On, ploughing on, through the wet, oozing sands.
She straightened herself, looking ahead as, silently, she put the weary question to her utterly strange surroundings.
Courage! The beach for which she was heading was now only about thirty yards away, a narrow strip which, instinct told her, was generally bare even at high water. On the land side it sloped abruptly up into a row of sand-hills, the white dunes upon the opposite side of the river from the Sugarloaf Peninsula, which had long been distantly familiar to her eye, the dunes to some far peak of which Kenjo had signaled by means of a lantern and blazing broom.
With the memory of that fire-talk, of the signaled message: “Safe at Camp Morning-Glory,” hope blazed in her as blazed the broom-handle. If she could only reach the Boy Scouts’ Camp somewhere among these dunes, all her troubles would be over.
She felt a momentary qualm of vanity about presenting herself as such a wet and draggled castaway and put up a hand to her loose, streaming hair, to make sure it was still all there.
“Oh, what does it matter if I do look a sight after all I’ve been through; they won’t care!” she told herself impatiently. “Goodness! their camp must be nearer than I thought. What was tha-at? A—shout?”
A shout it might be or a savage roar or the bellow of an animal; it came from some point invisible behind the first line of sand-hills; at first it carried no words with it. Then, as the girl stood quaking, wondering what sort of shore she had been cast on, came a second distant cry freighted with a hoarse challenge.
“Hólà! Hólà!” it said. “Why forre you raise de Cain dere—dig, dig, dig—all time dig?”
“Well! this is the very time to dig—after the rain—if you want to find anything,” returned a second voice, without the same element of guttural wildness in it that characterized the first.
“They’re Boy Scouts, digging for treasure—the treasure that Kenjo was questioning the Kullibígan fortune-telling top about!”