A DETERMINATION
However the wind might sit and whatever may have been her secret opinion of Ruth Fielding’s interest in Chessleigh Copley, Helen suddenly became mute regarding that young man.
But, after a moment, she was not at all mute upon the subject of the King of the Pipes and what might be going on on the island where they believed the queer old man had his headquarters.
“If it should be smugglers over there—only fancy!” sighed Helen ecstatically. “Diamonds and silks and lots of precious things! My, oh, my!”
“Better than pirates?” laughed Ruth.
“Consider!” cried her chum boldly. “I said that island looked like a pirate’s den from the start.”
“Your fore-sight-hind-sight is wonderful,” declared Ruth, shaking her head and making big eyes at her friend.
“Don’t laugh—Oh! What’s that?”
From over the water, and unmistakably from the rocky island on the summit of which the blasted beech stood—a prominent landmark—came the strange cry, “co-ee! co-ee!” which they had heard before.
“Do you suppose that poor old man is calling for help?” hesitated Ruth.
“Your grandmother’s aunt!” ejaculated Helen, in disgust.
“We-ell that is even a more roundabout relationship than that between Aunt Alvirah Boggs and me. Poor old soul, she is nobody’s relation, as she often says, but everybody’s aunt.”
“There goes the signal again, and here comes that boat!” exclaimed Helen suddenly.
“What boat?” demanded Ruth, looking in the direction of the distant Canadian island, toward which the canoe, with Totantora and Wonota in it, had now disappeared.
“Turn around—do!” exclaimed Helen. “This way. That is the same boat we saw going by some time ago. The boat with the yellow lady in it, as Wonota called her.”
“This is very strange,” murmured Ruth.
“But the yellow lady is not with those men now,” said Helen.
“I do not see any woman aboard,” admitted her friend.
The boat—going not so fast now—crossed their line of vision and finally rounded the end of the island on which the two chums believed the queer old man resided. At least, somebody had uttered the strange, shrill cry from that very spot.
“Oh, dear! If we were not marooned here!” grumbled Helen.
“What would you do?”
“If we had a boat—even a canoe—we could follow that motor-launch and see if those pirates make a landing.”
“Pirates!” repeated Ruth.
“Smugglers, then. Your own Chess Copley says they may be smugglers, you know.”
“I wish you would not speak in that way, Helen,” objected Ruth. “He is not my Chess Copley——or anything else.”
“Well, he certainly isn’t mine,” retorted Helen, with more gaiety. “I can’t say I approve of him—and I long since told you why.”
“I believe you are unfair, Helen,” said Ruth seriously.
“Dear me! if you don’t care anything about him, why are you so anxious to have me change my opinion of ’Lasses?”
“For your own sake,” said her friend shortly.
“I wonder! For my sake?”
“Yes. Because you are not naturally unfair—and Chess feels it.”
“Oh, he does, does he?” snapped Helen. “I hope he does. Let him feel!”
This heartless observation closed Ruth’s lips on the subject. The two girls watched the other island. They did not see the boat again. Nor did they see anybody on the island or hear any other cry from there.
They both began to grow anxious. No boat appeared from the direction of the camp, and it was past the hour now when Willie was to have called for them with the Gem. Why didn’t he come?
“Of course, Mr. Hammond doesn’t expect us to swim home,” complained Helen.
“Something must have occurred. Totantora’s being sent off so suddenly really worries me. Perhaps Mr. Hammond himself was obliged to leave the camp and perhaps he went in the Gem, and Willie cannot return for us until later.”
“But where is Tom? Surely he must know all about this sudden trouble.”
“What was Tom going to do to-day?” asked Ruth quietly.
“Oh, that’s so! I had forgotten,” said Tom’s sister, in despair. “He was going around to Oak Point with some of the men. That’s down the river, beyond Chippewa Point, and they could scarcely get back in the other motor-boat before dark.”
“That’s the answer, I guess,” sighed Ruth.
“Then we are marooned!” ejaculated Helen. “I do think it is too mean—and my goodness! we ate every crumb of lunch.”
“The two ‘Robinson Crusoesses,’ then, may have to go on short rations,” but Ruth said it with a smile. “I guess we are not in any real danger of starvation, however.”
“Just the same, a joke can easily become serious when one is deserted on a desert island.”
“But you were looking for adventure,” retorted Ruth.
“Well!”
“Now you have it,” said Ruth, but soberly. “And worrying about it will not help us a particle. Might as well be cheerful.”
“You are as full of old saws as a carpenter’s abandoned tool-chest,” said Helen smartly. “Oh! What is this I hear? The smuggler’s boat again?”
They did hear a motor, but no boat appeared from the other side of the Kingdom of Pipes. The sound drew nearer. The motor-boat was coming down the river, through a passage between the island where the girls were and the American side.
“Come on! I don’t care who it is,” cried Helen, starting to run through the bushes. “We’ll hail them and ask them for rescue.”
But when she came in sight of the craft, to Ruth’s surprise Helen did not at once shout. Ruth only saw the bow of the boat coming down stream herself; but suddenly she marked the small name-board with its gilt lettering:
Lauriette
“Here’s Chess, I do believe!” she cried.
“Humph!” grumbled Helen.
“Now, Helen Cameron!” gasped Ruth, “are you going to be foolish enough to refuse to be taken off this island by Chessleigh Copley?”
“Didn’t say I was.”
“And don’t be unkind to him!” pleaded Ruth.
“You seem so terribly fond of him that I guess he won’t mind how I treat him.”
“You know better,” Ruth told her admonishingly. “Chess thinks a great deal of you, while you treat him too unkindly for utterance.”
“He’d better not think of me too much,” said Helen scornfully. “His head won’t stand it. Tom says ’Lasses never was strong in the deeper strata of college learning.”
Ruth was not to be drawn into any controversy. She called to the young man when, dressed in flannels and standing at his wheel and engine, he came into view.
“Hurrah! Here’s good luck!” shouted Chess, swerving the bow of the Lauriette in toward the island instantly.
“Hurrah! Glad you think it’s good luck,” said Helen sulkily. “I guess you never were marooned.”
“That’s navy blue you’ve got on—not maroon,” said Chess soberly. “Do you suppose I am color-blind?”
“Smarty!”
“Now, children, this is too serious a matter to quarrel over,” admonished Ruth, but smiling because her chum showed, after all, interest enough in the young man to be “scrappy.” “What do you suppose we have seen, Chess?”
“I’d like to know first of all how you came here without a boat?”
“My goodness, yes!” gasped Helen. “I’d almost forgotten about Wonota and Totantora.”
Ruth shook her head. “I am not likely to forget that,” she said.
She explained to the young man as they got into the launch and he pushed out from the shore about the difficulty that had arisen over the Indians. He was naturally deeply interested in Ruth’s trouble and in the fate of the Indians. But on top of that Helen eagerly told about the speedy launch, the yellow lady, and their suspicions regarding what was going on at the island that they had nicknamed the Kingdom of Pipes.
“I tell you what,” Chess said, quite as eagerly as Helen, “I was coming over to take you all for a sail on the river to-night. Let’s get Tom and just us four keep watch on that island. I believe there is something going on there that ought to be looked into.”
“I—I don’t know that it is our business to look into it,” suggested Ruth, doubtfully.
But for once Helen agreed with Chess, and against Ruth’s better judgment it was determined to come back to this locality after dinner and lurk about the mysterious island in the Copley launch.