“Why–why, it looked like a wagon. ’Twas something.”
“I suppose so!” laughed Frank. “Wagon with a load of hay on it–eh?”
Wyn said nothing more. She sat upon the float, with her knees drawn up and hugged in her brown arms, and thought. The other girls could get nothing out of her.
She wasn’t dreaming, however. She was thinking to a serious purpose.
It had looked like a wagon–as much as it looked like anything else. But, of course, she had seen it very dimly. She knew by the touch that it was of wood; but it was no waterlogged tree, although there was slime upon it It was not rough; but smooth.
Of course, it wasn’t a wagon. Nor was it a huge box. Neither wagon nor box could have got out here, fifteen or twenty rods off Gannet Island.
Wyn glanced over toward the island and saw that she could look right into the cove where John Jarley had met with his accident. According to the boatman’s story, as he went overboard from the motor boat he gave the wheel a twist that should have shot her directly out of the cove toward the middle of the lake.
“But suppose the boat didn’t respond, after all, to the twist of the wheel?” Wyn was thinking. “Or, suppose the slant of the rudder was not as great as he supposed?”
She fixed in her mind about the spot where the thing lay she had hit, and then glanced back to the tree on the bank of the cove, that showed the long scar where the branch was torn off.
The line between the two was clear. The motor boat might have run out exactly on that course and missed the wooded point which guarded the entrance to the cove.