What Happened at Quasi: The Story of a Carolina Cruise

“No apology is due. I was voluntarily talking of my own personal affairs, and your remark was entirely pertinent. My garments are made of very costly fabrics, but as such materials endure all sorts of hard usage and last for a very long time, I find it cheaper in the end to buy only such; more important still is the convenience of it, to one leading the sort of life I do. Instead of having to visit a tailor three or four times a year, I have need of his services only at long intervals. The garments I now have on were made for me in London three years or so ago, and I have worn no others since. In the meanwhile I have been up the Amazon for thousands of miles, besides visiting Labrador and the southern coast of Greenland.

“That brings me to my principal item of expense, which is the passage money I must pay in order to get to the regions I wish to explore. That costs me a good deal at each considerable removal, but in the meanwhile I have earned greatly more by my work.

“But pardon me for prosing so about myself. I’ll say not another word now, so that you young gentlemen may be free to make whatever use you wish of this superb day. I shall spend the greater part of it in figuring some specimens with my colored crayons. Good morning!”

XXIX

TOM FINDS THINGS

As soon as the visitor disappeared through a tangled growth of bushes, Larry began marking out the duties of the day.

“First of all we must make ourselves comfortable,” he said, as if reflecting.

“That means a bush shelter of some sort,” interrupted Tom.

“No, it doesn’t either,” Larry answered, in a tone of playfulness like Tom’s own.

“What does it mean, then?”

“It means a shelter – not ‘of some sort’ as you say, but of a good sort. The wind blows hard here sometimes as the place is so exposed to a broad passage leading to the sea outside. So we must build something that isn’t easily carried away by a squall.”

“It would mean a good many other things,” said Cal, “if I were the architect selected to make designs, with front elevations, floor plans, estimates and all the other things they do before beginning to put up a building.”

“Why, of course, Cal, you are to direct the work,” answered Larry. “You know more about such things than all the rest of us combined.”

“Well, then, first of all, our palatial country residence must face directly away from the sea,” said Cal. “If it had its wide open side in any other direction we’d be drenched inside of it every time a rain came in from the sea, and that is where nearly all the hard rains come from here. Then, again, if the hovel faced the wrong way it would be filled full of smoke every time a sea breeze blew, and in this exposed place that is nearly all the time. There are seventeen other good and sufficient reasons for fronting the structure in the way I have decreed, but the two I have mentioned are sufficient to occupy and divert your young minds as we go on with the work. Now let all hands except Larry busy themselves chopping crotched poles of the several dimensions that I’ll mark here in the sand, for lack of other and more civilized stationery.”

With a sharpened stick Cal began writing in the sand.

“Four poles, 12 feet long, and three or four inches thick.”

“But what do you want me to do, Cal?” asked Larry.

“Go fishing,” said Cal. “We must have some dinner after awhile. See if you can’t bring in a sheepshead or some other fish weighing five or six pounds and fit for roasting.”

In an instant Larry was off with cast net, shrimp bucket and some fish lines.

Cal resumed his sand writing, cataloguing the various sorts and sizes of poles wanted. Presently he stopped short, muttering:

“But then we’re not lumbermen, and the only tool we have to chop with is our one poor little hand ax. It won’t take three of us to wield that toy. Say, Tom, suppose you take your gun and see if you can’t get us some game. We’ll do well enough with fish for dinner, but we must have some meat for to-night. So go and get some. I know you’re half crazy to be off in the woods shooting. Dick and I will work at the poles and palmetes – that’s apt alliteration, but it was quite accidental, I assure you. One can use the ax and the other cut palmete leaves with his jackknife, exchanging jobs now and then. We’ll need a great stack of the palmetes with which to cover the roof and three sides of our mansion.”

“Yes, of course, and fortunately they grow very thick just out there in the woods,” said Dick. “I saw them early this morning.”

“Yes, I know. I saw them yesterday when I picked out a place for the camp. Our need of them was one of the considerations I had in mind. By the way, Dick” – the two were busily at work now – “what do you think of the professor’s plan of sleeping?”

“It saves him a lot of trouble,” Dick answered.

