“Be sure there is gasoline enough, Tom. That Stazy doesn’t spread a foot of canvas, and we are not likely to find a gas station out there in the ocean, the way we did in the hills of Massachusetts.”
“Don’t fear, Miss Fidget,” he rejoined. “Are you all game?”
They were. The girls went to “doll up,” to quote the slangy Tom, for Reef Harbor was one of the most fashionable of Maine coast resorts and the knockabout clothing they had been wearing at Beach Plum Point would never do at the Harbor hotels.
The Stazy was a comfortable and fast motor-yacht. As to her sea-worthiness even Tom could not say, but she looked all right. And to the eyes of the members of Ruth Fielding’s party there was no threat of bad weather. So why worry about the pleasure-craft’s balance and her ability to sail the high seas?
“It is only a short run, anyway,” Tom said.
As for Colonel Marchand, he had not the first idea about ships or sailing. He admitted that only continued fair weather and a smooth sea had kept him on deck coming over from France with Jennie and Helen.
At the present time he and Jennie Stone were much too deeply engrossed in each other to think of anything but their own two selves. In a fortnight now, both the Frenchman and Tom would have to return to the battle lines. And they were, deep in their hearts, eager to go back; for they did not dream at this time that the German navy would revolt, that the High Command and the army had lost their morale, and that the end of the Great War was near.
Within Tom’s specified hour the party got under way, boarding the Stazy from a small boat that came to the camp dock for them. It was not until the yacht was gone with Ruth Fielding and her party that Mr. Hammond set on foot the investigation he had determined upon the night before.
The president of the Alectrion Film Corporation thought a great deal of the girl of the Red Mill. Their friendship was based on something more than a business association. But he knew, too, that after her recent experiences in France and elsewhere, her health was in rather a precarious state.
At least, he was quite sure that Ruth’s nerves were “all out of tune,” as he expressed it, and he believed she was not entirely responsible for what she had said.