The Campfire Girls on Station Island: or, The Wireless from the Steam Yacht

“Don’t you want me to row some, Nell?” Jessie asked.

“I’m doing fine,” declared the clergyman’s daughter. “But – but I guess I am getting a blister. These old oars are heavy.”

“We ought to have made him give us two pairs,” complained Amy. “Then the two of you could row.”

“Listen to her!” cried Jessie. “She would never think of taking a turn at them. Not Miss Drew!”

“Oh, I am the captain,” declared Amy. “And the captain never does anything but steer.”

They had rowed by this time well up toward the northerly end of the island. Hackle Island Hotel sprawled upon the bluff over their heads. It was a big place, and the grounds about it were attractive.

“I don’t see Belle or Sally anywhere,” drawled Amy. “And see! There aren’t many bathers down on this beach.”

“This is the still-water beach,” explained Jessie. “I guess most of them like the surf bathing on the other side.”

There were winding steps leading up the bluff to the hotel. Not many people were on these steps, but the seabirds were flying wildly about the steps and over the brow of the bluff.

“Wonder what is going on over there?” drawled Amy, who faced the island just then.

Nell stopped rowing to look at the incipient blister on her left palm. Jessie bent near to see it, too. Nobody was looking across the bay toward the mainland.

“You’d better let me take the oars,” Jessie said. “You’ll have all the skin off your hand.”

“Why should you skin yours?” demanded Nell. “These old oars are heavy.”

“How dark it is getting!” drawled Amy. “Even the daylight saving time ought not to be blamed for this.”

Jessie looked up, startled. Over the mainland a black cloud billowed, and as she looked lightning whipped out of it and flashed for a moment like a searchlight.

“A thunderstorm is coming!” she cried. “We’d better turn back.”

But when Nell looked up and saw the coming tempest she knew she could never row back to the inlet before the wind, at least, reached them.

“We’ll go right ashore,” she said with confidence.

“What do you say, Amy?” Jessie asked.

“Far be it from me to interfere,” said the other Roselawn girl, carelessly, and without even turning around to look. “I’m in the boat and will go wherever the boat goes.”

Nell, settling to the oars again with vigor, remarked:

“One thing sure, we don’t want the boat overturned and have to follow it to the bottom. Oh! Hear that thunder, will you?”

Amy woke up at last. She twitched about in the stern and stared at the storm cloud. It was already raining over the port, and long streamers of rain were being driven by the rising wind out over the bay.

“Wonderful!” she murmured.

“Where are you going, Nell?” suddenly shrieked Jessie. “The boat is actually turning clear around!”

“Don’t blame me!” gasped Nell. “I am pulling straight on, but that girl has twisted the rudder lines. Do see what you are about, Amy, and please be careful!”

“My goodness!” gasped the girl in the stern. “It’s going to storm out here, too.”

She frantically tried to untangle the rudder lines; but while she had been lying idly there, she had twisted them together in a rope, and she was unable to untwist them immediately. Meanwhile the thunder rolled nearer, the lightning flashed more sharply, and they heard the rain drumming on the surface of the water. Little froth-streaked waves leaped up about the boat and all three of the girls realized that they were in peril.

CHAPTER XVIII – FROM ONE THING TO ANOTHER

“Let ’em alone, Amy!” begged Jessie, from the bow. “You are only twisting the boat’s head around and making it harder for Nell to row.”

“I – could – do better – if the rudder was unshipped,” declared Nell, pantingly.

Immediately Amy jerked the heavy rudder out of its sockets. Fortunately she had got the lines over her head before doing this, or she might have been carried overboard.

For the rudder was too much for Amy. The rising waves tore it out of her hands the instant it was loose, and away it went on a voyage of its own.

“There!” exclaimed Jessie, with exasperation. “What do you suppose that grouchy old man will say when we bring him back his boat without the rudder?”

“He won’t say so much as he would if we didn’t bring him back his boat at all,” declared Amy. “I’ll pay for the rudder.”

Jessie felt that the situation was far too serious for Amy to speak so carelessly. She urged Nell to let her help with the oars; and, in truth, the other found handling the two oars with the rising waves cuffing them to and fro rather more than she had bargained for.

Jessie shipped the starboard oar in the bow and together she and Nell did their very best. But the wind swooped down upon them, tearing the tops from the waves and saturating the three girls with spray.

