It did not blow steadily, as hurricanes did, but in fits and gusts, more disconcerting than a steady blow of more power. The rain, also, came in showers. Now there would not be a drop filling, and again there would be a deluge, blinding in its intensity.
For want of a better name the storm was called a hurricane, though many of the real characteristics were lacking. And, as the dreary day wore on, the motor girls, and the boys, too, felt themselves coming under the spell of fear—not so much for themselves, as for their loved ones aboard the Ramona, which was the name of the steamer on, which Mr. and Mrs. Robinson and Mrs. Kimball had sailed.
"Oh, if anything has happened to them!" sighed Cora.
"Can't we get some news?" asked Bess, faintly.
"Surely there are telegraph lines and cables," spoke Belle.
"There are," the hotel clerk informed them, "but there are so many small islands hereabouts, into the harbor of any one of which the ship may have put, that it would be impossible to say where it was. And not all the islands have means of communication. So I beg of you not to worry, Senoritas. Surely they are safe."
Yet even the clerk, sophisticated as he was, did not believe all he himself said. For the storm, as the girls learned afterward, was almost unprecedented in the West Indies.
There was nothing they could do save to wait until it was over—until it had blown itself out, and then to wait, perhaps longer and with an ever increasing anxiety, for some news of those who had sailed.
"Oh, if Senor Robinson should be lost!" half sobbed Inez, on the third day of the storm, when it showed no signs of abating. "If he should be lost, my father would be doomed forever to zat prison."
"Nonsense!" exclaimed Jack, for it was in talking to Jack and Walter that the Spanish girl gave utterance to these sentiments. "Don't go saying such things around Cora and Bess and Belle, or you'll give them the fidgets. There's no sign the steamer is lost just because it has run into a storm."