Immediately after there was a cry from the little black coxswain.
"Oh, massa Fred, I's so frightened!"
"Whatever is the matter, Kashie?"
"See, sah, see!" he cried, pointing away ahead. "De island done go clear away out ob de world, sah!"
It was difficult indeed for any one in the boat to believe his senses. Every one felt dazed, and looked dazed. The island was gone sure enough; yet how or whither seemed inexplicable.
But the wind kept increasing every minute, and to go back now in the teeth of it was utterly impossible. So on and on the little boat flew for a time. The sea had got up so high too, all at once, that they were afraid to venture on lying to, and to lower sail meant being pooped by the racing, threatening waves.
How long they ran before the wind they never could tell. They had given themselves up for lost, however, and sat there in the gathering gloom of the awful thunder-storm silent and despairing, like men without hope and energy.
Fred himself had taken the tiller, and Cassia-bud was crouched in the bottom of the boat, hugging his friend Bob in abject terror.
But if Fred and Frank were puzzled by the disappearance of the fairy-isle, as they had called it, their astonishment knew no bounds when the boat was suddenly caught up by a huge wave, and hurled forward into a chaos of broken water and roaring breakers. Hurled into it? Yes, and hurled over it, into water that was as smooth as a mill-pond stirred by a summer's breeze. Behind them and away in a circle all around breakers foamed and roared and thundered. There was the quick, incessant gleam of lightning from out the blackness of the weather clouds; but yonder, not a hundred yards away, was an island, low and almost level, but fringed with cocoa-nut trees, and with an undergrowth of waving palms and other tropical shrubs.
In five minutes' time the boat was drawn up on the snow-white coral beach, and the thunder-storm had burst over them in all its violence.