"Let's take her home with us. Plenty of things there. Wrap her up good and warm and we'll take her on the buckboard. We can all crowd on--all but the boys."
The boys had not seen enough yet, anyway, and were not ready to go; but the girls were eager to return to the bungalow--especially when they could take the castaway with them.
"And there we'll get her to tell us all about it," whispered Helen to Ruth. "My! she must have an interesting story to tell."
There was only the cook in the station and nobody to stop the girls from taking Nita away. She had recovered her senses, but scarcely appreciated as yet where she was; nor did she seem to care what became of her.
Heavy called the man who had driven them over, and in ten minutes after she was ashore the castaway was on the buckboard with her new friends and the ponies were bearing them all at a spanking pace toward the Stone bungalow on Lighthouse Point.
The fact that this strange girl had been no relation of the wife of the schooner's captain, and that Mrs. Kirby seemed, indeed, to know very little about her, mystified the stout girl and her friends exceedingly. They whispered a good deal among themselves about the castaway; but she sat between Ruth and Helen and they said little to her during the ride.
She had been wrapped in a thick blanket at the station and was not likely to take cold; but Miss Kate and old Mammy Laura bustled about a good deal when Nita was brought into the bungalow; and very shortly she was tucked into one of the beds on the second floor--in the very room in which Ruth and Helen and Mercy were to sleep--and Miss Kate had insisted upon her swallowing a bowl of hot tea.
Nita seemed to be a very self-controlled girl. She didn't weep, now that the excitement was past, as most girls would have done. But at first she was very silent, and watched her entertainers with snapping black eyes and--Ruth thought--in rather a sly, sharp way. She seemed to be studying each and every one of the girls--and Miss Kate and Mammy Laura as well.
The boys came home after a time and announced that every soul aboard the _Whipstitch_ was safe and sound in the life saving station. And the captain's wife had sent over word that she and her husband would go back to Portland the next afternoon. If the girl they had picked up there on the dock wished to return, she must be ready to go with them.