To make sure of what she had hit when she dived seemed to Wyn to be the principal thing. And how could she make sure of this without going down specially to examine the mystery?
“How under the sun am I going to do that without the boys seeing me?” she mused. “And if I take the girls into my confidence they will all want to be there, too–and then sure enough the Busters will catch us at it. Dear me! I don’t know what to do–really.”
She had half a mind to take Frank into her confidence; but, then, Frank was such a joker. The girls and boys had often talked about hunting for the missing motor boat; but since Mr. Lavine had gone back to Denton, after the regatta, neither club had seriously attempted a search for the Bright Eyes.
Polly had told Wyn how men from Meade’s Forge had searched for the boat when she was first lost; and some of the bateau men had kept up the search for a long time. Had the motor boat and the silver images been found, Dr. Shelton might have been obliged to pay a large reward to obtain them, for not all of the bateau men of the lake were honest.
“Some of them bothered father a good deal while he was first laid up from his accident, coming by night and trying to get him to give them details which he hadn’t given to the other searchers. They thought he must know just where the Bright Eyes was sunk,” Polly had told the captain of the Go-Ahead Club. “But they got tired of that after a while. They saw he really did not know what had become of the boat.”
Polly! She was the one to confide in, Wyn decided. And the captain of the Go-Ahead Club did not decide upon this until after the other girls in the big tent, and Mrs. Havel, were all asleep. Wyn had been awake an hour wondering what she would better do.
Now, convinced that the boatman’s daughter would be a wiser as well as safer confidante at this stage than Frank or the others, Wyn wriggled out of her blanket and seized her bathing suit. It was a beautiful warm night. She was no more afraid of the woods and lake at this hour than she was by daylight.
So she slipped into the suit, got out of the tent without rousing any of the others, selected her own paddle from the heap by the fireplace, and ran barefooted down to the shore. It took but a minute to push her canoe into the water.
She paddled away around the rushes at the end of the strip of sand below the knoll, driving the canoe toward the Jarley Landing. Out of the rushes came a sudden splashing, and some water-fowl, disturbed by her passing, spattered deeper into hiding.
Wyn only laughed. The warm, misty night wrapped her around like a cloak; yet there was sufficient light on the surface of the lake for her to see her course a few yards ahead.