And he understood the peril better than the girl-victim upon whose sand-plastered, draggled condition he now looked with chivalrous pity while he questioned her.
“I was out in a rowboat, alone, on the river when the squall came on; I lost an oar—I hope the other one is in the dory still; they were such pretty oars, all painted over on blades and handles with our Camp Fire symbols—at first I wanted to stand up in the boat and yell and yell—I was so frightened—for it was just frightfully rough; it seemed every minute as if the waves would roll the dory over, topsy-turvy. But I remembered that”—the girl’s voice was still broken and breathless—“that Captain Andy told us Camp Fire Girls that if one of us was ever caught in such a predicament and couldn’t row, the only hope was to flatten oneself to a flounder in the dory’s bottom. Well! I did—and a pretty wet flounder I was.”
“Then that sou’westerly squall swept the boat down the river, I suppose, before the wind shifted round to the east,” suggested Stack. “Were you cast ashore on the Neck?”
“I felt the dory’s bottom touch—then d’you suppose ’twould take me long to flounder out of her?” chuckled the girl. The Morning-Glory spirit, the little touch of humor, though draggled, was reviving in her.
“If it hadn’t been for hearing your voices among the dunes I might have got along all right, for Captain Andy had warned us about quicksands and said ‘they’d fool you,’ so I crept along on all fours, at first, after landing, teetering this way an’ that—you might have taken me for a seal if you’d seen me from a distance!” laughing shakily.
“But ’twas all so wild and lonely!” with a gasp. “I wanted to get where the voices were. And”—a sudden recollection came to her,—she dimpled mischievously—“I heard you shout to each other about digging—digging for buried treasure—Kenjo told us what the very old man who was hunting hen-clams said about strange coins being picked up near here.... I saw something bright, like silver, flashing after the rain, in the side of that sand-hill there—I thought I might get ahead of you....”
“Where was it?” Stack was up like an arrow; the gold-microbe working in him again as an antidote to the quicksands’ scare. “Can you show me where it was?”
He moistened his lips eagerly.
Morning-Glory, appealed to thus, dragged herself, with his help, to her feet; the eyes which were so like her great-grandfather’s in the old miniature searched gravely the side of the sand-pyramid.
“No, I can’t—see—it—now. Ye-es, I do, though!There it is!” She pointed triumphantly to a sparkle in one of the wind-hollowed grooves of the wet sand-hill.