“Yes, in one way. But if he had anything with him that water would spoil, it would make more trouble than it saves. As he has nothing of the kind – ”

“How about his reserve ammunition? A man who depends upon his gun for all his food must have a lot of cartridges somewhere.”

“That’s so, but his rifle is probably of very small calibre, so that a good many cartridges can be packed in a small space. Of course we can’t ask him.”

At that moment “the professor,” as Cal had called him, appeared, with profuse apologies.

“It was really inexcusable,” he protested, “for me to go away as I did when you young gentlemen had a shelter to build. I should have stayed to help in the work, as I am to share in its advantages. But I am so unused to providing shelter for myself that I quite forgot your larger necessities. Fortunately I heard the blows of your ax and was reminded of my duty. I have come at once to assist you.”

“Oh, you mustn’t think of that, Professor,” answered Cal. “We really need no assistance. My brother and Tom have gone off for supplies of meat and fish, but they’ll be back presently, and meanwhile we two can use the only tools we have for this kind of work. Besides, you have something of your own to do.”

“Nothing that may not be as well done at another time. I must insist upon bearing my share of the work of constructing a camp which you have been courteous enough to invite me to share.”

“But you don’t sleep under a roof – even a flimsy one of palmete leaves,” objected Dick. “We invited you to join us here only because we like good company.”

“Thank you for the compliment. No, I do not sleep under a roof, but your roof will be a great convenience and comfort to me in other ways.”

“I don’t see – ” Cal began, but Dunbar broke in.

“You don’t see how? No, of course not. How should you? But that is only because you know so little of my tasks. I must write my scientific reports and articles carefully and voluminously, and I must make accurate color drawings of my specimens to accompany my text. I am badly behind with my work in these ways, and the very best time to bring up the arrears is of long, rainy days, when the living things I must study – all of them except the fishes – are hidden away in such shelters as they can find. But I cannot sit in the rain and write or draw. That would only be to spoil materials of which I have all too little already. So the rainy days are lost to me, or have been, hitherto. Now that I am to enjoy your hospitality, I shall sit in your shelter when it rains, and get a world of writing and drawing done.”

“Well, at any rate, we shall not need your help in this work, and we have no tool for you to work with if we did. As to our little hospitality, it mustn’t and doesn’t involve any obligation on your part. If it did it wouldn’t be hospitality at all, but something very different. Why not put in your time on your own work?”

“I would, if my head didn’t object,” the man of science answered rather dejectedly, Cal thought, but with a smile.

“Have you a headache, then?” the youth asked, putting as much sympathy into his tone as was possible to a robust specimen of young manhood who had never had a headache in his life. “It must be very distressing.”

“No, I haven’t a headache,” the professor answered. “I wish it was only that. No, my head isn’t clear to-day, and when I try to work it gets things jumbled up a bit. I tried this morning to write a scientific account of the habits of a certain fish that these waters bear, and somehow I got him out into the bushes using wings that I had never observed before. Now I must go and catch another specimen of that fish and examine it carefully to see if the wings are really there or not. You see in cases of doubt a scientist dares not trust anything to conjecture or memory. He must examine and make sure.”

So saying, the professor started off to catch the fish he wanted. He had spoken in a half jocular tone and with a mischievous smile playing about his lips, though his words were serious enough.

“What do you think, Dick?” Cal asked as soon as the man was well beyond earshot; “is he a trifle ‘off’? has he lost some of his buttons?”

“Possibly, but I doubt it.”

“But what nonsense he talked!”

“Yes, I know. But did you observe his smile? He was only doing in his way what you so often do in yours. Your smile often contradicts your words – making its bow, as it were, to the nonsense you are uttering. Yet we don’t suspect you of having slipped your cable.”

“I suppose that’s it,” said Cal, “but allow me to suggest that our chatter cuts no palmetes, and we’re in need of a great number.”

By the time the needed poles and crotch sticks were cut and sharpened for driving into the ground, Larry returned, bringing with him one huge fish and a bucket full of croakers and whiting, all of which he had dressed on the shore.

He wrapped the large fish in a mass of wet sea weed and buried it in the hot ashes and coals to bake. After setting such other things to cook as he thought necessary, he joined the others in the work of setting up the poles and fastening their ends securely together with vines as flexible as hempen rope. The wetter parts of the woodlands yielded such vines in abundance, and as somewhat experienced sailors the boys all knew how to tie knots that no strain could loosen.

