CHAPTER XVIII – THE SEARCH
Ruth and Agnes went around the wooded point, called “Willowbend,” and looked up the river. As we already know, the drifting boat, with Tess and Dot and Tom Jonah in it, had gone out of sight on the other side of Wild Goose Island.
“It never came this way, Ruth!” groaned the frightened Agnes. “They’ve drifted out to sea, just as I said.”
“Nothing of the kind,” Ruth declared, bound to keep up her sister’s courage, and knowing well that her conscience was punishing her cruelly. “The tide is coming in. They were bound to float up the river. But maybe the boat’s gone ashore somewhere.”
“Or it’s sunk,” said the lugubrious Agnes.
“Now you stop that, Aggie Kenway!” cried Ruth, stamping her foot. “I won’t have it. With Tom Jonah those children would not easily get into trouble.”
“They could fall out of the boat,” urged Agnes, wiping her eyes.
“They’d not be foolish enough to rock the boat. It’s all right, I tell you. I did expect to see the boat from this spot; but it’s floated into some cove somewhere. The children are safe enough – ”
“You don’t know!” blubbered Agnes.
“Keep still! Yes, I do know – I know as well as I want to. But we’ll have to ask for help to find them.”
“What kind of help?” asked Agnes.
“We’ll get Mr. Stryver’s motorboat,” said the oldest Corner House girl, with decision.
As they went back around the bend they heard a chorus of shouts from the camp. Agnes was startled, being in a nervous state, anyway.
“What is that, Ruth? The Gypsies?” she demanded.
“If it is, then the Gypsies have adopted the Milton high school yell. Don’t you recognize it?” returned Ruth. “The boys have arrived.”
“Neale O’Neil!”
“I suppose Neale is with them.”
“He will help us,” cried the delighted Agnes, sure in the ability of Neale O’Neil to do almost anything.
“Well – I suppose he may,” admitted Ruth, slowly.
Ruth had made no mistake in identifying the school yell of their boy friends. There was a crowd of boys at the two big tents reserved for Joe Eldred and his friends. They had just come on the auto-stage.
Already an American flag and the school pennant were being raised on the flag-pole before the tents. The scene at Willowbend Camp had been a most quiet one ten minutes before; now it seemed to be alive in every part, and the boys from Milton were all over it.
They were like a herd of young colts let loose in a new pasture. They got the flags up before the girls came back, and then began running races, and playing leap-frog on the sand. The midday heat made no difference to them.
“Doesn’t that water look inviting?” shouted Ben Truman to Joe and some of the bigger boys. “When do we go in swimming, Joe?”
“You can go when you like, Bennie,” returned Eldred.
“I’d like right now,” declared the youngster.
“Clothes and all, I suppose, Ben?” drawled Neale O’Neil.
“What’s clothes? I’m not afraid to go in just as I am.”
“I dare you, Ben!” shouted another of the boys, knowing the spirit of Truman.
“Done!” exclaimed Ben, and sprang away toward the in-coming tide. He splashed half-knee deep into the river before the others could call him back. He probably had no intention of going any deeper; but inadvertently he stepped into one of the holes the wooden-legged man had recently made when he dug for clams there, and over Ben pitched upon his nose!
There was a great shout of laughter. Ben was submerged – every bit! He came up blowing like a porpoise.
“Come on in, fellows! the water’s fine!” he gasped, not embarrassed by the accident.
“Thank you. We’ll wait till the bathing suits arrive,” returned Neale. “Hello! Here are the Corner House girls – two of them, at least.”
He hurried forward to greet Ruth and Agnes. The other boys simmered down a little when they observed the girls; most of them doffed their caps politely, but only Joe and Neale knew Ruth and Agnes very well.
“Oh, Neale!” was the latter’s greeting to her boy friend. “Don’t tell the other fellows, but Tess and Dot are lost.”
“Great goodness, Ag! You don’t mean it?” cried Neale, keenly troubled by her statement.
“It’s not as bad as that,” Ruth interposed. “They are out in our boat with Tom Jonah.”
“I knew you had him down here. He’ll take care of them,” said Neale, with confidence.
