Chapter 2

Patrick looked at the naked girl lying prone on top of the bed that he had made from the many rabbit pelts that he had sewn together with the string-like fibers from the tall palm trees. She didn't look like much due to her petite figure and the fact she was curled up into a little ball totally exhausted and in a world of her own.

He felt a familiar old urge and almost laughed at himself for his selfish thoughts.

If he was certain about anything, it was that this was neither the time nor the place for such sinful thoughts and impulses that tended to rule his life in the old days when he was quite the drinker and ladies' man.

The girl's clothes were strung out on a long line of good hemp between two trees on the edge of the tree-line. He knew they would be dry in a matter of hours and he could take them down and store them away. Here on the island she would only need a much abbreviated costume because the humidity and oppressive heat in the midday sun was enough to convince even the most modest of castaways to consider near nudity as the proper response. All he wore most days was either his rag-tag skivvies or loincloth of rabbit pelts to hide his private parts. His entire body was a deep tone of brown and only his fair hair and his deep blue eyes disclosed that he was not an island native.

He left the girl sleeping and did a quick scout of the island perimeter to make certain there were no ships on the horizon and no more wreckage on the beach. Then he almost ran back to the hidden cave suddenly worried that the girl might wake up and think she had been kidnapped and spirited into captivity.

The girl was still sleeping when he returned so he prepared the meal outside on the small little rock grill that heated and cooked his meals. He had plenty of rabbit jerky but he kept that for when he was on the move and working in different parts of the island. He had the stew meat in the pot on top of the rock and the wild onions that must have been carried by the birds to the fertile brush. At first, he had experimented with the mushroom type plant he found in the deep brush but discovered it was a bit disturbing to his thinking process and he avoided it ever since because it made him far too morose.

He studied the woman in her repose and noticed she had a crucifix around her neck and wore a tiny gold ring on one of her toes. He thought the ring was strange because he had never seen a female before with a ring on her toe. For a moment he thought that she might be a member of some cult or ethnic group that had unusual customs. Then, he promptly forgot about it because she was stirring and he wanted to be on the alert to answer her questions as quickly as possible.

"Sweet Jesus, where am I now? Is this heaven or hell or someplace I never heard of before?"

Patrick stirred the stew in the metal pot that was really just a converted tin used to store salted port onboard a ship. He answered her with what he hoped was a reassuring tone of voice.

"You are on a small island to which there is no name and also unknown is to whom it belongs. I am Patrick O'Keefe formerly of the US Navy but now the sole resident and Governor of this island with no name. To whom do I have the honor of talking?"

The girl looked confused but her only move was to try to cover her breasts and pubic area with her hands because she was embarrassed at her nakedness.

Patrick handed her some of the dry clothes from the line and told her,

"This is just some of your own clothing to cover up your necessaries. The rest of your stuff is folded over there in the corner and I would recommend not using it until we find out how we can cut it up into several costumes to last longer because we don't know how long it will be before we are rescued."

The girl with the big eyes and the reddish hair got dressed hurriedly and she kept her back turned to me out of a sense of modesty but he noticed she never told him to look the other way. In any event, he got a nice up close and personal look at her pretty petite posterior in all its feminine glory built for fast action on a cold and boring night.

"I must have lost my glasses!"

He realized she was talking to him whilst he absorbed the magnificent sensuousness of her perfect heart-shaped bottom. Her words filtered into his stream of consciousness and he remembered seeing a pair of glasses on the beach near where he had shifted her onto his shoulders and carried her to safety. He just hoped it was high enough in the sand to stay out of the surf at high tide. Patrick just ignored her statement not wanting to get her hopes up in case he had no joy in finding her glasses.

"I am going back down to the beach and see if there is anything we can use here. You should stay inside the cavern. As you can see, it is still daylight outside but if you start wandering around on your own, you might get lost and then there is nothing I can do to help you."

He was exaggerating a bit because the island was not really that big that anyone with a lick of common sense could accomplish getting lost for very long. The fact that there were several areas that were a bit dangerous was also true but he didn't want to scare her unnecessarily and there was plenty of time for him to acquaint her with all of those places as time went on.

He found her glasses wedged under a piece of wood from the wreck. The only problem was a small crack in one lens from the pounding surf. He washed them free of all the gritty sand and with the exception of the slight crack they were as good as new. He stacked some odds and ends from the bounty of the sea and headed back to the cave. The sun was setting in the west over the horizon and he knew from experience that the daylight would only last for a short time after the top went below the shimmering edge of the empty sea. Then, the air would become colder and sometimes rain would move in from the open sea to cover the island with a cleaning rainfall that replenished his water supply and removed all signs of human habitation.