So Morning-Glory, flattened to a flounder—and wet as ever was flounder-fish yet—“held on to herself” and prayed and thought of her Camp Fire Sisters.
“I wonder if they miss me—they must—and whether they see the boat drifting down to the breakers on the bar?” she questioned as the roar of those breakers swelled to a crash in her ears, as she could see the white wave-tops rising furiously on either side of the boat, plucking off their ghastly head-feathers of spray and tossing them in upon her like a watery coverlet, while she lay on her back in her cradle, the boat’s bottom.
That was just before a change came.
Yes, her Camp Fire Sisters and their Guardian did see the driven dory, were at this moment plucking their hearts out in anguish.
They were rending the streaming heavens with their cries, scouring the sodden Sugarloaf to find another boat and somebody strong to go after her while the dearest girl in their camp was being swept in a curtained drive of rain, upon a roaring bed of waves, out toward the mouth of the roar, the Bar, where the breakers curled in an ecstasy, piling white on white, pale as climbing death.
CHAPTER XIV
THE CASTAWAY
All of a sudden the girl so wildly cradled amid the breakers, with her wet, white face staring up from the boat’s bottom at the rain-washed, frowning sky, through sheets of spray, clear as rain, that swept over her, was vaguely conscious of some change in the forces that drove and whirled her.
She stopped bailing out the water that threatened to fill the little dory, sat up and peered over the edge of her dripping cradle.
Presence of mind grows like all other virtues. Just behind her head as she lay flat in the boat, stuck in a little wooden pocket of the dory, was what Captain Andy called a bailer-scoop, like a parlor coal-shovel, with no handle to speak of.