“Blue!” she whispered. “The face Lucile saw in the Mission was blue, illuminated and blue. In the story the old seaman told me the face of the god of the Negontisks was illuminated and blue. The candlestick I found was blue. What should be more natural than that a blue jade candlestick should be made in which to set a candle with which to illumine the blue god? Blue jade is valuable. A ring or stickpin set with a small piece of it is costly. That makes the candlestick both costly and valuable. All that,” she sighed, “seems to hang together.”
Again she sat for a time in deep thought.
“Only,” she breathed at last, “who ever heard of a tribe of Negontisks in America, let alone here in Chicago? Try to imagine a hundred or more near-savages, with no money and no means of transportation but their native skin-boats, traveling eight thousand miles over land and sea and ending up in Chicago. It can’t be imagined. It simply isn’t done. So there goes my carefully arranged puzzle all to smash.”
Throwing off her dressing-gown, she climbed into her berth, listening to the flag-rope lashing the mast for an instant, then fell fast asleep.
CHAPTER X
THE REAL CRUISE BEGINS
Next morning Florence was skating down the lagoon, deep in thoughts of the mysterious events of the past few days. So deeply engrossing were these thoughts that she did not see what lay before her. Suddenly her skate struck some solid obstacle. She tripped, then went sprawling. Her loosened skate shot off in another direction.
“That’s queer,” she murmured as she sat up rubbing her knees.
Glancing back over the way she had come, she saw nothing more than a circular raised spot which had formed when water had sprung up through a hole in the ice.
“That’s strange,” she mused, and rising, she hopped and glided back to the spot.
“Someone must have cut a hole in the ice,” she reflected, “though what they’d do it for is more than I can see. We youngsters used to do that to get a drink when we were skating on a little prairie pond, a long way from nowhere. But here the ice is fourteen inches thick and there’s a drink of water to be had for the asking up at the skate house.”