The impossible sometimes happens. That a thirty-foot sailing vessel, as staunch a craft as ever sailed the rock-ribbed sea, with a mast twice the required thickness, should be drifting helpless with mast and sail cast off and lost from sight, should lie helpless in a calm sea while a storm came tearing in from off the land was, in time of peace, you might say, impossible. Yet all this was just what was happening. The Flyaway was hopelessly adrift. What was more, Pearl Bracket, the golden-haired, freckle-faced girl of Peak’s Island, and Ruth with her city friends, twelve-year-old Jessie Hilton and Betty, were aboard. How could all this happen in one calm afternoon?
It had all come about so suddenly that even the four girls shuddering there on the mastless schooner could scarcely believe it had happened at all. They had sailed to Witches Cove. Having dropped anchor within the shadows of the overhanging rocks, they had tried their hand at fishing.
It had been a curious afternoon, not exactly cloudy, yet not exactly clear. A haze, a lazy mist, drifted here and there. Never did Witches Cove seem so spooky as now. Once as Pearl looked up from her fishing she saw a film of gray rise in the darkest corner of the pool. As if fashioned by an invisible hand it took the form of a witch with high hat and hooked nose. She was even riding a broom.
Pearl touched Ruth’s arm and pointed. Ruth saw and shuddered.
“Gray Witch is riding to-day,” she said. “Something is sure to happen.” In this she was not wrong.
The fishing was unusually good. Soon the deck of the Flyaway was alive with flapping fish. In the excitement the Gray Witch and all else was forgotten.
Then had come the supreme moment. Jessie had hooked a twelve-pound rock cod. The cod had showed fight. Before she could draw him in he had fouled the line among the kelp. So securely was he hooked that even then he could not escape. So, with three girls tugging at one line and the fish at the other, the red kelp went swinging and swaying back and forth at the bottom of the pool.
It was just at the moment when the kelp seemed about to lose its hold on the rock and to come floating to the top with the magnificent fish in its wake, that Pearl, chancing to look away, dropped the line to spring back in an attitude of fear.
She found herself looking into a pair of dark eyes. Instinct told her to whom those eyes belonged. “The face-in-the-fire,” her mind registered.
“The—the bombers!” she had whispered to Ruth.