“I don’t know. Search—me!” quiveringly.
“I wonder the Boy Scouts don’t get caught among the wicked quicksands, seeing that they’re camping somewhere among those other dunes.” It was Sybil Deering who spoke. Sybil was not yet a Camp Fire Girl, although her elder sister who was to spend two months in camp had already been initiated as a Wood Gatherer; Sybil felt that the occasional presence of boys would add sauce to this crystalline Sugarloaf on which she found herself.
She had not been in bathing and she yawned in the hot sun as she sent her gaze sweeping over as much of that white Sugarloaf Peninsula as she could see, a hundred acres of sand-dunes taking their name from the highest peak, a pillar-like loaf of sand that sparkled like sugar-frosting in the hot sun.
“Oh, they know how to steer clear o’ the quicksands, I guess,” answered Captain Andy, answering on behalf of the Boy Scouts whose invisible camp was somewhere among the lesser sand-hills on the other side of the tidal river, here, nearly two miles across. “But quicksands’ll fool you,” he went on meditatively. “That’s why they’re so turrible dangerous; they look just like the firm sand, seem like it, too, when you plant one foot on them, but bring up the other, bend your weight on it an’ immediately you’ll hear the water rushing in under you and you’ll begin to sink—an’ it’s the one thing next to impossible under Heaven to drag you out!”
“How long does it take to—to sink out of sight?” asked Arline Champion—who had just come up out of the water rainbowed with brine—feeling awfully creepy.
“’Bout five minutes. Get caught in one o’ those sand-traps, nobody ever knows what becomes of you!”
There was a pervading, unanimous shudder, gathering up into it all the little minor shivers of the wet bathers.
“You’d better tell Jessica that,” volunteered little Betty Ayres from the edge of the dripping group. “She goes out in the rowboat, alone, the most; she might get swept down there—an’ stranded.”
“That reminds me, I saw the Morning-Glory, early to-day, doing a strange stunt; she was sitting under a rock with a sheet o’ something—dull glass it seemed like—on her knee, bending over it. I thought she was looking at herself in it an’ called to her, chaffing-like! She jumped up and ran away. She seemed kind o’ vexed at being caught.”
There was a general, wondering laugh, ousting the shudder, as one and another pair of girlish eyes sought the turbaned head of Morning-Glory, the foam-chicken, amid the waves.