“No, you won’t,” said Tess promptly. “For I won’t go, Neale O’Neil. I don’t ever expect to be cast away again, so there!”
Early in the afternoon the trio got the motor-boat into the water again and anchored it off shore. The mechanism was already adjusted. It had to be tried out, changed a little, and finally set to running. There was sufficient gasoline to carry them a long way if the machinery ran perfectly.
Had Ruth and Agnes not been so frightened by the fact that their presence on Palm Island had been discovered by the turtle fishers, they would surely have spied the Isobel when she first came into view from behind the smaller island where Tess and Dot had been marooned.
The older girls hid in the jungle down by the rocky point and waited through the evening in much alarm. They heard and even saw some of the rough men passing and repassing the place of their concealment. They dared not go to sleep, and feared that they would have to remain awake, and in hiding, until another day.
But while the minutes crept by so slowly, Agnes, quick-eared as well as sharp of eye, began to hear a sound that at first puzzled then excited her. She seized Ruth more tightly in her arms.
“Oh, Ruthie! Listen! What is it?”
“Sh! They will hear you,” murmured her sister.
“I—I want them to, I guess,” choked Agnes. “Hear that? It’s the chugging of a motor-boat, Ruth!”
“Oh, never!” exclaimed the older girl, but getting up to her knees.
“It is the Isobel. Surely it is. They are coming! Neale! Neale!”