It was Florence who could not sleep that night. The throbbing pain in the sprained ankle defied repose. The strange events of that day and those that had gone before had at last broken through her staunch reserve and entered her inner consciousness.
“Sleep!” she exclaimed at last in a hoarse whisper. “Who can sleep?”
Strangely enough, at that moment in a little cabin at Chippewa Harbor, Vincent Stearns, the young newspaper photographer who had given Greta the white flares, lay on his cot looking away at the moon and wondering in a vague sort of way what was happening to his dark-eyed friend up there on Greenstone Ridge.
“Hope she finds some rare greenstones,” he said to the moon. “Hope she is finding adventure, happy adventure.
“Happy adventure.” He repeated the words softly. “Guess that’s what we all hope to have in life. But so few adventures are happy ones.
“And if that little girl’s adventures are not happy ones, there will come the white flare in the night.
“The white flare.” He found himself wishing against the will of his better self that he might catch the gleam of that white light against the skyline. “What an adventure!” he murmured. “Racing away to Lake Ritchie, paddling like mad, then struggling up the ridge in the night to find—”
Well, what would he find? What did he expect to find? He did not know. Yet something seemed to tell him that perhaps at some unearthly hour the flare would stand out against the sky.
Adventure. Having given up thoughts of sleep, Florence was going over in her mind the events of that day.
“The hydroplane,” she whispered. “Who can be coming up here to hide away on the shore of that narrow lake? And why?
“How simple it is after all, coming up here in a plane without attracting attention! The plane from Houghton comes and goes at all hours. The people at Rock Harbor hear it. If it does not land at their door, they say, ‘It has gone to Tobin’s Harbor or Belle Isle.’ The folks at Tobin’s Harbor and Belle Isle think it has gone to Rock Harbor. The strange plane may come and go up here as its pilot wishes, and no one the wiser.
“After all,” she sighed, “we are not officers of the law. It’s really not our affair. And yet—”
She was thinking of the scream Greta had heard, and of the apparently helpless one carried to a boat and then to land, and after that of the scream they had both heard in the night.