Johnson looked puzzled but started in a hurry. In an hour or so he was back, still puzzled; compasses he thought were for people who were lost.
“It’s only a chance, John, another forlorn hope, but there’s magnetic iron in those dynamos and the needle might show it if we can get above the boat.”
Johnson’s friendly eye shone instantly with interest. Starting from the spot of the wreck, he poled slowly down the river, keeping in line with the rock. Ten, twenty, thirty—fifty feet below the rock they poled and the needle did not waver from the north.
“She’d go to pieces before she ever travelled this far.” The glimmer of hope in Bruce’s eyes had died. “Either the needle won’t locate her or she’s drifted into the channel. If that’s the case we’ll never get her out.”
Then Johnson poled back and forth, zig-zagging from bank to bank, covering every foot of space, and still the needle hung steadfastly to its place.
They were all of fifty feet from where the boat had sunk and some forty feet from shore when Bruce cried sharply:
“Hold her steady! Wait!”
The needle wavered—agitated unmistakably—then the parts of the dynamos and the motor in the boat dragged the reluctant point of steel slowly, flutteringly, but surely, from its affinity, the magnetic North.
Bruce gulped at something in his throat before he spoke——
“John, we’ve got her!”