Agnes climbed the hill to the very foot of the huge palm, carrying an old pair of binoculars with her. She came down with flying hair and excited eyes.
“There is something flapping in the top of a palm tree on that first island! I can see it as plain as plain!” she cried.
“What is it—an old carrion crow?” demanded Neale.
“I don’t mean that it is alive,” returned Agnes. “It is a flag or something!”
“Do you suppose it is something the children have put up to attract our attention?” cried Ruth.
“If it is in the top of a tree, how did they get it up there?” questioned Luke.
“We-ell. They put up something in the boat; Tess’s skirt, I think,” Ruth said.
They could not stop to investigate Agnes Kenway’s discovery at this time. But when they went back to the inlet where the raft lay, Mr. Howbridge climbed upon a rock with the glasses and examined the fluttering thing which Agnes had marked in the tree-top on the first island of the chain to the east.
There was no other sign of life or occupancy; but certain it was that some sort of pennant fluttered in the breeze. Tess and Dot could not, of course, have climbed so high to fasten a signal of distress, even had they thought of doing such a thing; but this mysterious pennant seemed a promise that the island was occupied.
If the little voyagers had come in the drifting motor-boat to this island and been stranded, they might have found somebody already there—somebody who would take care of them.