Feebly, the exhausted boy was able to say: “You came in the nick of time, old man; I could not have lasted much longer.”
Kenneth answered not a word, but thought with a shudder of how close he had come to mistaking his friend’s frantic movements for playful antics. He reached out his hand and grasped the other’s fervently—it was a grip of thankfulness and affection on both sides.
Though Frank’s escape was narrow, the recovery of his high spirits was almost immediate, and soon the three friends were running races on the exposed sand bar as if one of them had never been in peril of his life, let alone a short hour before.
With the returning tide, the “Gazelle” straightened up, and after a few strong pulls on the anchor, which had been previously dropped for that purpose, she slipped off into deep water. It was still early afternoon, so with an eased sheet and light hearts the “Gazelle” and her gallant crew passed through the channel, out on the open ocean.
“Look at that old lighthouse; that’s a fine tower, but I don’t see any signs of a lantern.” Frank pointed to a tall shaft like a great chimney that rose from a cluster of palm trees. The yacht was slipping past the long point that forms one of the barriers between the ocean and Biscayne Bay.
“That must be the old Cape Florida light a fellow in Miami told me about,” said Ransom, gazing at the tall, graceful tower that pierced the blue.
“That tower has a story to tell. This place was full of Indians, I don’t know how long ago, and the lighthouse keeper and his assistant, a colored man, were in mortal terror of them. They thought, however, that they had a safe refuge, if worse came to worse, in the tower. One day a big bunch of the red savages came up and, after shooting a while at the men in the keeper’s house, set it afire. To save themselves from being roasted alive, the two men took refuge in the lighthouse itself and climbed up the long, winding flights of wooden stairs to the lantern room on top. For a time it seemed as if they were safe, but the ingenious devils soon hit upon the plan of setting fire to the stairs and platforms inside the tower. The door open at the bottom and top, the lighthouse became a veritable chimney, and the flames licked up the dry woodwork in a flash.”
“Gracious! What happened to the men?” Frank interrupted Kenneth to ask.
“When it got too hot inside,” Ransom continued, “and when the platform they were standing on inside began to smoke, they climbed out on that narrow little run-around outside; you can see it from here.”
The skipper pointed to the tower and the little balcony running round it near the top.