“I guess I know what that white-haired boy tried to tell us,” gasped Amy, from the stern. “He must have seen this thunderstorm coming.”

“All the other boats got ashore,” panted Nell. “We were foolish not to see.”

“Nobody on lookout – that’s it!” groaned Amy. “Oh!”

A streak of lightning seemed to cross the sky, and the thunder followed almost instantly. Down came the rain – tempestuously. It drove over the water, flattening the waves for a little, then making the sea boil.

“Hurry up, girls!” wailed Amy. “Get ashore – do! I’m sopping wet.”

Jessie and Nell had no breath with which to reply to her. They were pulling at the top of their strength. The shore was not far away in reality. But it seemed a long way to pull with those heavy oars.

The rain swept landward and drove everybody, even the few bathers, to cover. The shallow water was torn again into whitecaps and a lot of spray came inboard as Jessie and Nell tried their very best to reach the strand.

Amy could do nothing but encourage them. There was no way by which she might aid their escape from the tempest. One thing, she did nothing to hinder! Even she was in no mood for “making fun.”

In fact, this tempest was an experience such as none of the three girls had seen before. Jessie and Nell were well-nigh breathless and their arms and shoulders began to ache.

“Let me exchange with one of you, Nell! Jess!” cried Amy, her voice half drowned by the noise of wind and rain.

“Stay where you are!” commanded Jessie, from the bow, as her chum started to come forward. “You might tip us over!”

“Sit down!” sang the cheerful Nell. “Sit down, you’re rocking the boat!”

“But I want to help!” complained Amy.

“You did your helping when you got rid of that rudder,” returned Nell, comfortingly. “Do be still, Amy Drew!”

“How can one be still in such a jerky, pitching boat?” gasped the other girl. “Do – do you think you can reach land, Jessie Norwood?”

“I’ve hopes of it,” responded her chum. “It isn’t very far.”

“I wonder how far it is to – to land underneath the keel?” sputtered Amy.

“For pity’s sake stop that!” cried Nell Stanley. “Don’t suggest such gloomy and gruesome things.”

“Well,” grumbled Amy, “I believe it’s the nearest land.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” panted Jessie. “But don’t talk about it, Amy.”

The rain swept over and past the small boat in such heavy sheets that finally the girls could scarcely see the shore at all. Amy found something to do – and something of importance. Although not much water slopped into the boat over the sides, the rain itself began to fill the bottom. The water was soon ankle deep.

“Bail it! Bail it!” shouted Nell.

“Oh! is that what the tin dipper is for?” gasped Amy. “I – I thought it was to drink out of.”

Afterward “Amy’s drinking cup” made a joke, but just then nobody laughed at the girl’s mistake. She set to work with vigor to bail out the boat, and kept it up “for hours and hours” she declared, though the others insisted it was “minutes and minutes.”

At last they reached the strand.

One of the bathing house men ran out to help pull the bow of the boat up on the sands.

“Run along up to the hotel!” he cried. “There is no good shelter down here for you.”

The moment they could do so the three girls leaped ashore. Thus relieved of their weight, the boat was the more easily dragged out of the reach of the waves, which now began to roll in madly. The lightning increased in its intensity, the thunder reverberated from the bluff. The tempest was at its height when they hastened to mount the winding wooden stair.

“Oh, my blister! Oh, my blister!” moaned Nell, as she climbed upward.

“Everything I’ve got on sticks to me like a twin sister,” declared Amy Drew. “Oh, dear! How shall we ever get home in these soaked rags?”

“We must go to the hotel,” cried Jessie. “Come on.”

She was the first to reach the top of the stairs. There was a garden and lawn to cross to reach the veranda. As the rain was beating in from this direction none of the hotel guests was on this side of the house. The three wet girls ran as hard as they could for shelter.

Just as Jessie, leading the trio, came up the veranda steps, she heard a loud and harsh voice exclaim:

“Well, of all things! I’d like to know what you girls think you are doing here? You have no business at this hotel. Go away!”

Jessie almost stopped, and Amy and Nell ran into her.

“Oh, do go on!” cried Amy. “Let us get inside somewhere – ”

“Well, I should say not!” broke out the harsh voice again, and the three Roselawn girls beheld Belle Ringold and Sally Moon confronting them on the piazza. “Just look at what wants to get into the hotel, Sally! Did you ever?”

“They look like beggars,” laughed Sally. “The manager would give them marching orders in a hurry, I guess.”

