“There’s nobody there,” said her sister, looking back, too. “Not a soul.”
“Guess you’re right. If there were anybody besides the girls there they’d have some kind of a boat, and we’d see it.”
“That’s so, Neale,” Ruth said. “And surely any grown person who rescued the girls wouldn’t have let the boat drift away again.”
The trio of searchers gazed at each other in trouble and amazement. They could not explain this mystery in any satisfactory way.
[CHAPTER XIX—A STARTLING MEETING]
Tess and Dot, sitting in the middle of a brush clump on Wild Goose Island, never saw the blue motorboat with their sisters and Neale O’Neil in it, fly past.
But the dark-faced girl, dressed in her bedraggled Gypsy finery, saw the Nimble Shanks, for she was on the watch at one side or the other of the island, all the time.
She observed the motorboat overtake the drifting craft, and saw Neale carry a line aboard the latter and then start up the engine of the power boat again. The two boats went up the lake at a fair pace; but the searching party could not travel so fast now, for fear of swamping the towed boat.
“I don’t think this is much fun,” said Dot, plaintively, when the big girl came back to them. “It’s hot here—and I’m hungry—and my Alice-doll has lost one of her shoes.”
“We’ll go up into the woods and pick some berries,” said the strange girl, not unkindly. “I know where there are some strawberries—and they’re just as sweet.”