“He—he’s gone!” Jeanne gasped.
“Yes. I gave him his freedom.” Florence lifted the red and white spoon from the water to send it rattling to the bottom of the boat. “But think of the picture he would have made! ‘Pike caught by girl in Duncan’s Bay on Isle Royale.’ Can’t you just see it?
“But after all,” she mused as the darkness deepened, “I don’t think so much of that kind of publicity. If we could only have our pictures taken with some innocent wild creature we have saved from destruction, how much better that would be.”
There was about this last remark an element of prophecy. But unconscious of all this, Florence took up the oars and prepared for a moonlit row back to the camping grounds.
“Listen!” She suddenly held up a hand for silence.
Across the narrow bay there ran a whisper. Next moment the glassy surface was broken by ten million ripples. At the same time a cloud covered the moon, and the world went inky black.
Directing her course more by instinct than sight, Florence sent her boat gliding right to the bottle necked entrance to the bay. Then the moon came out.
For some time they sat in their tiny craft and stared in amazement. Beyond the entrance to Duncan’s Bay lies a mile of jagged, rock-walled shore line. Against this wall waves were now breaking. As the two girls watched, they saw white sheets of foam rise thirty feet in air to spray one section of rocky wall only to rush on and on out to sea until it ended in a final burst of fury far away.
“Well,” Florence sighed, “we’re here for the night, whether we like it or not.
“I wonder—” her tone changed. “Wonder if Greta’s back.”