“Do let us in out of the rain,” Jessie said faintly. She did not know but perhaps the hotel people would object to strangers coming inside. But Amy demanded:

“What do you think you have to say about it, Belle Ringold? Is this something more that you or your folks own? Do go along, Belle, and let us pass.”

“Not much; you won’t come in here!” declared Belle, setting herself squarely in their way. “No, you don’t! That door’s locked, anyway. It belongs to Mrs. Olliver’s private suite – Mrs. Purdy Olliver, of New York. I am sure she won’t want you bedrabbled objects hanging around her windows.”

“Go around to the kitchen door,” said Sally Moon, laughing. “That is where you look as though you belonged.”

“Oh, that’s good, Sally!” cried Belle. “Ex-act-ly! The kitchen door!”

At that moment another flash of lightning and burst of thunder made the two unpleasant girls from New Melford cringe and shriek aloud. They backed against the closed door Belle had mentioned as being the wealthy Mrs. Olliver’s private entrance.

Amy and Nell screamed, too, and the three wet girls clung together for a moment. The rain came with a rush into the open porch, and if they could be more saturated than they were, this blast of rain would have done it.

“We have got to get under shelter!” shouted Jessie, and dragged her two friends farther into the veranda. Belle and Sally might have been mean enough to try to drive them back, but at this point somebody interfered.

A long window, like a door, opened and a lady looked out, shielding herself from the wind by holding the glass door.

“Girls! Girls!” she cried. “You will be drowned out there. Come right in.”

“Fine!” gasped Amy, not at all under her breath. “Belle doesn’t own the hotel, after all!”

“It’s Mrs. Olliver!” exclaimed Sally Moon in a shrill voice, as she and Belle came out of retirement and likewise approached the open window.

“Come right in here,” said the lady, cheerfully, as Jessie and her friends approached. “You are three very plucky girls. I saw you out in your boat when the storm struck you. Come in and I’ll have my maid find you something dry to put on.”

“Oh, fine!” sighed Amy again.

The trio of storm-beaten girls hastened in out of the wind and rain; but when Belle and Sally would have followed, Mrs. Olliver stopped them firmly.

“Don’t you belong in the hotel?” she asked. “Then go around to the main entrance if you wish to come in. You are at home.”

She actually closed the French window – but gently – in the faces of the bold duo. Amy, at least, was vastly amused. She winked wickedly at Jessie and Nell Stanley.

“This will break Belle’s heart,” she whispered.

CHAPTER XIX – BOUND OUT

Jessie thought that the very wealthy Mrs. Purdy Olliver was no different from Momsy or Mrs. Drew or Nell’s Aunt Freda. She was just polite and kind. Secretly the girls from Roselawn thought the lady was very different from Belle’s mother and Mrs. Moon. Perhaps that fact was one reason why the unpleasant Belle Ringold had spoken in some awe of the New York woman.

She had a really wonderful suite at the Hackle Island Hotel, for she had furnished it herself and came here every year, she told her young visitors. There was a lovely big bath room with both a tub and a Roman shower.

“Though, you can believe me,” said Amy, “I don’t have any idea that many of the old Romans had baths like this. It was ‘the great unwashed’ that supported Cæsar. ‘Roman bath’ is only a name.”

“Wrong! Not about Cæsar’s crowd, but about the Romans in general as bathers,” answered Jessie. “Read your Roman history, girl. Or if not that – and you won’t – some historical novels.”

“Humph!” sniffed Amy, but made no further reply.

The girls laughingly disrobed and tried the shower, while the maid dried their outer clothing, furnishing each of the guests with kimono or negligee. Then they came out into Mrs. Olliver’s living room and took tea with her.

They did not get their own clothes back until nearly six o’clock, and saw nothing of Belle and Sally when they came out of the hotel. Perhaps that was because they left by Mrs. Olliver’s private door and ran right down the steps to the beach where they had left the boat.

The kind woman had asked them to come and see her again, and was especially cordial when she knew that Jessie was the daughter of the Mrs. Norwood who had been chairman of the foundation fund committee of the Women’s and Children’s Hospital of New Melford.

“I think that idea of having a radio concert by which to raise funds for the hospital was unusually good,” the New York woman said. “It was the first thing that interested me in radio-telephony. I mean to have a set put in here soon. There is a big one in the hotel foyer, but it does not work perfectly at all times.”

“Dear me,” said Nell, as the girls descended to the beach, “you run into radio fans everywhere, don’t you? How interesting!”

