Next day they laid the keel of their forlorn hope, and when that ceremony was over, Blair and Ha'o started off again across the hills to the old village, to endeavour to get the brown men to make a start on their own buildings and plantings. Characteristically, they were inclined to lie down under misfortune and let things take their chance, and Blair, characteristically also, stated his intention of stopping there till they got to work. He exhorted them to better heart both by word and example, and Ha'o lent the weight of his authority, and, where that failed, added the still weightier impulsion of physical force. Authority weakens under disaster, but a bold heart and a heavy hand are strong arguments, and, disaster or no disaster, Ha'o had no intention of abating one jot of his seigneurial rights. He was chief still and he let them feel it. "What is the good of planting?" said the brown men. "We shall be dead before the fruit comes." "Oh no, you won't!" said Blair cheerfully. "There is fruit in the Valley and fruit on the other side of One-Tree Pass, but in future you'll have to go and get it for yourselves, and you can have all the fish you want for the catching." "But we don't care for fish every day." "There are many things I don't care for myself, my sons, but when I can't do better I put up with them. You must learn to be men." The actively mutinous spirit, which the opportunity of the day after the storm had kindled in them, had passed with the passing of that which had excited it. It had vanished in the smoke of the funeral pyre, and Blair was grateful, for things might have been very different. Instead of fighting the lethargy of despair they might have had to defend themselves against its fury, and he was well content. He tried hard to get them to come over into the Valley, but that they would not do. They would come to the hill top for such fruits as might be brought there for them, and they would go over One-Tree Pass, but into the valley of the stone gods not one of them would set so much as a toe, and Ha'o himself could not make them. With all hands working heartily and at high pressure,--from Captain Pym, who dropped the last remnants of his starch in the process, to Aunt Jannet who, in the intervals of her other duties, picked oakum as if she had been undergoing a term of imprisonment,--the boat building made famous progress, and four weeks from the day the keel was laid the Kenni-Kenni was launched--prevailed upon, at all events, and apparently much against her will, to quit mother earth and take to the water. And if she looked, as Captain Cathie admitted, something of a cross between a washtub and a patchwork quilt, she was undoubtedly built strong and would stand a good deal of knocking about. As to her sailing qualities, they might have been better and they might have been worse, and, as Cathie said, they had not started out to build a cup-winner--which was perhaps just as well.