After that they lapsed into silence, and Ruth renewed her silent rowing.
The hour was late. Betty’s head began to nod. Ruth, alone with her thoughts, was swinging her oars in strong, sweeping strokes when a curious thing struck her eye. They were passing the ancient abandoned fort on House Island, a massive pile of solid granite, when through a narrow space where cannon had frowned in the long ago, a light appeared. One instant it shone there clear and bright, the next it was gone.
“How strange!” she thought. “No one is ever there.” At once she registered a resolve to visit the fort to have a look into this new mystery.
Once more she thought of the ancient wood-carrying schooner, of the bolts of silk cloth in her hold, and of the dory that had passed them in the night.
“It’s astonishing,” she told herself, “the way events connect themselves up, woven together in a pattern like a rug. But you have to trace them out one by one before the pattern comes out clear and strong.”
The moon was out. The stars were shining when their punt touched the sandy beach of the island that had always been Ruth’s home.
A half hour later that same moon, looking down upon a brown and weather-beaten fisherman’s cottage, beamed through narrow panes of glass upon two girls sleeping side by side. One was large and strong and ruddy. Her arms, thrown clear of the covers, showed the muscular lines of an athlete. Endless miles of rowing, clam digging in the early morning, hauling away at the float line of lobster traps, had done this. There was about the girl’s whole make-up a suggestion of perfect physical well-being which is found oftener than anywhere else in a seacoast village.
The other girl, as you will know, was slim, active and with nerves tight as fiddle strings. Her life had been lived in the city. A few months before she had gone with her father to live at a school by the side of Lake Michigan. Now, for the summer, she was staying with a wealthy young married woman in her summer cottage on the island. She was with Ruth for but this one night.
As one looked at Betty lying there in repose, he read in her face and figure signs of strength. The slender arms and limbs were not without their suggestion of power. Her strength was the quick, nervous strength of a squirrel; useful enough for all that. One might be sure that she would leap into action while others searched their troubled minds for a way out.
Strangely matched as they might be, these girls were destined to spend much of their summer together and to come to know in a few brief weeks how much of mystery, adventure and romance the rugged coast of Maine has to offer those who come there to seek.