“Yes, I know,” agreed Ruth. “But they all got in the boat unbeknown to Aggie and me, and the tide’s carried them up the river.”
“You don’t know!” burst out Agnes.
“Well, they couldn’t have drifted out into the cove, that’s sure!” returned the older Corner House girl. “I’m going to get Mr. Stryver’s motorboat. Will you take us out in it and look for the children, Neale? You can run a motorboat, can’t you?”
“Sure! And I’ll do anything I can to help find the children,” declared Neale O’Neil. “Now, don’t you girls turn on the sprinklers – ”
“Who’s crying?” gulped Agnes, angrily.
“You are – pretty nearly. And your eyes are all red.”
“Hay fever,” sniffed Agnes, trying to joke.
“I’m going to get the boat right away. Come on, Neale,” cried Ruth, and she started for the Stryver tent. “I’m worried about those children,” she added, over her shoulder. “There are Gypsies about.”
She hurried on and Neale took Agnes by the elbow and led her out of all possible earshot of the other boys.
“Buck up, Aggie,” he said, gruffly, as a boy will. “You’ve been a good little sport – always. Don’t blubber about it.”
“But it was I who forgot to tie the boat,” Agnes said.
“Tell me about it,” urged Neale. So Agnes gave him the particulars. “Funny how the boat should have drifted out of sight so quickly,” was the boy’s comment.
“Isn’t it? But it’s go-o-one – ”
“There, there! We’ll find it and the children will be all right,” he assured her.
Ruth came running with the key to the padlock that moored the Nimble Shanks to the mooring stake. They got out to her – just the two girls and Neale – in a dory.
The Nimble Shanks was a blue boat with a high prow and long, sweeping lines to the low stern. It was not a large boat, but was built for speed. The engine and steering-gear were amidships and were arranged so that one man could handle the craft.
Neale was naturally of a mechanical turn, as well as an athlete. He had built a kerosene engine during the winter, with some assistance from Mr. Con Murphy, the shoemaker with whom he lived in Milton. Moreover, he had driven a boat just like this one of Mr. Stryver’s on the Milton river.
While Ruth was unlocking the chain of the Nimble Shanks, and fastening the dory in its place, Neale whirled the fly-wheel and caught the ignition spark; immediately the exhaust began to pop and Neale shouted:
“All free, there, Ruth?”
“Let her go, Neale!” returned Agnes, eagerly. “I can’t wait, it seems to me.”
“Sit tight, then, ladies,” said Neale, as Ruth scrambled aft. “I believe this craft can be made to travel.”
The girls obeyed as the Nimble Shanks started. She shot right out into the middle of the river, and the wave thrown up by her wedge-like bow rose higher and higher on either hand. Actually, when the motorboat had been running for five minutes, the girls in the sternsheets seemed sitting at a much lower level than the surface of the river.
“Goodness! if this boat stopped suddenly we’d be drowned by that wave,” gasped Ruth.
Neale headed up the river in a grand curve. They could see the shores on either hand. The boys ashore cheered their departure, though they did not know their errand.
They shot by the wooded bend like an express train. The girls kept watch on either hand for the boat. They hoped to see her rocking in some cove along one shore or the other.
But it was Neale himself who first sighted the drifting craft. The motorboat took the south channel in passing Wild Goose Island. Neale suddenly brought the speed of the craft down to one-half.
“There’s a boat ahead,” he said to the girls. “It appears to be empty. Stand up and see if it’s the one.”
Ruth rose and clung to Agnes’ shoulder to steady herself. She saw the empty cedar boat, bobbing on the little waves beyond the far point of Wild Goose Island.
“It’s her!” she said, breathlessly. “But where are the children?”
“We’ll find out,” said Neale, quickly. “Sit down again.”
“And Tom Jonah?” urged Ruth.
“Make up your mind that wherever the children are, he is, too,” said Neale, and he let the Nimble Shanks out again, and Ruth tumbled promptly into her seat.
The motorboat fairly leaped ahead. In five minutes they were near the empty boat, and Neale shut off the engine entirely. Under the momentum she had gained she slid right up beside the tossing cedar boat.
