“What shall we do for paper?” Eleanor had just asked, when Margaret answered her: “Birch bark makes the best kind of paper. I saw a tree on the edge of the little wood.”
“True enough,” Winston exclaimed, as he bounded away, returning a few moments later with a strip of bark. The message was written, placed in the bottle and securely corked.
“I wish we had something to tie on the neck of the bottle to make it more noticeable,” Virginia began when Betsy snatched a cherry-red ribbon from her hair.
“The very thing!” the lad exclaimed. “Now, let’s cross the island. There is a much shorter way than that by which you came.”
“Hurray for us!” the lad cried half an hour later, when they stood on the shore near where the girls had landed. “Luck is with us! The wind and tide are just right to carry our message rapidly toward the mainland.”
Taking off his shoes and stockings, Winston waded far out on the shoal and then he lightly tossed the bottle into the deep water beyond. It partly sank, then rose. The wind caught in the loops of the red ribbon bow making sails that soon carried the bobbing bottle out of their sight.
“I have often made a fire on this shore at night,” Winston said, pointing to a charred place among the rocks, “but it evidently aroused no one’s curiosity. It is well for Peggy and for me that I studied woodcraft when I was a Boy Scout in England and learned to make a fire without matches,” he told them as they retraced their steps to the side of the island on which their host and wee hostess lived.
In the meantime the three lads from Drexel Academy were slowly cruising along the coast. Every now and then they would go as close as they dared, and all three, making megaphones of their hands, would shout: “Virginia Davis! Barbara Wente!” over and over, but only echoes from the cliff replied. Occasionally a sea bird startled by their cries would circle about them, but no other living thing was seen.
“This is a lost hope,” Benjy said, at last. “We have been cruising up and down this coast for two hours, in fact, nearly three, and so we might as well give up.”