“There he is! There he is!” cried Nancy, tears of joy streaming down her thin cheeks.
There really was a man waving something white. From the way he ran back and forth Nancy saw he was not weak from hunger as she was.
A few minutes later the plane moved off a safe distance from the reefs and taxied cautiously nearer one of the inlets. A small rubber motorboat, manned by three men, headed toward a passage in the barrier reef. Nancy wondered if she could live through the interval until she could know if the marooned man was really Tommy. She and Vernon crossed to the opposite window, which gave a view toward the island, but the plane was too low for them to see beyond the high waves pounding on the reef.
“I’m sure I look like a scarecrow,” said Nancy, suddenly aware of her looks. “Could they spare me a little water to try to scrub some of the grime off my face and hands?”
Vernon put a bit of water in a helmet and took a folded handkerchief from his pocket to use as a washcloth. He even produced a small piece of soap. Though Nancy scrubbed and scrubbed, and felt slightly better for the performance, she decided that nothing less than a day’s soaking in hot water would produce satisfactory results.
She saw that Mabel and Hilda still slept, and she left them in peace. Already she was beginning to wonder when they would let her have more water and another portion of food. But Lieutenant Holmes had been very positive in dealing out the amount they could have at first.
Vernon and Captain Crawford, the young blue-eyed pilot, filled the seemingly interminable interval by asking Nancy about the shipwreck. While she gave them the horrible details Nancy’s gaze kept turning toward that door through which the boatmen would return.
“How long were you adrift?” asked Captain Crawford.
Nancy shook her head. “I’m not sure. Olan Meyer made notches on the stern seat until he died—after that it didn’t seem to matter. There’re seven notches on the seat.”
“They left Koshu Island on October third,” Vernon recalled. “This is the sixteenth.”