By the time that the dinner was cooked the framework of the shelter was more than half done.

“We’ll knock off for dinner now,” Larry suggested, “and after dinner the whole force will set to work finishing the framework and covering it. There are bunks to be made, too, and filled with long gray moss, so we’ll have a very full afternoon.”

“By the way, Professor,” asked Cal, as the man of science rejoined the group, “are you quite sure you won’t let us make a bunk for you?”

“Oh, yes – quite sure.”

“Did you catch the fish you wanted to examine, or did he take to his wings and fly away?”

“Oh, that was only my poor little jest. You didn’t take it seriously, did you?”

Then, interrupting the reply that Cal had begun to make, he said rapidly:

“But I did want to make another examination of the fish in question. You see, when I examined a specimen a few days ago, my attention was concentrated upon certain definite points, and when I casually observed something that suggested the possibility of its having a sense of taste, I went on with the other questions in my mind and quite forgot to satisfy myself on this point. But when I sat down this morning to write notes of my observations, the point came back to my mind, and I saw that I must examine another specimen before writing at all. That is what I meant by saying, in figurative speech, that my fish went flying away among the bushes, or whatever else it was that I said.”

“But, Professor,” said Larry, “something you said about a fish’s sense of taste just now awakens my curiosity. May I ask you – ”

“Not now,” said Dick. “Let’s reserve all that for this evening after supper. You see Tom isn’t here now, and he will want to hear it all. Maybe the professor will let us turn loose our tongues to-night and ask him the dozen questions we have in our minds.”

“Yes – a thousand, if you wish,” Dunbar answered. “I have studied fish with more interest, perhaps, than I ever felt in investigating any other subject, and naturally I like to air the results of my inquiries.”

Larry busied himself taking the dinner from the fire, and as he did so Tom returned.

“Hello, Tom!” called out Cal as the boy was struggling through the bushes back of the camp. “Just in time for dinner. Did you get anything worth while?”

“Judge for yourself,” he replied, entering the open space and dropping a huge turkey gobbler on the ground. “Isn’t that a beauty? Got him on the wing, too. But I forgot, Cal, you don’t approve of post-mortem chatter over game. One thing I must tell you, anyhow. I found a patch of these and brought home some samples in my pockets to see if it’s worth while to go after more.”

As he spoke he drew out a number of sweet potatoes and cast them down.

“Are there more to be had?” Larry asked eagerly.

“Yes, bushels of them – growing wild.”

“Good! Tom, you’ve a positive genius for finding precisely what we want. Our supply of bread and bread substitutes is very scant, or was before you made this discovery, and with all due respect for your opinion, Professor, I am satisfied that we need a considerable proportion of starchy foods to go with our meat.”

“Oh, I agree with you as to that,” quickly answered the professor. “I have never doubted it. I only said that man, being an omnivorous animal, can live upon an exclusive diet of meat just as he can live on the starchy foods alone. I think I stated distinctly that he is better off with both than with either alone.”

“You certainly did say that, Professor,” said Dick; “it is only that Larry was inattentive at the time of your lecture. But I say, Tom, is it far to your potato patch?”

“Only about half a mile or a little less.”

They were all busily eating dinner now, and for a minute there was nothing more said. Presently Tom spoke:

“I say, Larry, which of you fellows can best be spared to go with me after dinner, and help me bring in the deer?”

“What deer?” asked all in a breath.

“Why, the one I shot an hour or so ago. I managed to hang him up in a tree out of reach of other animals, I think, but I suppose he ought to be brought to camp pretty soon.”

Cal rose threateningly.

“I am strongly tempted to throw things at you, Tom Garnett,” he began. “But there isn’t anything to throw except the ax, and if I threw that I might incapacitate you for walking, and without your assistance we might not be able to find that deer. What do you mean, sir, by interrupting us at dinner with a surprise like that? Don’t you realize that it is bad for the digestion? In plain language that even your intelligence can perhaps grasp, why in the name of all that is sensible, didn’t you tell us about the thing when you first came?”

