After a time she lifted her head to admit into her consciousness certain vital facts. Her feet were ankle deep in water, and had been for an hour; yet she had not known it. Her hands were blistered. Her arms ached. Red had found a flashlight and had switched it on. They were nearing a shore. On the shore was a narrow dock and a boathouse. All this came to her as if she were a very small child reading it from a book.
“This harbor,” Red spoke at last, “is about a mile from the lighthouse. There is no safe landing there for such a night. The light is not out. We were passing along close to a rocky wall that hid the light.
“There is a trail from this place to the lighthouse. And at the lighthouse there is a fire and blankets, food and good cheer.”
“Food and good cheer,” the girl repeated after him as in a dream. “Then we will go there.”
They did go there, though the girl will not recall the long stretch of pasture-like land over which they passed, nor the ridge they scaled to descend on the other side and to catch again the blinking rays of that cheering light. She will not recall all this because she walked as one in a dream.
At the lighthouse, besides two men, there was a woman, the head keeper’s sister. To her care Berley Todd was entrusted. When she had wrapped her in hot blankets and poured steaming broth down her throat, she bundled her off to bed where for long hours Berley dreamed of kidnapers, wild waves and cracking guns.
The Red Rover did not sleep. Never more awake in his life, he found himself in a position to act; and the Red Rover was born for action alone. For days his immediate future, the possibility of getting back to Old Midway in the great game, his very life itself, had hung in the balance. Now the balance had swung down. Fate had given him a break.
As he stood outside the lighthouse, his mind still in a whirl, a short chubby man with a beaming sort of smile approached him.
“I am Pierre Gagnon. And you,” he beamed afresh, “are the great Red Rover.”
“That’s what they call me,” Red said quietly. “But that doesn’t matter. Only one thing truly matters. How am I to get back to the city in time for that game?