NOT SO MUCH FUN
The danger, Jessie had thought, was over. But what Darry Drew said
made her feel anxious again.
“You don’t suppose we shall have to stay here until daylight, do
you?” she demanded.
“Too bad we haven’t your radio—or some radio—Jessie,” said Amy. “If
we could send out a cry for help——”
“Hey!” grumbled Burd Alling. “You’ll have to send out any wireless
like that with your lungs. Come on! Let’s all shout. Maybe somebody
on shore will hear us.”
“Maybe we can make the folks in the other boats hear,” Jessie
suggested.
They lifted their voices in unison and shouted. Again and again
the cry for help ricochetted across the water. But not a sound was
returned. There had been so much singing and laughing and shouting
on the lake this evening that none of the dwellers along shore would
suspect that there was a party in need of rescue.
“You don’t suppose the far end of this log is fastened to the shore,
do you, Burd?” suggested Darry.
“Not much. I can see the trees now. We’re forty yards or more out, I
bet. And this log is drifting out into the lake all the time.”
“That’s what I thought,” agreed the older fellow.
“We might swim it,” Burd said.
“But Jocklin Point is an awfully lonely place. We’d never get through
that tangle of woods,” said Jessie quickly.
“Guess you are right, there,” Darry agreed, hopelessly.
“And I can’t swim so very good,” Amy confessed. “I—I’m afraid to try
it. In the dark, too.”
“Looks as if we’d have to stay here and drift about until morning,”
Burd said in disgust. “Wish we’d saved some of the lunch.”
“How can you speak of such things when you are in danger of
drowning?” moaned Amy. “It—it isn’t reverent.”
“Wow!” yelled Burd. “I felt a snapping turtle at my toe.”
“You did not! You did not!” cried the excited Amy. “You just say
that, Burd Alling, to frighten me.”
But she cocked her feet up on the top of the log and from that time
on was in danger of toppling off.
“We can keep you afloat, Sis,” her brother declared. “Guess we’d
better push for the shore.”
“Not at the point,” Jessie objected. “We’d never be able to land
there. And the mosquitoes would eat us up. There’s a regular swamp.”
“Then, how about crossing the lake?”
“I won’t! I won’t!” repeated Amy, with decision.
“We’ll leave her here and swim ashore and get a boat,” suggested the
wicked Burd.
“You dare!” cried Amy. “Now you’ve got me all worked up. I—I won’t be
able to sleep all night.”
At that the others burst into laughter, in which Amy joined.
“You sure won’t sleep here on this log,” said her brother. “That’s a
cinch. Come on, Sis; brace up. We are in no immediate danger——”
And just then the log rolled and the girls screamed again. Amy
sputtered some more.
“I’m wet to my knees! My slippers are ruined! Isn’t this awful, Jess
Norwood?”
“It is not half as bad as though turtles _were_ nibbling at our
toes,” said her chum.
“Oh!”
“One of the boys might swim ashore for help,” pursued Jessie.
“Guess we’ll have to come to it,” Darry admitted. “Jess has got the
right idea.”
“But suppose he gets cramp?”
“You’re proving the possession of a fine imagination,” said Burd.
“All right, Darry. Who will be the sacrifice—you or I?”
“Wait a moment!” cried Jessie suddenly. “I hear something.”
They held their breath and listened. Amy was about to let loose
a flood of questions, when the sound that had caught her chum’s
attention was repeated.
“I hear it!” Amy cried.
“What is it?” demanded Burd.
Jessie pitched her voice high and sang out:
“This way! This way! We’re wrecked!”
“Is it really somebody shouting?” asked Darry.
Again they heard the call. It seemed to come from the other side of
the lake—the shore where the Dogtown boat landing was situated.
“Again! All together!” ordered Burd Alling.
At that the shipwrecked party raised their voices once more and made
the echoes ring. Their cries startled birds in the trees along the
shore and some of them made angry protest. A pair of horned owls
swept out of a grove and went “hoothooing” through the bottoms, to
the terror of field mice and other small game.
Amy shuddered, too, when it was over. “Those birds always give me
the shakes,” she gasped. “Was it them shouting, do you suppose?”
But now the cry, and an unmistakably human cry, came nearer. There
was a craft approaching. Darry stood up cautiously, balancing himself
on the log, and gazed over the murky lake.
“I see it! It’s coming!” he muttered.
Then an eery cry reached their ears. Jessie gasped.
“It’s that child!” she cried.
“What child do you mean?” demanded Darry.
“Little Henrietta. That is who it is.” She raised her voice again and
cried: “Henrietta! We’re here!”
“Comin’, Miss Jessie!” responded “Spotted Snake, the Witch,” and a
chorus of boys’ voices joined hers in encouragement.
The mended canoe soon came into view. Little Henrietta was in the bow.
“I knew it! I knew it!” she cried eagerly. “I seen your light go out
from the dock, so I knowed you have been sunk. Then you yelled, and
the boys said they’d come out and see.”
But the canoe could only take in two of the castaways at a time. The
girls went first, and when they had landed with Henrietta at Dogtown,
Charlie Foley and Montmorency Shannon went back to the log to rescue
Darry and Burd.
The two collegians did not let the boys do this for nothing; and all
of them praised Henrietta until she ran away. The mishap had ended
without serious disaster; but Amy complained a great deal walking
home to Roselawn.
“Next time I go out with you fellows in a boat, you’ll know it,” she
said. “And I got wet, and lost my sweater, and now it will be two
o’clock when we get home.”
“Lucky we aren’t out there for all night,” said her brother. “Don’t
be a grouch, Sis.”
But Jessie loudly praised Henrietta and “the Dogtown kids.”
Particularly did she praise Monty Shannon. Amy squeezed her chum’s
arm. She knew why Jessie spoke so warmly of the red-haired boy.
Not too much was made at home of the adventure. But Darry and his
chum, with the help of some of the men servants, had a hard job
during the next two days raising the _Water Thrush_. Therefore Jessie
Norwood and Amy Drew were obliged to find entertainment without the
assistance of the young collegians.