guide killed a reptile marked with longitudinal stripes, – but otherwise like a rattlesnake, – which measured nine feet from tip to tip.”
“Well, I don’t want to be around when any such creatures as that are about,” said Lathrop.
“I’m with you there,” cried Billy, “snake stories are all right in print but I don’t want to figure in any of them.”
“Come on, boys, – volunteers to get supper,” cried Frank, after the group had strolled back to the boat landing, – all hands taking turn at packing the water keg.
“Supper?” cried the others.
“Yes,” replied Frank, “we can row the keg off to the Carrier Dove, get some duffle ashore and camp here in the jungle for a night. There’s no use trying to navigate this coast in the dark. Who says – yes?”
Of course they all did, – hailing his suggestion with acclamation, – and, after Frank and Harry had rowed off to the sloop, Lathrop and Billy Barnes set about getting in a supply of firewood and laying a fire between two green logs set parallel, in a manner that did credit to Bill’s training as a woodsman in Nicaragua.
Frank and Harry were too tender-hearted to resist Ben Stubbs’ pleadings to be made one of the party – moreover he promised to cook them what he called a bush supper if allowed to come ashore, so that when the boys shoved off in the placid water on their return trip to the Island Ben made one of the Squeegee’s load.
As soon as they got ashore Ben approvingly commended Billy’s camp-fire arrangements, at which the reporter glowed with pleasure. Somehow in the wilderness a small tribute to a boy’s handiness will send him into the seventh heaven of gratified pride. Under Ben Stubbs’ orders the party had soon secured several bunches of oysters from the mangroves, – which were laden with the bivalves where they dipped into the water at low tide, – as well as half a dozen turtles, small fellows which Ben declared made as good eating as the terrapin of the northern restaurant and banquet. To crown the feast, Frank, who had been scouting about with one of the shot-guns, brought down a couple of small ducks.
The oysters Ben roasted in their shells, laying them when finished on plantain leaves on previously heated rocks. The turtles he prepared by scalding them and then, after cutting down the center of the lower shell, the meat was easily got at. Salted and peppered inside and out and the meat removed from the shell after a half-an-hour’s boiling with onions and the young campers had a meal fit for a president, who, as Billy observed, “is a heap more particular than a king.”
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