“Oh! I wish you wouldn’t,” gasped Dot. “I had forgotten about those old turkles.”
The two sisters fell asleep as calmly as though they were in their own beds at the old Corner House. This was by no means the first night they had been lost and had slept in the open air. And nothing had ever really harmed them; though it is true that they were frightened at times.
This occasion was no exception. They could not have been sleeping two hours when first Tess and then Dot was aroused. It was not the splashing of the silvery water in the pool that aroused them, but some sound—a groan or sigh that actually seemed to have been uttered right in their ears!
Up sat the two little girls, wide awake and with wide-open eyes. They faced the pool. Out of this, rising slowly and ghostily, was a glistening gray body like a drowned giant that might have suddenly come up to breathe.
And the sigh he uttered! It made the flesh of Tess and Dot Kenway quiver to hear that sound and the blood seemed to freeze in their veins.
“O-o-o-o-o-o!” moaned the mysterious ghost, while the water poured in a gentle shower from his shoulders.
CHAPTER XXIII—THE TURTLE CATCHERS
The two older Corner House girls, like the two younger, were fear-ridden during at least a part of that second night of their separation. But perhaps Tess and Dot had much less to be really afraid of than Ruth and Agnes.
The latter spent the remainder of the hours of darkness after the strangers landed on Palm Island at the foot of the great tree that topped the hill above the camp that had been established for the girls before the boys had taken to the raft with Mr. Howbridge.
Crouched at the foot of the giant palm Ruth and Agnes clung to each other, sleeping but fitfully, until dawn. Aroused in the faint gray light, the sisters crept down to the shelter of the jungle again. They lay there, listening for sounds from the camp which they believed the Spanish-speaking crew of the mysterious craft had made at the spring.