It was a dismaying prospect. Half an hour of such vagrant drifting as she had experienced was enough for a lifetime.
“Or I may—I may be swept ashore somewhere! It is hauling to the east; I’m certain of it!”
She knew something about the four winds and their direction; she had been keeping a scientific record of them for a month, together with the clouds, rain, fog or mist which, day by day, drifted over Camp Morning-Glory, in order to obtain a new honor-bead, a brown honor for “Camp Craft,” to string upon the leather thong about her neck, worn on ceremonial occasions.
If the wind blew from the east it certainly would not hurl her straight on until she struck the wild heart of the breakers on the bar.
What it would do with her she didn’t know. As she felt the dory spun and jostled in every direction, lifted high upon the white shoulder of one wave which crowed as it tossed it to another, she just sat and cowered under the cold lash of the spray, her heart-strings like bowstrings strained almost to snapping, with waiting for watery developments.
“That—that’s what Captain Andy calls the Neck—that sandy point jutting out there! Oh, if the boat would only, once, stop dancing and touch bottom!” she gasped aloud, stretching out her right arm toward that brown Neck of sand as if to encircle it. “Goody! I feel inside o’ me like a flooded attic, with everything, odds an’ ends of furniture, drifting round and bumping together.”
Her teeth clicked upon the gurgle of hysterical laughter—partly a bumped sole—that accompanied his soliloquy.
Another bump! A grounding shock! The dory was rubbing its nose against a long finger of sand slanting out from the Neck.
A receding surf-wave dragged it back. But the girl was on her feet like a wet flash and stumbling forward over the cross-seats. Sobbing, panting, she jumped over the rocking, receding bow right into the heavy, breaker-ridden surf dashing upon the Neck.
It was a bold splash that sent the wheeling sea-gulls circling off, amazed. And it was a bolder wade through the shallow fringes of surf and on, ploughing on, through the wet, oozing sands to gain a foothold upon some firmer sands of the brown Neck.