The boat was all right, only half filled with water. The bathhouse man came and turned the craft over for them and emptied it. Jessie thanked and tipped him and he pushed them off. Jessie and Amy each took an oar and made Nell sit in the stern and nurse her blister.

“It really is something of a blister,” Amy remarked, looking at it carefully.

“There’s water in it already, and it hurts!” wailed the clergyman’s daughter.

“I see the water,” declared Amy. “It may be an ever-living spring there. You know, people have water on the brain and water on the knee; but seems to me a spring in your hand must be lots worse.”

“You never will be serious,” said Nell, half laughing. “If the blister was on your hand – ”

“Don’t say a word! I think I shall have one before we reach the landing,” declared Amy. “And, girls, what do you suppose that grouchy old fisherman will say when he sees we lost his rudder?”

“He won’t see that,” replied Jessie.

“What! Why, listen to her!” gasped Amy. “Is she going to try to get away before he misses the rudder?”

“Not at all,” returned her chum calmly, while Nell began to laugh. “It was you who lost the rudder, Amy Drew. Nell and I had nothing to do with that crime.”

“Ouch!” cried Amy. “I wouldn’t have lost it if it hadn’t been for the thunderstorm coming down on us so suddenly. And that old fellow didn’t warn us of any squall.”

“He warned us that squalls were prevalent on the bay,” replied Nell. “He said he knew nothing about the weather. And I guess he told the truth.”

“There is a great lack of unaminity in this trio,” complained Amy. “If I lost the rudder, didn’t we all lose it?”

When they reached the inlet, however, the old fisherman was just as surprising as he had been in the first place.

“Don’t blame me,” he said when the girls came ashore. “I told you I didn’t know anything about the weather. I wouldn’t have been surprised if you’d lost the boat.”

“We only lost a part of it,” said Amy quickly. “The rudder.”

“Well, it wasn’t much good. I can find another around somewhere. Lucky to get the hull of the boat back, I am.”

“You didn’t get the whole of it back, I tell you,” said Amy, soberly.

He blinked at her, and without even a smile, said:

“Oh! You mean that for a joke, do you? Well, I don’t understand jokes any more than I do the weather. No, you needn’t pay me for the rudder. ’Tain’t nothing.”

The trio had a good deal to talk about when they got home, but Darry and Burd came in at dinner with the news that the Marigold was all ready for sea and that they would get under way right after breakfast the next morning.

Dr. Stanley and his daughter and Jessie and Amy were to be the boys’ guests on this trip, and the idea was to go along the coast as far as Boston and return. Mrs. Norwood had become used by this time to the boys going back and forth in the yacht and after her own voyage down to the island had forgotten her fears for the young folks.

“I am sure Darry will not expose the girls to danger,” she said to her husband. “But I am glad Dr. Stanley is going with them. He has such good sense.”

Henrietta wanted to go along. She did not see why she could not go on the yacht if “Miss Jessie and Miss Amy” were going. She might have whined a bit about it, if it had not been that she was reminded of the Radio Man.

“You want to look out,” Amy advised her. “You know the Radio Man is watching you and like enough he’ll tell everybody just how bad you are.”

“Gee!” sighed Henrietta. “It’s awful to be responsible for owning an island, ain’t it?”

The girls were eager to be off in the morning, and they scurried around and packed their overnight bags and discussed what they should wear for two hours before breakfast. Burd was not to be hurried at his morning meal.

“No knowing what we may get aboard ship,” he grumbled. “If it comes up rough there may be no chance at all to eat properly.”

“Now, Burd Alling!” exclaimed Amy. “How can you?”

“How can I eat? Perfectly. Got teeth and a palate for that enjoyment.”

“But don’t suggest that we may have bad weather. After that tempest yesterday – ”

“You’ll have no hotel to run to if we get squally weather,” laughed her brother. “I think, however, that after that shower we should have clear weather for some time. Don’t let the ‘Burd Alling Blues’ bother you.”

“Anyway,” said Jessie, scooping out her iced melon with some gusto, “we have a radio on board and we can send an S O S if we get into trouble, can’t we?”

“Come to think of it,” said Darry, “that old radio hasn’t been working any too well. You will have to give it the once over, Jess, when you get aboard.”

This made Jessie all the more eager to embark on the yacht. She was so much interested in radio that she wanted, as Amy said, to be “fooling with it all of the time!”

