Nor was the prayer unheeded. As she looked a dark spot appeared over Manana. Then the plane came into full view. As if set to the task, the light from the island beacon followed the aviator in his flight. Ten seconds he was in full view. Then he was gone, passed on into the night.
“Why!” the girl exclaimed, catching her breath, “How—how strange!”
The thing she had seen was strange. A broad-winged seaplane with a wide fusilage that might have been a cabin for carrying three or four passengers, had passed. The strange part of it all was that it was painted the dull gray-green of a cloudy sea, and carried not one single insignia of any nation.
“The Flying Dutchman of the air,” she thought as a thrill ran up her spine.
For a long time she sat there staring at the darkness of night that had swallowed up the mysterious ship of the air.
At last, with a shudder, for the night air of Monhegan is chill even in summer, she rose to creep beneath the blankets beside her sleeping companion.
She was about to drift away to the land of dreams, when she thought of Captain O’Connor and what he had told her of smugglers along the Maine coast.
“Can it be?” she thought. “But no! One would not risk his life crossing the ocean in a seaplane just to smuggle in a few hundred dollars’ worth of lace or silk or whatever it might be. ’Twouldn’t be worth the cost.
“But men,” she thought quite suddenly. “He said something about smuggling men into the country. It might be——”
Her eyes were drooping. The day had been long. The salt sea air lay heavy upon her. She fell asleep.