And they began a thorough search of the boat from top to bottom and finally found her hanging over the rail of a gangway, trying to touch the snowy foam flying in the swirling wake of the paddle wheel. It was the first time she had ever been on a lake, and she took a perfectly childish delight in the racing water. Pulled back to safety by Nyoda, she gave an animated account of her adventures since seeing them last, in the course of which she had nearsightedly walked into the pilot house and caught hold of the wheel to steady herself when the boat gave a lurch, and had been summarily put out by an angry first mate. “I’ve been everywhere on the boat except down the smokestack,” she concluded triumphantly.
Soon Rock Island appeared as a speck on the horizon in Nakwisi’s glass, then as a long black streak which they could all see, and finally grew by leaps and bounds into a beautiful wooded island with trees and lawns and beautiful summer cottages shining in the sunlight. Shouldering their ponchos, they went ashore, and walked around the point of the island to the cottage where they were to spend the night. It was close to the water, where a curving indentation of the shore line made a lovely little beach. If Sahwah did not make the record at poncho rolling, she left them all behind in getting into her bathing suit, and five minutes after the door was unlocked her hands clove the water in a flying dive from the end of the pier.
Katherine splashed about courageously, trying to swim, and finally succeeded in propelling herself through the water by a series of jerks and splashes unlike any stroke ever invented by the mind of man. “This is too hard on my dellyket constitooshun,” she remarked at last, clambering out and draping her ungainly length around a rock, thereby disclosing the fact that her bathing suit was minus one sleeve. Katherine regarded the yawning armhole with mild vexation. “Broke my needle when my suit was all done but putting in the one sleeve,” she remarked serenely, “and there wasn’t time to go out and buy one—I finished the suit at eleven o’clock last night—so I just pasted that sleeve in with adhesive tape, and it didn’t show a bit. But it must have let go in the water,” she finished plaintively. Nyoda looked at the girls, and the girls looked at Nyoda, and once more they were dumb.
Tired of swimming, they dressed and explored the island and then sat down on the big boat dock and dangled their feet over the edge. Soon a tug came up alongside the pier and the sailor who ran it chanced to be a man whom Nyoda had met the previous summer on the island. “Hello, Captain McMichael,” she called.
The sunburnt sailor looked up. “Hello, hello,” he answered. “What are you doing up here so early in the season?” When Nyoda had explained that she had brought the girls up on a sightseeing trip, Captain McMichael promptly offered to take them for a ride in the tug. “Got to go over to Jackson’s Island and get a lighter of limestone,” he said. “I’d have to set you ashore on Randall’s Island while I went over to Jackson’s to get the lighter,” he continued, “because you’d get all covered with lime dust if you stayed in the tug while they were loading, and it’s no place for ladies to go ashore. But Randall’s is all right. The quarries there aren’t worked any more and there are only a few summer cottages. But there are excellent wild strawberries,” he finished with a twinkle in his eye. “I’ll call for you on the way back and get you here before dark. Will you come?”
“Oh, Nyoda, may we?” cried the girls, delighted at the prospect.
“Why, yes,” answered Nyoda. “I think that will be a delightful way to spend the afternoon. I have always wanted to explore Randall’s Island; it looks so interesting from the steamer. We accept your invitation with pleasure, Captain McMichael.”
“Glad to have you,” responded the tug master heartily, as he set the powerful engine throbbing.
“Don’t fall overboard,” he yelled above the steam exhaust a minute later as Katherine hung over the stern and trailed her hands in the water. Nyoda clung to her dress and the rest sang in chorus:
“Sailing, sailing,