“Yes! Yes! Here I am.”
“Shsh! Don’t talk,” she warned as Pearl began to babble excitedly. “We must get out of here at once.”
“Why? Wha—”
“Don’t talk. Come on!”
A moment later a punt with three dark forms in it crept away from the shadowy shore.
They rowed across the bay in awed silence. Having reached the shore of their own island, they breathed with greater freedom; but even here, as they climbed the steep board stairway that led from the beach to the street above, they found themselves casting apprehensive backward glances.
Once in the main street of their straggling village, with house lights blinking at them from here and there, they paused for a moment to whisper together, then to talk in low tones of the probable outcome of their recent mysterious adventure.
“I fully expected to see the Black Gull gone when I looked out of the window this morning,” said Ruth. “But she wasn’t.”
“Still chafing at her chains. Poor old Black Gull!” Pearl always felt this way about the discarded ship of other days.
“What did you think?” said Ruth. “You wouldn’t expect the owner of the boat to steal it himself. And he was a member of that terrifying band.”