“Oh, perhaps so,” said Harvey. “See, there’s a line of breeze way down below.”
A darkening of the water some miles distant showed that a southerly breeze was coming in. They got the first puffs of it presently, and trimmed their sails for a long beat down the bay.
The Viking was a good boat on the wind, the seas did not roll up to any great size, as the wind had come up so late in the day, and it was easy, pleasant sailing in the bright summer afternoon. Still, the breeze was too light for any good progress, and they had only reached Hawk Island, on which the lighthouse stood, and which was fifteen miles from Loon Island, by two o’clock.
They were going down a long reach of the bay now that rolled some six miles wide, between North and South Haven on the one hand, to starboard, and a great island on the other. Back and forth they tacked all the afternoon, with the tide, turning to ebb just after three o’clock, to help them.
By six o’clock they were two miles off the southeastern shore of South Haven, with great Loon Island, its high hills looming up against the sky, four miles across the bay.
“Well, shall we try for it?” asked Harvey, eagerly scanning the sky.
It looked tempting, for there had come one of those little, deceptive stirrings of the air that happen at times before sundown when the wind makes a last dying flurry before quieting for the night. The sun, just tipping the crests of the far-off western mountains across the bay, had turned the western sky into flame. Loon Island looked close aboard. So they kept on.
Then by another hour the glow had faded from the sky and the waters blackened and the shadows began to die away on the hills of Loon Island, and all the landscape grew gray and indistinct. They were two miles above the harbour, when the bluffs that marked it blended into the dark mass of its surroundings and there was no guide left for them to follow. The wind had fallen almost to nothing.
“We can’t miss it,” said Harvey, stoutly. “I’ve been in there once before.”
“No, we’re all right,” said Henry Burns. He went forward and stood looking off eagerly for some sign of light on shore. The island grew black in the twilight, and then was only a vague, indefinite object.