“Wait! Don’t—start!”
But the engine had picked up and that launch was steaming off, Rosa still apparently too stunned to protest, and Nancy was powerless!
“Where are you going?” Nancy shouted, quickly as she could recover from her surprise.
But no answer came back; nothing but the chug-chug of the engine, and the boat’s daring cut through the water.
“Rosa!” yelled the distracted Nancy. “Come back—”
Rosa turned and waved a fluttering hand, not gayly but sort of resignedly. And Nancy knew that all she, herself, could do was to—wait!
Certainly Orilla was heading her boat across the narrow end of the lake, at which point the water was sucked up by any number of little land patches, hills and foothills of the mountains. To land in any one of these would mean almost complete seclusion—for the thick evergreens made tiny forests of the islands. It was among these little islands that Nancy watched, impotently, for the last speck of color that identified the launch.
“Oh, what shall I do!” she moaned aloud. “Rosa is not fit to go off with that girl. And who can go after her?”
The memory of Mrs. Pixley’s plight out on No Man’s Land, the evening that Rosa and Nancy went to her rescue, now came back to Nancy, with Rosa placed in the same predicament.
“If she ever leaves her out there alone,” she worried, this time without speaking aloud, “we may not be able to find the spot.”