As Florence at last, after having drawn on a garment of soft clingy material and having thrown a warm dressing gown over this, sank into a chair, she murmured:
“Thanks be! We are here. But, after all, where is ‘here’?”
CHAPTER XIV
“A PHANTOM WIRELESS”
It was night, dark, cloudy, moonless night. Florence could scarcely see enough of the sandy beach to tell where she was going. She had, however, been over that same ground in the daytime, so she knew it pretty well. Besides, she wasn’t going any place; just walking back and forth, up and down a long, narrow stretch of hard-packed and frozen sand.
She was thinking. Walking in the darkness helped her to think. When there is nothing to hear, nothing to see and nothing to feel, and when the movement of one’s feet keeps the blood moving, then one can do the best thinking. Anyway that was the way this big, healthy, hopeful college girl thought about it. So she had wrapped herself in a heavy cape and had come out to think.
They had been ice-locked on the island for thirty-six hours. The ice had crowded on shore for a time. It had piled high in places. Now the wind had gone down and it was growing colder. It seemed probable that the ice would freeze into one solid mass, in which case they would be locked in for who knows how long.
The water in their little natural harbor had taken on something of a crust. It was possible that the boat would be frozen into the stream.
“Not that it matters,” she told herself rather gloomily. “We can’t start the engine and as long as we can’t it is impossible for us to leave the island; only thing we can do is wait until someone discovers our plight or we are able to hail a boat.”
They were on an island; they had made sure of that first thing. She and Marian had gone completely around it. It wasn’t much of an island either. Just a wreath of sand thrown up from the bottom of the lake, it could scarcely be more than three miles long by a half mile wide. The stream they had entered, running almost from end to end of it, drained the whole of it. The highest point was at the north. This point was a sand dune some forty feet high. Their boat was moored at the south end. The entire island, except along the beach, was covered with a scrub growth of pine and fir trees. As far as they could tell, not a single person had ever lived on the island.
“It’s very strange,” Marian had said when they had made the rounds of it. “It doesn’t seem possible that there could be such an island on the lake without summer cottages on it.”