It took a minute or two for this to sink in. There was no doubt about it. He was telling them that in a few minutes they would be lost in this horrible fog. And that might mean—they shivered and turned dismayed faces to each other.
“I—oh, I’m awfully sorry,” wailed Laura. “If I hadn’t said what I did to Paul we might never have come.”
“Nonsense! that had nothing to do with it,” said Billie, putting a loyal arm about her chum. “We would have come just the same.”
Then followed a waking nightmare for the boys and girls. In a few moments the fog settled down upon them in a thick impenetrable veil, so dense that, as Paul had said, you could almost have cut it.
It became impossible for Paul to steer, and all there was to do was to sit still and wait and hope for the best. Fog horns were sounding all about, some seeming so close that the girls fully expected to see some great shape loom up through the mist, bearing down upon them.
For a long time nobody spoke—they were too busy listening to the weird meanings of the fog horns and wondering how they could have escaped a collision so long. For a while Paul had kept the engine running in the hope that he might be able to keep to his course and eventually get to Lighthouse Island. But he had decided that this only made a collision more likely, and so had shut it off. And now they had been floating for what seemed hours to the miserable boys and girls.
It was Connie who finally broke the silence.
“Oh, dear,” she said, apropos of nothing at all, “now I suppose we’ll have to die and never solve our mystery after all.” She sighed plaintively, and the girls had a wild desire to shout with laughter and cry at the same time.
“Goodness,” said Laura hysterically, “if we’ve got to die who cares about mysteries anyway?”
The boys, who had been peering ahead into the heavy unfriendly fog, looked at the girls in surprise.