Free Baby Island by Carol Ryrie Brink, Helen Sewell Page B

stayed at the tepee with the babies. When Mary went, Mr. Peterkin’s house was shining clean and he had a nice pan of biscuits or a cocoanut pudding. He had a bounteous store of supplies on his shelves, so that cooking should have been easy. But when Jean went, things did not always shineso brightly, and instead of golden biscuits there was a fallen cake or what Jean called a “flumperty-wumperty,” which was a mixture of whatever she could find in Mr. Peterkin’s cupboard. However, on Jean’s days there was certainly more fun, for the phonograph played most of the time and Halfred sang and Charley danced or swung from the rafters by his tail. On these occasions poor Mr. Peterkin, unable to bear “young ’uns,” went into the jungle to hunt, or far up the beach for gulls’ eggs. There was only one thing which spoiled Jean’s visits for her. Mr. Peterkin had forbidden her to look into his chest.
    “It’s that chest of his that worries me, Mary,” remarked Jean one evening after she had been at the shanty. “Think of having to see it there every time I go, and not knowing what’s inside it.”
    “Oh, old sailors always have sea chests, Jean.”
    “So do pirates, Mary, and theirs are full of poltroons.”
    “Don’t you mean doubloons, dear?”
    “Well, anyway, I can’t rest until I know.”
    “Jean, you know that story we had in our reader about Pandora? She was just the kind of girl you are and couldn’t rest until she knew what was inside everything.”
    “I don’t think I ever read that story,” said Jean uncomfortably.
    “Then I’ll tell you. She finally opened the chest to seewhat it held, and all the troubles and sicknesses and fearful things in the world that had been shut up in there flew out and went to work again.”
    “Well, I never said I was going to look, did I?” demanded Jean.
    “No, of course not,” said Mary. “I just thought maybe you ought to know about Pandora.”
    “Yes, and there was that awful thing that happened to Bluebeard’s wife, too, wasn’t there, Mary?”
    “Yes, Bluebeard had definitely told her not to look, and she went and did. It served her right to find all those ladies hanging by their hair.”
    “It certainly did!” agreed Jean heartily. “But you wouldn’t call Mr. Peterkin’s whisker exactly blue, would you, Mary? Or would you?”
    “It’s very, very black,” said Mary. “Sometimes very black things are almost blue.”
    Jean shuddered. “Of course, I’m not really interested in his old chest,” she said. “But what I do want to know is how he lost his toe. There must be a good story about that. I wish you’d ask him, Mary.”
    “Why don’t you?”
    “Maybe I will sometime, if I feel quite brave.”
    Mr. Peterkin was harsh, but he never forgot to pay them with a pail of goats’ milk. The girls had learned to heat iton Mr. Peterkin’s stove, so that it would not sour quickly, and, by keeping it in the cold stream which flowed past the tepee, they were able to have sweet milk for the babies for nearly a week. Toward the end of the week, however, they had to fall back on canned milk, and Mary began to wonder how they could get the fresh goats’ milk more often. It was certainly a long way around to Mr. Peterkin’s house, and, even without the babies, it took them several hours to walk each way, besides doing Mr. Peterkin’s work.
    “But we can’t move any nearer because of leaving our stream,” said Mary. “Of course, Mr. Peterkin has a spring at his place, but he’d never let us live beside him, and I’m not sure I’d want to either.”
    “If we could go through the jungle,” said Jean, “it would be nearer.”
    “I know,” said Mary, “but we’d be sure to get lost.”
    “Mr. Peterkin has never been over here,” said Jean. “Maybe he doesn’t know how far we go every week.”
    “I expect he doesn’t care. But, listen, Jean, why don’t we invite him over to dinner sometime? Let’s do it on a Sunday when he can