“Oh!” she exclaimed, suddenly attempting to stand up. “The dory’s gone!”
It was true. In her haste to muffle the bell, she had failed to tie her painter securely. Now it had drifted away into the fog.
“Time to dream now,” she told herself ruefully. “May never do anything else.”
To one who knows little of the ways of boats and buoys and other things belonging to the sea, the girl’s acts might seem madness.
They were not. By some mischance, the chain fastened to a huge rock at the bottom of the channel, which held the bell buoy to its place, had given way. The bell buoy still clanging its message, now a false message indeed, was drifting out to sea. If the S. S. Standish, the Booth Bay Harbor steamer, were guided by this false message catastrophe would befall her. With all on board she would go crashing into a cliff or be piled upon some rocky shoal.
Pearl could see it all, just as it would happen. A terrible crash, then unutterable confusion. Men shouting, children crying, women praying, seamen struggling and the black sea closing down upon a sinking ship.
“But now, thank God,” she said fervently, “it shall not be. Not hearing the bell, having no sure guide, they will stand away till the fog lifts.”
Then of a sudden her heart went cold and beads of perspiration started out on her forehead. What was to come of her? With her dory gone, she was going straight out to sea on the frame of a drifting buoy. What chance could there be?
A moment of calm thought, a whispered prayer, and she shut the thought from her mind. She was doing her plain duty. She was in God’s care. That was enough.
The hoot of the steamer’s fog horn sounded louder. Nearer and nearer they came. They had passed the Witch Rock bell in safety. There was need of Pearl’s bell buoy now.