“I’ve associated with you, Cal, too long and too intimately to retain a just appreciation of what is sensible. Anyhow, I wanted the fun of springing the thing on you in that way. If you’ve finished your dinner, we’ll be off after the venison. It isn’t half a mile away.”

XXX

DUNBAR TALKS AND SLEEPS

It required nearly all the afternoon for Tom and Cal to bring the deer to camp and dress it. In the meantime Larry, Dick and Dunbar – who insisted upon helping and did his part very cleverly – worked upon the shelter and the bunks inside. As a result the hut was ready for use that night, though not quite finished in certain details.

By Larry’s orders no further work was to be done after supper, but supper was to be late, as there was the turkey to be roasted, and he wanted to roast it right. While he was preparing the bird for the fire, Dick was rigging up a vine contrivance to serve in lieu of a spit, and Tom and Cal employed the time in bringing a bushel or two of Tom’s wild sweet potatoes to camp.

The turkey was suspended by a long vine from the limb of a tree, so hung as to bring the fowl immediately in front of a fire built at that point especially for this roasting. Dick had bethought him to go to the dory and bring away a square of sheet copper, carried for boat-repairing purposes. This he scoured to brightness with sand, after which he fashioned it into a rude dripping pan, and placed it under the turkey to catch the juices for basting purposes. There was nothing remotely resembling a spoon in the camp or the boat, but Dick was handy with his jackknife, and it did not take him long to whittle out a long-handled wooden ladle with which to do the basting.

By another device of his the roasting fowl was kept turning as fast or as slowly as might seem desirable. This device consisted of two very slender vines attached to the supporting vine at a point several feet above the fire. One of the “twirlers,” as Dick called the slender vines, was wrapped several times around the supporting vine in one direction and the other in the opposite way.

Sitting on opposite sides of the fire, and each grasping a “twirler,” Dick and Larry kept the turkey turning first one way and then the other.

While they were engaged in this, an abundant supply of Tom’s sweet potatoes were roasting in the ashes.

“Now we are at Quasi,” said Cal, just before the turkey was declared “done to a turn” – “at Quasi, the object of all our hopes, the goal of our endeavors, and the guiding star of all our aspirations during a period of buffetings, trials and sore afflictions. We are securely at Quasi, and our residence – which prosaic people might call a hut, hovel or shanty, but which is to us a mansion – is practically finished. It is only meet and fit, and in accordance with Homeric custom, that we should celebrate the occasion and the toilsome achievements that have made it possible, by all possible lavishness of feasting. All of which means that I am going to make a pot of robust and red-hot coffee to drink with the turkey and ‘taters.’”

It was a hungry company that sat down on the ground to eat that supper, and if there was anything lacking in the bill of fare, such appetites as theirs did not permit the boys to find out the fact.

“It is an inflexible rule of good housewives,” drawled Cal, when the dinner was done, “that the ‘things’ as they call the dishes, pots, pans, and the like, shall be cleared away and cleansed. So here goes,” gathering up the palmete leaves that had served for plates and tossing them, together with the bones and fragments of the feast, upon the fire, where they quickly crackled into nothingness. “There aren’t any cooking utensils, and as for these exquisitely shaped agate iron cups, it is the function of each fellow to rinse the coffee out of his own. Oh, yes, there’s the coffee pot I forgot it, and by way of impressing the enormity of my fault upon a dull intelligence I’ll clean that myself. A hurried scouring with some sand and water, followed by a thorough rinsing, ought to do the business finely.”

“I say, Cal,” said Dick, “I wish you would remember that this is your off night.”

“I confess I don’t understand. Do you mean that I shall leave the coffee pot for some other member of the company to scour?”

“No. I mean this is your off night for word-slinging. The professor is going to tell us some things and we want to hear him. So, ‘dry up.’”

“I bow my head in contriteness and deep humiliation. You have the floor, Professor.”

“May I ask you young gentlemen not to call me ‘professor’?” Dunbar asked very earnestly.

“Why, of course, we will do as you like about that,” answered Larry; “we have been calling you ‘professor’ merely out of respect, and you told us you were or had been a professor in a college.”

