“What’s beautiful about it?” her father growled.
However, he turned to gaze at a zigzag group of sailboats tacking gracefully along the far rippled shore. Not a quarter of a mile away, a ferryboat churned the blue water to whip cream foam as it steamed upstream.
“Are you certain this is the dock where we were to meet Mr. Gandiss?” Penny asked after a moment. “It seems queer he would fail us, for it’s nearly five o’clock now. We’ve waited almost an hour.”
Ceasing the restless pacing, Mr. Parker, publisher of the Riverview Star, a daily newspaper, searched his pockets and found a crumpled letter.
Reviewing it at a glance, he said: “Four o’clock was the hour Mr. Gandiss promised to meet us at dock fourteen.”
“This is number fourteen,” Penny confirmed, pointing to the numbers plainly visible on the shed. “Obviously something happened to Mr. Gandiss. Perhaps he forgot.”
“A nice thing!” muttered the publisher. “Here he invites us to spend two weeks at his island home and then fails to meet us! Does he expect us to swim to the island?”
Penny, a slim, blue-eyed girl with shoulder length bob which the wind tossed about at will, wandered to the edge of the dock.
“That must be Shadow Island over there,” she observed, indicating a dot of green land which arched from the water like the curving back of a turtle. “It must be nearly a mile away.”
“The question is, how much longer are we to wait?” Mr. Parker glanced again at his watch. “It’s starting to cloud up, and may rain in another half hour. Why not taxi into town? What’s the name of this one-horse dump, anyhow?”