CHAPTER XVIII

THE SEARCH

Ruth and Agnes went around the wooded point, called “Willowbend,” and looked up the river. As we already know, the drifting boat, with Tess and Dot and Tom Jonah in it, had gone out of sight on the other side of Wild Goose Island.

“It never came this way, Ruth!” groaned the frightened Agnes. “They’ve drifted out to sea, just as I said.”

“Nothing of the kind,” Ruth declared, bound to keep up her sister’s courage, and knowing well that her conscience was punishing her cruelly. “The tide is coming in. They were bound to float up the river. But maybe the boat’s gone ashore somewhere.”

“Or it’s sunk,” said the lugubrious Agnes.

“Now you stop that, Aggie Kenway!” cried Ruth, stamping her foot. “I won’t have it. With Tom Jonah those children would not easily get into trouble.”

“They could fall out of the boat,” urged Agnes, wiping her eyes.

“They’d not be foolish enough to rock the boat. It’s all right, I tell you. I _did_ expect to see the boat from this spot; but it’s floated into some cove somewhere. The children are safe enough——”

“You don’t know!” blubbered Agnes.

“Keep still! Yes, I _do_ know—I know as well as I want to. But we’ll have to ask for help to find them.”

“What kind of help?” asked Agnes.

“We’ll get Mr. Stryver’s motorboat,” said the oldest Corner House girl, with decision.

As they went back around the bend they heard a chorus of shouts from the camp. Agnes was startled, being in a nervous state, anyway.

“What is that, Ruth? The Gypsies?” she demanded.

“If it is, then the Gypsies have adopted the Milton high school yell. Don’t you recognize it?” returned Ruth. “The boys have arrived.”

“Neale O’Neil!”

“I suppose Neale is with them.”

“He will help us,” cried the delighted Agnes, sure in the ability of Neale O’Neil to do almost anything.

“Well—I suppose he may,” admitted Ruth, slowly.

Ruth had made no mistake in identifying the school yell of their boy friends. There was a crowd of boys at the two big tents reserved for Joe Eldred and his friends. They had just come on the auto-stage.

Already an American flag and the school pennant were being raised on the flag-pole before the tents. The scene at Willowbend Camp had been a most quiet one ten minutes before; now it seemed to be alive in every part, and the boys from Milton were all over it.

They were like a herd of young colts let loose in a new pasture. They got the flags up before the girls came back, and then began running races, and playing leap-frog on the sand. The midday heat made no difference to them.

“Doesn’t that water look inviting?” shouted Ben Truman to Joe and some of the bigger boys. “When do we go in swimming, Joe?”

“_You_ can go when you like, Bennie,” returned Eldred.

“I’d like right now,” declared the youngster.

“Clothes and all, I suppose, Ben?” drawled Neale O’Neil.

“What’s clothes? I’m not afraid to go in just as I am.”

“I dare you, Ben!” shouted another of the boys, knowing the spirit of Truman.

“Done!” exclaimed Ben, and sprang away toward the in-coming tide. He splashed half-knee deep into the river before the others could call him back. He probably had no intention of going any deeper; but inadvertently he stepped into one of the holes the wooden-legged man had recently made when he dug for clams there, and over Ben pitched upon his nose!

There was a great shout of laughter. Ben was submerged—every bit! He came up blowing like a porpoise.

“Come on in, fellows! the water’s fine!” he gasped, not embarrassed by the accident.

“Thank you. We’ll wait till the bathing suits arrive,” returned Neale. “Hello! Here are the Corner House girls—two of them, at least.”

He hurried forward to greet Ruth and Agnes. The other boys simmered down a little when they observed the girls; most of them doffed their caps politely, but only Joe and Neale knew Ruth and Agnes very well.

“Oh, Neale!” was the latter’s greeting to her boy friend. “Don’t tell the other fellows, but Tess and Dot are lost.”

“Great goodness, Ag! You don’t mean it?” cried Neale, keenly troubled by her statement.

“It’s not as bad as _that_,” Ruth interposed. “They are out in our boat with Tom Jonah.”

“I knew you had him down here. He’ll take care of them,” said Neale, with confidence.

“Yes, I know,” agreed Ruth. “But they all got in the boat unbeknown to Aggie and me, and the tide’s carried them up the river.”

“You don’t _know_!” burst out Agnes.

“Well, they couldn’t have drifted out into the cove, that’s sure!” returned the older Corner House girl. “I’m going to get Mr. Stryver’s motorboat. Will you take us out in it and look for the children, Neale? You can run a motorboat, can’t you?”

“Sure! And I’ll do anything I can to help find the children,” declared Neale O’Neil. “Now, don’t you girls turn on the sprinklers——”

“Who’s crying?” gulped Agnes, angrily.

“You are—pretty nearly. And your eyes are all red.”

“Hay fever,” sniffed Agnes, trying to joke.

“I’m going to get the boat right away. Come on, Neale,” cried Ruth, and she started for the Stryver tent. “I’m worried about those children,” she added, over her shoulder. “There are Gypsies about.”

She hurried on and Neale took Agnes by the elbow and led her out of all possible earshot of the other boys.

“Buck up, Aggie,” he said, gruffly, as a boy will. “You’ve been a good little sport—always. Don’t blubber about it.”

“But it was I who forgot to tie the boat,” Agnes said.

“Tell me about it,” urged Neale. So Agnes gave him the particulars. “Funny how the boat should have drifted out of sight so quickly,” was the boy’s comment.

“Isn’t it? But it’s go-o-one——”

“There, there! We’ll find it and the children will be all right,” he assured her.