“Oh, oh!” groaned Agnes. “Where have they gone?”
“Not overboard, that’s sure,” said Neale, cheerfully. “They would have overturned the boat.”
“I – don’t – know,” began Ruth.
“Oh, Ruth!” shrieked Agnes. “Maybe they were not in her after all.”
“But that clam man said he saw them.”
“He didn’t see them in the boat when it was afloat,” said Agnes, clinging to the safer possibility.
“I know. But where else did they go?”
“Down the beach, maybe,” said Neale, slowly.
“The Gypsies have gotten them!” exclaimed Agnes, in despair.
“Stop it, Ag!” cried Ruth, shaking her sister. “You can think up the most perfectly awful things – ”
“Bet they got out of the boat on the shore somewhere, and let it drift away again,” suggested Neale, rather feebly.
“It wouldn’t be like Tess to do such a foolish thing,” said Ruth, shaking her head.
“They didn’t have anything to tie the boat up with. There’s no painter in her,” said the observant Neale.
“Of course there’s a painter!” cried Agnes, jumping up. “A nice long one – ”
“Where is it?” demanded the boy.
“Oh, Ruth! That’s gone!” gasped Agnes.
“Say!” said Neale, very seriously; “ropes don’t come untied of themselves. Sure it was fastened to the boat?”
“To that ring,” Ruth declared, confidently.
“And little Tess, or Dot, wouldn’t think to untie it themselves – I’m sure,” the boy observed. “They are with somebody who has taken them out of the boat – be sure of that.”
“You only – only say so to comfort us,” sobbed Agnes.
“Oh, Ag! stop being a ‘leaky vessel’!” cried Neale, with a boy’s exasperation at a girl’s tears. “Crying won’t help you any.”
Ruth had been examining the cedar boat, carefully. There was a little water in the bottom of it. She knew it did not leak. And floating on the water was a tiny russet leather slipper.
“That belongs to Dot’s Alice-doll!” she cried, leaning over the gunwale and fishing for the slipper. “They were in the boat.”
“We knew that before. The clam man said so,” sniffed Agnes.
“But they got out in a hurry. Otherwise Dot would have noticed that the doll had lost her slipper.”
“That seems reasonable,” admitted Neale O’Neil. “But what’s become of them? Where did they go? Where are they now?”
He was staring all about the river, while the two boats gently rubbed together, bobbing and courtesying on the tide.
“Don’t see anybody on the shores – and not another boat in sight,” the boy added.
“Maybe they went ashore on the island?” suggested Agnes, looking back.
“There’s nobody there,” said her sister, looking back, too. “Not a soul.”
“Guess you’re right. If there were anybody besides the girls there they’d have some kind of a boat, and we’d see it.”
“That’s so, Neale,” Ruth said. “And surely any grown person who rescued the girls wouldn’t have let the boat drift away again.”
The trio of searchers gazed at each other in trouble and amazement. They could not explain this mystery in any satisfactory way.
CHAPTER XIX – A STARTLING MEETING
Tess and Dot, sitting in the middle of a brush clump on Wild Goose Island, never saw the blue motorboat with their sisters and Neale O’Neil in it, fly past.
But the dark-faced girl, dressed in her bedraggled Gypsy finery, saw the Nimble Shanks, for she was on the watch at one side or the other of the island, all the time.
She observed the motorboat overtake the drifting craft, and saw Neale carry a line aboard the latter and then start up the engine of the power boat again. The two boats went up the lake at a fair pace; but the searching party could not travel so fast now, for fear of swamping the towed boat.
“I don’t think this is much fun,” said Dot, plaintively, when the big girl came back to them. “It’s hot here – and I’m hungry – and my Alice-doll has lost one of her shoes.”
“We’ll go up into the woods and pick some berries,” said the strange girl, not unkindly. “I know where there are some strawberries – and they’re just as sweet.”
“Oh! that will be fine. I do love strawberries,” declared Dot, easily appeased.
Tess was more troubled than her sister by this strange situation. She felt, somehow, as though the big girl were holding them prisoners. Yet she could not understand why.
She got up from the ground and at once Tom Jonah started up, barking and bounding about.
