“I expect he’s awful mad at me,” sighed Jane Ann, alias Nita.
“I know that he is awfully anxious to get you back again, my dear,” said Ruth. “He is altogether too good a man for you to run away from.”
“Don’t you suppose I know that, Miss?” snapped the girl from the ranch.
They embarked in the catboat and Tom showed his seamanship to good advantage when he got the Jennie S. out of that dock without rubbing her paint. But the wind was very light and they had to run down with it past the island and then beat up between the Thimble and the lighthouse, toward the entrance to Sokennet Harbor.
Indeed, the breeze fell so at times that the catboat made no headway. In one of these calms Helen sighted a rowboat some distance away, but pulling toward them from among the little chain of islands beyond the reef on which the lumber schooner had been wrecked.
“Here’s a fisherman coming,” she said. “Do you suppose he’d take us ashore in his boat, Tom? We could walk home from the light. It’s growing late and Miss Kate will be worried.”
“Why, Sis, I can scull this old tub to the landing below the lighthouse yonder. We don’t need to borrow a boat. Then Phineas can come around in the Miraflame to-morrow morning and tow the catboat home.”
But Jane Ann had leaped up at once to eye the coming rowboat–and not with favor.
“That looks like the boat that Crab came out to the Thimble in,” she exclaimed. “Why! it is him.”
“Jack Crab!” exclaimed Helen, in terror. “He’s after you, then.”