It would have been a lot drier than this place."
"You may think so now," replied Steve, "but wait till you get aboard
again. We might have stayed on her, as it's turned out, but the boat
didn't look very homelike to me yesterday!"
"How the dickens were we to know that it would hold together, or even
stay on its keel?" asked Joe disgustedly. "Don't talk like a sick
goldfish, Ossie!"
As soon as they had consumed breakfast they scrambled down to the beach
with many groans and stretched their cramped and aching limbs. The rain,
although now little more than a very heavy mist, limited their vision to
a hundred yards or so in any direction. Steve hazarded the opinion that
they were not more than two miles from the mainland, although he made no
attempt to give a name to the island they were on. The fate of the
_Follow Me_ worried them all, but Phil, always the most sanguine in
times of stress, pointed out that as the other craft had not followed
them onto the island she was probably safe.
"She may be piled up further along somewhere," suggested Joe. "I say
we'd better have a look. It would help a bit to know what sort of a
place we've struck, anyway. For all we know there may be a house just
around the corner!"
So they set out in two parties, Steve, Ossie and Phil going one way and
the rest the other.
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