“Stop that dog!” exclaimed the big girl, crossly. “Make him walk beside you. I’ll tie him up,” she threatened.
“Then he’ll howl awful,” cried Dot. “We tried that once at home. Don’t you ’member, Tess?”
“Well, you keep him still,” snapped the big girl.
At a word from Tess the old dog drooped his tail and fell in behind them, in a most subdued manner. They went up through the thick woods to the higher part of the island. At no point could the little procession have been seen from the water.
There was a hillock up there, bare of trees, the southern side of which was sown thickly with strawberries. The bed was rich in berries, and how sweet and delicate was their flavor!
“Oh, so much nicer than boughten berries!” Tess declared, forgetting for the time all her anxiety.
Indeed, both of the Corner House girls were so busy satisfying their appetites with strawberries that they forgot about the unpleasant side to their adventure. Nor did they see the girl who had helped them ashore from the boat, creep over the knoll to watch the motorboat and its tow going down the river again, by way of the northern channel.
It was fully half past one. While Tess and Dot feasted in the wild strawberry patch, their sisters and Neale O’Neil munched cold, fried crabs on the Nimble Shanks.
It took a lot of berries to satisfy the healthy appetites of two girls like Tess and Dot whose dinner had been indefinitely postponed. Dot finally rolled right over in the shade, fast asleep, her dress and fingers berry-stained and the last plump one she had picked between her rosy lips!
The big girl came back and Tess whispered: “We’d best not wake her, for she usually takes a nap afternoons. When she wakes up, I guess we’d best be going. Ruth and Agnes will be awfully scared for us. And we’ve lost Ruth’s boat, too,” she added, disconsolately.
“How do you expect to get off this island?” demanded the strange girl.
“Why! how did you get on?” returned Tess.
“I paddled myself over on a raft of logs, early this morning before anybody else was up,” said the girl, after a minute. “I wasn’t going back till night. But if I keep you children all day there’ll be a big row, I s’pose,” she added, sullenly.
“I expect there will,” was Tess’ calm response.
“They’d get me for kidnapping, like enough,” said the girl, as though talking to herself. “Wish I hadn’t taken you out of that boat. But you and the dog were raising an awful noise.”
“I’m sorry,” said Tess, politely, “if we have been a nuisance. But of course we’ve got to get back to the tent before dark.”
“I s’pose so,” admitted the older girl.
“It’s funny Ruth hasn’t been up here before now looking for us,” Tess observed.
The big girl turned her head so Tess should not see her face. “Suppose she did not know you went sailing in the boat?” she said.
“Why! perhaps that is the reason,” Tess agreed. “They couldn’t have seen us; for if they had, Ruth would have been after the boat in a hurry.”
“Well,” said the strange girl, “I’ll have to get you across to the river bank. I wasn’t going till night. But – ”
“We are very much obliged to you,” Tess hastened to say. “But we couldn’t stay that long.”
“Oh, well! I’ll leave you children at a farmer’s over there. They’ll have a telephone and they’ll get word to your sisters. You’ll get back by suppertime.”
“Thank you,” Tess said, simply.
But she was more than a little disturbed in her mind. A raft of logs did not encourage her to look forward to the trip to the mainland with much pleasure.
Besides, the mystery regarding this pretty girl made Tess feel uncomfortable. Tess Kenway was quite old enough to know the difference between right and wrong; and there was something about the strange girl that was decidedly wrong!
Why had she come out here to Wild Goose Island in the early morning – before anybody in the neighborhood was up? Was she a runaway? Had she done something really naughty? and was she afraid to have her folks find her?
It was all a great puzzle and Tess sighed and shook her head. Finally she asked: “If you please, where is the raft of logs?”
“Right down there,” said the girl, pointing to the southern side of the island. “You can’t see it. I dragged it into shallow water and covered it up with branches and brush.”
“Is – is it safe?” queried Tess.
“Well, it didn’t drown me coming over,” said the girl, with a short, hard laugh. “But the logs came near parting.”
“Oh!”
“I’ll fix ’em before we start back. That painter off your boat will help. We will be all right,” said the big girl, carelessly.
