“What’s that?” asked Helen, suddenly seizing her chum’s wrist. “Did you hear it?”
“That splash? The men are washing decks.”
“It is a man overboard!” murmured Helen.
“More likely a big fish jumping,” said the practical Ruth.
The girls hung over the rail, looking shoreward, and tried in the uncertain light to see if there was any object floating on the water. If Helen expected to see a black spot like the head of a swimmer, she was disappointed.
But she did see—and so did Ruth—a lazy fishing smack drifting by on the tide. They could almost have thrown a stone aboard of her.
There seemed to be a little excitement aboard the smack. Men ran to and fro and leaned over the rail. Then the girls thought they saw the smackmen spear something, or possibly somebody, with a boathook and haul their prize aboard.
“I believe somebody did fall overboard from this steamer, and those fishermen have picked him up,” Helen declared.
The girls watched the sunrise and the shore line for another hour or more and then went in to breakfast. When they came back to the open deck the steamer was flying past the coast of the lower Peninsula, and Cape Charles Lightship courtesied to her on the swells.
Far, far in the distance they saw the staff of the Cape Henry Light. The steamer soon turned her prow to pass between these two points of land, known to seamen as the Capes of Virginia, which mark the entrance to Chesapeake Bay.