“I’ll take the wheel,” Agnes offered.
“You don’t need to,” said her companion. “She had no steerageway on her; and you might as well keep out of the storm. The rain is fierce!”
Agnes decided to take this advice, since staying on deck now would do no good and Neale was going below.
Neale raced to the motor room, where he found Hank ruefully contemplating the silent engine.
“What’s the matter?” asked Neale. “Is she broken?”
“Busted, or something,” was the answer. “If this was a mule, now, I could argue with it. But I don’t know enough about motors to take any chances. All I know is she was going all right, and then she suddenly laid down on me—stopped dead.”
“Yes, I felt it,” returned Neale. “Well, we’ll have to see what the trouble is.”
Agnes had gone into the main cabin where she found her sisters and Mr. Howbridge. Mrs. MacCall, in a nightcap she had forgotten to remove, was sitting in one corner.
“Oh, the perils o’ the deep! The perils o’ the deep!” she murmured. “The salty seas will snatch us fra the land o’ the livin’!”
“Nonsense!” exclaimed Mr. Howbridge, for he saw that Dot and Tess were getting frightened by the fear of the Scotch housekeeper’s words. “Lake Macopic isn’t salty, and it isn’t deep. We’ll be all right in a little while. Here’s Agnes back to tell us so,” he added with a smile at his ward. “What of the night, Watchman?” he asked in a bantering tone.