“Nonsense!” the good doctor had exclaimed. “Worked my way through school myself. Know what it means. All I ask is that you pass the good work on to some other fellow who needs a boost when you are through with school and making money.”
So here they were, and had been for two months, all comfortably established in the cabin of the O Moo.
Dr. Holmes had suggested that they might be able to accommodate another girl. They had become acquainted with Florence Huyler, a freshman in the physical culture department, and had decided at once that she was just the girl to join them.
Florence had not waited for a second invitation and here she was sleeping in the berth to Lucile’s right. Just why she should have seemed most fitting as a companion for such an adventure I can best tell you as events progress.
The long hike back and forth to the university and the art school had been a bit tiring at first, but in time they had come to enjoy it. Then winter had come and with it ice on the lagoon. Only yesterday they had had their first wonderful race over its shining surface. Her recollections came slower and slower and she was about to drift off into a dream when there came again that strange rat-tat-tat.
Once more she sat bolt upright to peer into the darkness; once more she asked herself the questions: “What can it be? Should I waken Marian and Florence?”
She did not waken them. To do so would seem, she thought, a trifle silly. The yacht stood upon a car with iron wheels which rested on a track raised five feet above the ground by a stout trestle work. The sides of the yacht towered above this trestle. Altogether the deck of the yacht was fully twenty feet from the ground. They ascended and descended by means of a rope ladder. This ladder, at the present moment, lay on the deck. No one could enter their cabin unless he were possessed of a ladder and any person attempting this would at once be detected and might be arrested for it, so why be afraid?
But, after all, that sound was puzzling. She wanted to know what it meant. For some time she contemplated slipping on her dressing-gown to creep out on deck and peer over the side. But the wind was chill and still rising. The flag-rope was whipping the mast with ever-increasing fury.
“Cold out there,” she thought with a shiver. “Glad the O Moo is in dry dock and not on the water!”
A sudden thought brought a new fear. Of a whole line of schooners and yachts on that track in the dry dock, the O Moo was the one closest to the water. What if she should slip back into the water and be driven out into the lake! Lucile shivered again. Then she smiled. How absurd. Did not a heavy cable hold her in place? Were not the wheels of the car, on which she rested, blocked? How then could she glide back into the lake?