“Yes, I know, and I thank you for your impulse of courtesy. I used the word descriptively when I told you I had been a ‘professor’ of Natural History. Used in that way it is inoffensive enough, but when employed as a title – well, you know every tight-rope walker and every trapeze performer calls himself ‘professor.’”

“Well, you must at least have a doctorate of some kind,” said Dick, “and so you are entitled to be addressed as ‘Dr. Dunbar.’”

“No, not at all. Of course a number of colleges have offered me baubles of that cheap sort – asking to make me ‘LL.D.,’ or ‘Ph. D.,’ or ‘L. H. D.,’ or some other sham sort of a doctor, but I have always refused upon principle. I hate shams, and as to these things, they seem to me to work a grievous injustice. No man ought to be called ‘Doctor’ unless he has earned the degree by a prescribed course of study and examinations. Honorary degrees are an affront to the men who have won real degrees by years of hard study. With two or three hundred colleges in this country, each scattering honorary degrees around and multiplying them every year, all degrees have lost something of their value and significance.”

“How shall we address you then?” asked Larry.

“Simply as ‘Mr. Dunbar.’ The President of the United States is entitled to no other address than ‘Mr. President.’ In a republic certainly ‘Mr.’ ought to be title enough for any man. Call me ‘Mr. Dunbar,’ please.”

“Well, now, Mr. Dunbar, won’t you go on and tell us what you promised?”

“What was it? I have quite forgotten.”

“Why, you said you had been led to suspect that your fish – the kind that takes wing and flies away into the bushes – had a sense of taste. Did you mean to imply that fishes generally have no such sense?”

“Yes, certainly. There are very few fishes that have capacity of taste. They have no need of it, as they bolt their food whole, and usually alive. There are curious exceptions, and – ”

“But, Mr. Dunbar,” interrupted Tom, “is it only because they swallow their food whole that you think they have no sense of taste? Is there any more certain way of finding out?”

“Yes, of course. The sense of taste is located in certain nerves, called for that reason ‘gustatory nerves,’ or ‘taste goblets.’ Now, as the fishes generally have no gustatory nerves or taste goblets, we know positively that they do not and cannot taste their food. That is definite; but the other reason I gave is sufficient in itself to settle the matter. The gustatory nerves cannot taste any substance until it is partially dissolved and brought into contact with them in its dissolved state. You can test that for yourself by placing a dry lump of sugar in your mouth. Until the saliva begins to dissolve it you can no more recognize any taste in it than in a similar lump of marble.”

“But why do they eat so voraciously then? What pleasure do they find in it?” asked Dick.

“Chiefly the pleasure of distending the stomach, but there is also the natural craving of every living organism for sustenance, without which it must suffer and die. That craving for sustenance is ordinarily satisfied only by eating, but it may be satisfied in other ways. Sometimes a man cannot swallow because of an obstruction in the canal by which food reaches the stomach. In such cases the surgeons insert a tube through the walls of the body and introduce food directly into the stomach. That satisfies the desire for sustenance, though the patient has not tasted anything. When a fish takes a run and jump at a minnow and swallows it whole at a gulp, he is doing for himself much the same thing that the surgeon does for his patient.”

“But, Mr. Dunbar,” Tom asked, “why is it then that the same species of fish will take a particular kind of bait at one time of year and won’t touch it at other times? In the very early spring I’ve caught lots of perch on worms, while a little later they would take nothing but live bait, and still later, when they were feeding on insects on the surface, I’ve known them to nose even live bait out of their way, refusing to take anything but the insects. If they don’t taste their food, why do they behave in that way?”

“Frankly, I don’t know,” Dunbar answered. “I have formed many conjectures on the subject, but all of them are unsatisfactory. Perhaps somebody will solve the riddle some day, but at present I confess I can’t answer it.”

Dunbar stopped as if he meant to say no more, and Tom became apologetic.

“Won’t you please go on, Mr. Dunbar? I’m sorry I interrupted.”

“Oh, but you must interrupt. If you don’t interpose with questions, how am I to know whether I’ve made my meaning clear or not? And how am I to know what else you wish to hear? No, no, no. Don’t withhold any question that comes into your mind, or I shall feel that I’m making a bore of myself by talking too much.”