Chapter XIX: A Fire on the Beach

As Don at last threw off the powerful searchlight and descended the steel stairway that led to the ground, two problems stood out in his mind. He had broken all rules in using the searchlight. There had been strict rules about that. No civilian was to touch it.

“Well,” he told himself, “they may send me to jail if they must. I’d do it again for my sister and for them.”

The other question that puzzled him was one regarding that explosion at sea. Since he knew nothing of the afternoon’s happenings at Witches Cove and their aftermath at sea, he could make little of it.

As for the four girls, they had, it seemed to Ruth at least, lived a lifetime in a few hours. In one short afternoon they had experienced peace, hope, joy, near triumph, fear, disaster and all but death. What more could there be to life?

The little city girl had behaved wonderfully. She had sat wide eyed, calm and silent through it all.

The city boy puzzled Ruth most of all. Battling the waves like a veteran seaman, he reached them alone in the heavy dory. Then, without a word, he put his shoulder to an oar and began helping them to beat their way back to land.

“And he thinks life is a joke,” Ruth told herself. Then in a flash it came to her. This boy once thought that life was a joke. He did not really believe it; was not living as if life were a joke.

“He’ll forget all he thinks,” she told herself, “and become a wonderful man. I am glad.”

When they had circled a rocky point and come to the lea, they drove their boat on a narrow beach. There they built a roaring fire and sat down to dry their clothes. There Don joined them.

“How did you lose your mast? What was that explosion?” he demanded excitedly.

It was Ruth who told of the afternoon’s events. In the telling she was obliged to add much about old Fort Skammel and the bombing smugglers that he had not known before.

“But did you hear that explosion at sea?” he asked as she ended.

“Yes,” said Ruth, “and I have my ideas. Looks to me as if we had seen the last of those two men.”

“You think their motor boat blew up?”

“I think they had explosives on board and that the jarring of the waves set them off.”

“Hm!” said Don. “That might be true.”

Early next morning Don tuned up the _Foolemagin_ and went in search of the _Flyaway_. He found her piled up on the beautiful broad beach on Long Island. Save for a bump here and there and the loss of her mast, she was quite unharmed.

In a half hour’s time he had her pulled off and in tow.

“Get her in shipshape by noon,” he told Pearl over a belated breakfast. “Uncle Joe has a mast he took from an old boat. I’ll put it in and you can give her a tryout.”

It was during this tryout of the _Flyaway_ that the three girls bumped square into the last great adventure of the season.