When she awoke there was the odor of coffee and bacon in the air. Greta and Jeanne were getting breakfast.
“Boats leave no trail,” she assured herself. “Unless they have seen the black schooner, I will not tell them it passed in the night.”
A bright glitter was on the surface of the bay. Old Superior had put on a bland and smiling face. No trace now of last night’s boisterous roaring.
“We’ll get back to the Pilgrim as soon as breakfast is over,” Florence decided.
“But the barrel of gold?” Greta protested. “Aren’t we going to dig for that?”
She was thinking of the talk they had had about the campfire, of the Indians, trappers and traders who had camped here for hundreds of years. In a flight of fancy she had dug a barrel of gold from beneath the sandy surface.
“No gold digging today,” Florence laughed. “No spade. But you’ll see! There’s another day coming. We’ll find it, don’t you ever doubt it, a whole barrel of gold!”
Florence was born to the wilds. High boots, corduroy knickers, a blue chambray shirt, a red necktie, these were her joy. She was as much at home in a boat as a cowboy is in a saddle. Breakfast over, she sent their light craft skimming through the narrows and out into the broad stretch of water lying between Blake’s Point and the reef that was the Pilgrim’s last resting place.
“Look how he smiles!” she cried, throwing back her head. “Old Superior, the great deceiver! You can’t trust him!”
And indeed you cannot. When a storm comes sweeping in over those miles of black waters and the fog horn on Passage Island adds its hoarse voice to the tumult of the waves, it is a terrible thing to hear those waves come roaring in.