“It is not so much the staying here,” said Ruth shakenly. “But I wanted to find the children myself and make sure they are all right.”
“You will have to trust that to us,” said Mr. Howbridge. “I do not believe for a moment that anything will happen to you girls here on Palm Island.”
“Oh, I am not afraid,” Ruth rejoined faintly.
“I think the camp should be moved over to the spring. There is a sheltered place in the side of the hill within ten yards of the spring—almost a cave. As we must take your tent——”
“Don’t bother about us!” cried Ruth. “Hurry and finish your raft.”
But Mr. Howbridge and the two young fellows were determined to leave Ruth and Agnes in as comfortable a situation as possible. In the first place, although no one dwelt on the thought, nobody could tell how long they would be gone from Palm Island.
It was all very well to consider that there was a fair wind blowing away from the island, one that would presumably drive the raft on the course followed by the drifting motor-boat. But how would they ever be able to beat up against this same wind on their return?
Even Neale and Agnes kept still about this. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Once they find the two little girls and the motor-boat, everything else must come right. That was the way the young people looked at it, anyway.
The repairs upon the engine of the Isobel had been all but complete. If the boat had not been wrecked upon one of the small islands, the trio hoped to finish the repairs easily and bring the craft back to Palm Island in triumph.
Now the party made haste to transfer all their belongings from the point where the old camp had been established to that spot west of the hill, at the spring. The spring was a fair-flowing stream that bubbled out from under a rock and had worn a course for itself in the sands to high water mark. When the party had first walked around the island they had overlooked this tiny rivulet, as the tide had been coming in and the brackish water had flowed up the course of it.