Mr Button tapped on it with the butt-end of the shell: it was
nearly full. Why it had been left there, by whom, or how, there
was no one to tell. The old lichen-covered skulls might have told,
could they have spoken.

"We'll rowl it down to the beach," said Paddy, when he had taken
another taste of it.

He gave Dick a sip. The boy spat it out, and made a face, then,
pushing the barrel before them, they began to roll it downhill to
the beach, Emmeline running before them crowned with flowers.



CHAPTER XVIII

THE RAT HUNT

They had dinner at noon. Paddy knew how to cook fish, island
fashion, wrapping them in leaves, and baking them in a hole in the
ground in which a fire had previously been lit. They had fish and
taro root baked, and green cocoa-nuts; and after dinner Mr Button
filled a big shell with rum, and lit his pipe.

The rum had been good originally, and age had improved it. Used as
he was to the appalling balloon juice sold in the drinking dens of
the "Barbary coast" at San Francisco, or the public-houses of the
docks, this stuff was nectar.