But when they got under way and the Marigold steamed out to sea there were so many other things to see and to be interested in that the girls forgot all about the radio for the time being, in the mere joy of being alive.

Darry had shipped a cook; but the boys had to do a good deal of the deck work to relieve the forecastle hands. Stoking the furnace to keep up steam was no small job. The engines of the Marigold were old and, as Skipper Pandrick said, “were hogs for steam.” To tell the truth the boilers leaked and so did the cylinders. The boys had had trouble with the machinery ever since Darry had put the Marigold into commission. But the young owner did not want to go to the expense of getting new driving gear for the yacht. And, after all, the trouble did not seem to be serious.

The speed of the boat, however, was all the girls and other guests expected. The sea was smooth and blue, the wind was fair, the sun shone warmly, and altogether it was a charming day. Nobody expected trouble when everything was so calm and blissful.

But some time before evening haze gathered along the sealine and hid the main shore and Hackle Island, too. Nobody expected a sea spell, however, from this mild warning – not even Skipper Pandrick.

“This is a time of light airs, if unsettled,” he said. “Thunderstorms ashore don’t often bother ships at sea. There’s lightning in them clouds without a doubt, but like enough we won’t know anything about it.”

It was true the Marigold’s company was not disturbed in the least during the evening. After dinner the heavy mist drove them below and they played games, turned on the talking machine, and sang songs until bedtime. Sometime in the night Jessie woke up enough to realize that there was an unfamiliar noise near.

“Do you hear it?” she demanded, poking Amy in the berth over her head.

“Hear what?” snapped Amy. “I do wish you would let me sleep. I was a thousand miles deep in it. What’s the noise?”

“Why,” explained Jessie, puzzled, “it sounds like a cow.”

“Cow? Huh! I hope it’s a contented cow, I do, or else the milk may not be good for your coffee.”

“She doesn’t sound contented,” murmured Jessie. “Listen!”

The silence outside the portlight was shattered by a mournful, stuttering sound. Nell Stanley sat up suddenly on the couch across the stateroom and blinked her eyes.

“Oh, mercy!” she gasped. “There must be a terrible fog.”

“Fog?” squealed Amy. “And Jessie was telling me there was a cow aboard. Is that the fog-horn? Well, make up your mind, Jess, you’ll get no milk from that animal.”

CHAPTER XX – SOMETHING SERIOUS

The three girls did not sleep much after that. The grumbling, stuttering notes of the foot-power horn seemed to fill all the air about the Marigold. Darry told them at breakfast that he used this old-fashioned horn on the yacht because it took too much steam if they used the regular horn.

“This is a great old tub,” complained Burd, who had spent the previous hour at the device. “She makes only steam enough to blow the horn when you stop the engines. Great! Great!”

“You’d kick if you were going to be hung,” observed his chum.

“Might as well be hung as sentenced to the treadmill. I suppose I have to go back and step on the tail of that horn after breakfast?”

“You’ll take your turn if the fog does not lift.”

“What could be sweeter!” grumbled Burd, and fell to on the viands before him with a just appreciation of the time vouchsafed him for the meal. Burd’s appetite never failed.

The fog, however, lifted. But it was a gray day and the girls looked upon the vessels which appeared out of the mist about them with an interest which was half fearful.

“Suppose one of those had run into us?” suggested Jessie. “And there is a great liner off yonder. Why, if that had bumped us we must have been sunk – ”

“Without trace,” finished Amy, briskly. “The old cow’s mooing did some good, I guess, Jess,” and she chuckled.

She had told the boys about her chum thinking there must be a cow aboard in the night, and of course they all teased Jessie a good deal about it. She laughed with them at herself, however. Jessie Norwood was no spoil-sport.

The Marigold steamed into the east all that afternoon. But the weather did not improve. The hopes of a fair trip were gradually dissipated, and even the skipper looked about the horizon and shook his head.

“Seems as though there was plenty of wind coming, Mr. Darrington,” he said to the owner of the yacht. “If these friends of yours are easily made sea-sick, we’d better get into shelter somewhere.”

“Where’ll we go?” demanded Darry. “Here we are off Montauk.”

“With the direction the wind is going to blow when she gets going, we’d better run for the New Harbor at Block Island and get in through the breech there. It’ll be calm as a millpond, once we’re inside.”

When Darry asked the others, however, the consensus of opinion was that they keep on for Boston.