"One. But that one turned up at King's Island, a hundred and fifty miles off its course."
"I guess we could risk it."
"All right, let's go."
Marian sprang to her feet, threw back the blankets to her couch, and fifteen minutes later was dreaming of a tossing skin-boat on a wild sea of walrus monsters and huge white bears.
Her wild dreams did not come true. When the time came to cross the thirty-five miles of water which separates the Old World from the New, they sailed and paddled over a sea as placid as a mill-pond. Here a brown seal bobbed his head out of the water; here a spectacled eiderduck rode up and down on the tiny waves, and here a great mass of tubular seaweed drifted by to remind them that they were really on the bosom of the briny ocean.
Only one incident of the voyage caused them a feeling of vague unrest. A fog had settled down over the sea. They were drifting and paddling slowly forward, when the faint scream of a siren struck their ears. It came nearer and nearer.
"A gasoline schooner," said Marian.
The natives began shouting to avert a possible collision.
Presently the schooner appeared, a dark bulk in the fog. It took shape. Men were seen on the deck. It came in close by. The waves from it reached the skin-boat.
They were passing with a salute, when a strange thing happened. Rover, the old dog-leader, who had been riding in the bow standing well forward, as if taking the place of a painted figurehead, suddenly began to bark furiously. At the same time, Marian caught sight of a bearded face framed in a porthole.