As they had noticed, it was unusually cold, and the wind from off the sea came sweeping in with force enough to drive their breaths back when they faced it. The Inlet was covered for half its breadth with a sheet of dull, iron gray ice, hummocky as a plowed field in places. Beyond, they could see the cold, steel-blue sea, breaking in showers of spray on the narrow strip of sand and brush which separated the Inlet from the open ocean and formed a breakwater. It was a depressing scene, and the chilliness and cheerlessness of it was added to by the shrieking voice of the wind whipping round the sharp angles of the boatyard buildings.
“Look!” cried Merritt suddenly, pointing seaward. “Isn’t that a schooner off there?”
He pointed to the southeast, where a small sailing vessel of some kind could be seen beating up into the wind, evidently making desperate efforts to keep off the coast.
“She’s pretty close in,” commented Rob. “They’ll have their hands full to claw her off.”
“What is she?” inquired Paul. “I can’t make out her rig.”
“Looks like a two-masted schooner from here,” said Rob. “My! but she’s eating up into that wind like a good one.”
“She’ll need to,” commented Merritt, as they entered the boathouse in which the motor-scooter stood installed, like a mechanical horse. For two hours or more they worked with Paul over the strange craft, rigging an inclined support for the gasolene tank. At last it was completed, to the young inventor’s satisfaction. He declared that the fuel would feed more rapidly, now that the improvement had been made.
The job completed, they emerged from the boathouse, having persuaded Paul to join the skating party. But what they saw as they came into full view of the sea drove all thoughts of skating out of their minds. The schooner they had noticed earlier in the day was now about off the Hampton Inlet beach. But she was so close in that they could almost see the figures moving about on her decks.
“Gee-hos-o-phat!” shouted Tubby. “She’ll be in the surf in another fifteen minutes.”
The others agreed with him. Desperately as the crew of the small, two-masted schooner were working to keep her out of the turmoil of the wind-driven breakers, she was being slowly but surely driven into the vortex.