Ruth came running with the key to the padlock that moored the _Nimble Shanks_ to the mooring stake. They got out to her—just the two girls and Neale—in a dory.

The _Nimble Shanks_ was a blue boat with a high prow and long, sweeping lines to the low stern. It was not a large boat, but was built for speed. The engine and steering-gear were amidships and were arranged so that one man could handle the craft.

Neale was naturally of a mechanical turn, as well as an athlete. He had built a kerosene engine during the winter, with some assistance from Mr. Con Murphy, the shoemaker with whom he lived in Milton. Moreover, he had driven a boat just like this one of Mr. Stryver’s on the Milton river.

While Ruth was unlocking the chain of the _Nimble Shanks_, and fastening the dory in its place, Neale whirled the fly-wheel and caught the ignition spark; immediately the exhaust began to pop and Neale shouted:

“All free, there, Ruth?”

“Let her go, Neale!” returned Agnes, eagerly. “I can’t wait, it seems to me.”

“Sit tight, then, ladies,” said Neale, as Ruth scrambled aft. “I believe this craft can be made to travel.”

The girls obeyed as the _Nimble Shanks_ started. She shot right out into the middle of the river, and the wave thrown up by her wedge-like bow rose higher and higher on either hand. Actually, when the motorboat had been running for five minutes, the girls in the sternsheets seemed sitting at a much lower level than the surface of the river.

“Goodness! if this boat stopped suddenly we’d be drowned by that wave,” gasped Ruth.

Neale headed up the river in a grand curve. They could see the shores on either hand. The boys ashore cheered their departure, though they did not know their errand.

They shot by the wooded bend like an express train. The girls kept watch on either hand for the boat. They hoped to see her rocking in some cove along one shore or the other.

But it was Neale himself who first sighted the drifting craft. The motorboat took the south channel in passing Wild Goose Island. Neale suddenly brought the speed of the craft down to one-half.

“There’s a boat ahead,” he said to the girls. “It appears to be empty. Stand up and see if it’s the one.”

Ruth rose and clung to Agnes’ shoulder to steady herself. She saw the empty cedar boat, bobbing on the little waves beyond the far point of Wild Goose Island.

“It’s her!” she said, breathlessly. “But where are the children?”

“We’ll find out,” said Neale, quickly. “Sit down again.”

“And Tom Jonah?” urged Ruth.

“Make up your mind that wherever the children are, _he_ is, too,” said Neale, and he let the _Nimble Shanks_ out again, and Ruth tumbled promptly into her seat.

The motorboat fairly leaped ahead. In five minutes they were near the empty boat, and Neale shut off the engine entirely. Under the momentum she had gained she slid right up beside the tossing cedar boat.

“Oh, oh!” groaned Agnes. “Where _have_ they gone?”

“Not overboard, that’s sure,” said Neale, cheerfully. “They would have overturned the boat.”

“I—don’t—know,” began Ruth.

“Oh, Ruth!” shrieked Agnes. “Maybe they were not in her after all.”

“But that clam man said he saw them.”

“He didn’t see them in the boat when it was afloat,” said Agnes, clinging to the safer possibility.

“I know. But where else did they go?”

“Down the beach, maybe,” said Neale, slowly.

“The Gypsies have gotten them!” exclaimed Agnes, in despair.

“Stop it, Ag!” cried Ruth, shaking her sister. “You can think up the most perfectly awful things——”

“Bet they got out of the boat on the shore somewhere, and let it drift away again,” suggested Neale, rather feebly.

“It wouldn’t be like Tess to do such a foolish thing,” said Ruth, shaking her head.

“They didn’t have anything to tie the boat up with. There’s no painter in her,” said the observant Neale.

“Of course there’s a painter!” cried Agnes, jumping up. “A nice long one——”

“Where is it?” demanded the boy.

“Oh, Ruth! _That’s_ gone!” gasped Agnes.

“Say!” said Neale, very seriously; “ropes don’t come untied of themselves. Sure it was fastened to the boat?”

“To that ring,” Ruth declared, confidently.

“And little Tess, or Dot, wouldn’t think to untie it themselves—I’m sure,” the boy observed. “They are with somebody who has taken them out of the boat—be sure of that.”

“You only—only say so to comfort us,” sobbed Agnes.

“Oh, Ag! stop being a ‘leaky vessel’!” cried Neale, with a boy’s exasperation at a girl’s tears. “Crying won’t help you any.”

Ruth had been examining the cedar boat, carefully. There was a little water in the bottom of it. She knew it did not leak. And floating on the water was a tiny russet leather slipper.

“That belongs to Dot’s Alice-doll!” she cried, leaning over the gunwale and fishing for the slipper. “They _were_ in the boat.”

“We knew that before. The clam man said so,” sniffed Agnes.

“But they got out in a hurry. Otherwise Dot would have noticed that the doll had lost her slipper.”

“That seems reasonable,” admitted Neale O’Neil. “But what’s become of them? Where did they go? Where are they now?”

He was staring all about the river, while the two boats gently rubbed together, bobbing and courtesying on the tide.

“Don’t see anybody on the shores—and not another boat in sight,” the boy added.

“Maybe they went ashore on the island?” suggested Agnes, looking back.

“There’s nobody there,” said her sister, looking back, too. “Not a soul.”

“Guess you’re right. If there were anybody besides the girls there they’d have some kind of a boat, and we’d see it.”

“That’s so, Neale,” Ruth said. “And surely any grown person who rescued the girls wouldn’t have let the boat drift away again.”

The trio of searchers gazed at each other in trouble and amazement. They could not explain this mystery in any satisfactory way.

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