Dot awoke after a little, and so did Tom Jonah. The whole party went down to the brush-fringed shore. Tess saw that the girl had hidden her raft very ingeniously. And it was evident, too, that she hated to leave the island so long before evening.
“Got myself in a nice mess!” the Corner House girl heard her mutter, as she went about binding the three logs together more tightly with the strong rope from the cedar boat.
She worked hard for half an hour, standing almost waist deep in the water as she made the logs secure. It was not a heavy raft – nor was it very safe looking, to Tess’ mind.
But fortunately Dot thought it would be great fun to ride on such a craft, and Tess was too brave to say anything that would really frighten Dorothy.
Tom Jonah became restless and wanted to wander about; but the big girl was very sharp with him. “If he were my dog I’d make him mind better!” she threatened. “If anything gives us away, it will be that dog.”
Tess did not understand this; and like Dot she felt hurt when anybody criticised Tom Jonah. “Love me, love my dog” was the motto of the younger Kenway sisters.
Finally the big girl pronounced the raft strong enough, and she waded out of the water and put on her skirts again. “Now, get aboard there,” she commanded. “If we’ve got to go, we might as well start. The tide will be less strong now.”
Dot skipped aboard the raft with her Alice-doll, in great glee; Tess followed more slowly. But when Tom Jonah tried to come, too, the big girl, with the broken oar she used for a paddle, drove him back.
“It won’t hold him up, too!” she cried. “Get out!”
“Oh! don’t hurt Tom Jonah!” wailed Dot, shrilly. “Don’t!”
“You look out!” warned Tess. “He’ll grab you!”
Tom Jonah certainly did grab the paddle. And he nearly wrenched it from the hands of the big girl, strong as she was.
“He’ll tip us all over!” declared the girl, angrily, flushed and breathing heavily. “Don’t you see how deep in the water we are? Any little wave will come right over the logs and wet us.”
“Well!” cried Tess. “We’re barefooted. And we can’t leave Tom Jonah behind.”
“He can swim, can’t he? Silly!” exclaimed the big girl. She pushed off the raft suddenly, leaving the troubled dog on the bank. The current caught the raft instantly and headed it down stream. The big girl hurried to dip her paddle in the water on the lower side and swerve the head of the raft around.
“Oh, Tom Jonah! Come! Come!” cried Dot, fearful that the dog would be lost.
He plunged right in and swam to the rear of the raft. He did not try to climb aboard, but he rested his nose on the logs and paddled quietly behind. The big girl paid him no further attention. She had her hands full as it was, keeping the raft from being swept down stream.
The current of the river had now conquered the inflowing tide. The force of the latter was spent; but the channel on this side of the island was not rough. The little waves did not break over their feet as yet.
The passage of the river was not, however, so hard. The handsome dark girl was strong, and she plied the broken oar with vigor. In half an hour they drew near to the tree-fringed southern bank.
The girls saw nobody along the shore, nor had any boat put out to meet them. It was a day when all the farmers seemed to be busy in their fields, and this was a wild spot toward which the raft had been aimed.
At last the end of the logs touched a shelving, narrow beach. The big girl leaped off and commanded Tess and Dot to follow immediately. Already Tom Jonah had scrambled ashore and was shaking himself, as a dog will.
Suddenly the big dog uttered a throaty growl. None of the three girls paid any attention. The strange girl was busy helping Tess and Dot to land.
Again Tom Jonah uttered his warning, and then barked sharply.
“Shut up!” commanded the big girl, turning on him fiercely.
At that moment a man walked out of the wood. He was a fierce little fellow with a black mustache and a dirty red tie. His velveteen suit was worn and greasy and his hat broken.
The strange girl turned suddenly and saw him. She uttered a stifled scream and the fellow folded his arms and said something to her sternly in a language that afterwards Tess said “sounded like powder-crackers exploding!”
The girl was terrified in the extreme. She looked from side to side as though contemplating escape. The fellow took another stride toward her.
And then Tom Jonah intervened. The big dog sprang with an awful growl, hurling himself straight at the man’s chest. The fellow went over backward and Tom Jonah held him down with both paws on his chest and his bared teeth at the victim’s brown throat!