“Luke! They are out there! My darling children—my little sisters that I promised mother when she died I would always take care of! Oh, Luke! They are gone—gone!”
He sprang up then beside the girl. It was well he did so, for she wavered and would have fallen had his arm not been around her.
“Ruth! Ruth!” shrieked Agnes, now flying over the sands to the rocky shore. “They are not on the boat? Oh, they can’t be!”
Mr. Howbridge was aroused to the seriousness of the happening. The disappearance of Tess and Dot was a tragedy that dwarfed altogether the loss of the motor-boat.
“I saw them! I saw them!” panted Ruth, lying in Luke’s arms for the moment. “They waved something on a stick. I think it was Tess’ skirt. But the boat is too far away now for you to see it.”
“And not a thing to follow them in,” muttered Neale.
Agnes put a quick palm over his mouth. Thoughtless as the flyaway sister usually was, she realized at this moment the feelings that racked her sister. For Ruth had been responsible for the safety of the little ones, and Agnes knew that nothing could be said to make the older girl forget that fact.
The sun was fast declining. They all knew that the twilight would be short. Indeed, nightfall in the tropics is almost sudden enough to scare one. The last ray of the sun disappears and in an instant it would seem it is velvety dark and the stars pop out!
It did not seem possible that they could do anything to help or to follow Tess and Dot; in any case, not at night. The boat was so far away that they could merely distinguish it as a black-red blotch upon the ocean, where the departing rays of the sun touched the moving object.
The children were too small to be seen, even had they stood upon the decked-over forward part of the Isobel. They were, of course, in the cockpit or in the cabin. All alone upon the ocean! The thought smote the others as well as Ruth Kenway with horror and alarm.