“Try the motor again!” Dave ordered. “We might get away now.”
The engines were accelerated, but in vain.
“Getting pretty hot down there.” Rufus mopped his brow as he came up from below.
A wave of despair overwhelmed Florence. What would be the end? Then a thrilling sight met her gaze. Fifty boys, each carrying a shovel or an ax and each with his head covered by a damp cloth, marched out of the camp cabin and straight toward the conflagration. “To do or to die for us,” she thought.
Then the boys struck up a song.
CHAPTER II
THE BATTLE OF SISKOWIT
The “Battle of Siskowit,” as the boys later named it, was gloriously fought.
“To think,” Florence exclaimed, as she watched one band of weary smoke-choked fighters fall back only to be replaced by fresh shock troops, “to think that those boys are willing to risk and endure so much to save us and our boat! What does it matter now if we never make a dollar from this summer’s work?”
There were times in that hour of fire fighting when the battle seemed lost; when tall spruce trees, caught in the flames, blazed toward the sky; when the heat burned the faces of the fighters and tar oozed up from the Wanderer’s deck.
Three times Rufus went below to set the motors roaring in the hope that some small tide had lifted the ship off the rocks, but his efforts were in vain. The Wanderer stuck fast.