She remembered the two policemen whom Lucile had seen on the beach that same night. Perhaps those two men had been running from the officers, trying to conceal something. But how had the man come there on the ice? Perhaps—she started at the thought—perhaps this man rode there beneath the sled. The runners had been extraordinarily broad. A man could easily ride between them. The thought gave her a start.
She thought of Lucile’s experience in the old Mission, and of her own with the blue candlestick. Perhaps, she told herself, they dropped the blue god through the ice.
Then she smiled at herself. How could the blue god be in Chicago? If it were they would never drop it in the water beneath the ice where it could never be recovered. Yet why had the ice been blue? Why—
She fell asleep, to listen in her dreams to the lash of ropes, the boom of canvas and to dream of riding a frail craft on a storm-tossed sea.
It would be difficult to determine just why it is that one knows how long he has slept, yet we very often do know. One wakens in the middle of the night and before the clock strikes the hour he says to himself, “I have slept three hours.” And he is right.
When Florence awoke that night she knew she had been asleep for about five hours. It was dark, pitch dark, in the cabin. The storm was still raging.
“Just listen,” she murmured dreamily, “One could easily imagine that we were out to sea.”
There was a tremendous booming of canvas and a lashing sound which resembled the wash of the waves, but this last, she told herself, was the ropes beating the mast. She had dozed off again when some strange element of the storm brought her once more half awake.
“One would almost say the yacht was pitching,” she thought as in a dream, “but she’s firmly fastened. It is impossible. She—”
Suddenly she sat up fully awake. She had moved a trifle closer to the porthole. Her head had been banged against it.