CHAPTER XIII
LAND AT LAST
Florence stood upon the deck. The storm had swept it clean. She was clinging to a hand rail at the side of the cabin. The water was still rolling about in great sweeping swells. Fog hung low over all. Strain her eyes as she might, she could see but a hundred yards. The boat, she discovered, had no horn or siren attached to it.
“If only we had one,” she told Marian, “we could keep it going. Then, if anyone is searching for us, he would be able to locate us by the sound.”
She stood there trying to imagine where they were, and what was to be the next scene in their little drama. All efforts to start the engine had been futile. There are a thousand types of gasoline engines. Marian had at one time managed a small motor on Lucile’s boat but that one had been of quite a different type.
“’Tisn’t any use,” Marian had sighed at last. “We can’t get it going.”
So there Florence stood thinking. Marian was in the cabin preparing some hot soup for Lucile. Lucile’s condition was much improved. She was sitting up in her berth. That much was good. But where were they and whither were they bound?
They had gone over their supplies and had found in all about eight pounds of flour and part of a tin of baking powder, three pounds of sugar, a half pound of coffee and a quarter pound of tea, two tins of sardines, a few dried prunes and peaches, two glasses of preserves and a few other odds and ends. Beside these there were still twelve cans of the “unlabeled and unknown” vegetables and fruit.
“I hope,” Marian had smiled, “that they are all corn. One can live much longer on corn than on pineapple.”
“But we can’t live long on that supply,” Florence had said soberly. “Something has just got to happen. And,” she had added, “perhaps it won’t. If it were summer, things would be different, for at that time of the year the lake is dotted with vessels. But now they are all holed up or in dry dock. Only now and then one ventures out. We may have been blown out a long way from shore too; probably were.”
She was thinking of all this now. At the same time her eyes were squinting, half closed. She was trying to pierce the fog.