Aunt Jane turned upon him her round innocent eyes.
"Oh, no, Mr. Tubbs," she assured him, "I don't think a single one
of them was named Benjy!"
The laughter which followed this gave me time to get myself in hand
again.
"Crusoe it is and will be," I asserted. "Like Great-Grandmother
Harding, I don't approve of changeableness. It happens that a girl
I know at home has a dog named Benjy." Which happened fortunately
to be true, for otherwise I should have been obliged to invent it.
But the girl is a cat, and the dog a miserable little high-bred
something, all shivers and no hair. I should never have thought of
him in the same breath with Crusoe.
That evening Mr. Shaw addressed the gathering at the
camp-fire--which we made small and bright, and then sat well away
from because of the heat--and in a few words gave it as his opinion
that any further search in the cave under the point was useless.
(If he had known the strange confirmatory echo which this awoke in
my mind!) He proposed that the shore of the island to a reasonable
distance on either side of the bay-entrance should be surveyed,
with a view to discover whether some other cave did not exist which
would answer the description given by the dying Hopperdown as well
as that first explored.
Mr. Shaw's words were addressed to the ladies, the organizer and
financier, respectively, of the expedition, to the very deliberate
exclusion of Mr.
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