"I haven’t run a six-cylinder car for nothing," interrupted Miss Chalmers sharply. "Is this the dock?"
For answer he stopped the engine and guided the boat alongside a low wharf, at the end of which burned the lantern they had seen.
"Witherbee’s Island," he said as he reached to help her ashore.
Miss Chalmers sprang upon the wharf without aid and demanded her trunks. The boatman heaved them out methodically. He paused for an instant to study an inscription on the end of a particularly bulky and heavy one, and, when he had difficulty in deciphering it, reached for the lantern. He read:
"Anything more I can do?" he asked pleasantly.
"I should say not! I owe you something, I suppose?"
"Ten dollars!" cried Miss Chalmers. "For what happened? After all that— Why, it’s—"
She snapped her purse open and handed him a bill with an angry gesture. In fact she flung it at him. Anything to be rid of him, she thought. He pocketed the money with a chuckle.
"My name is Sam," he remarked as he stepped back into the boat. "Any time you need a launch, why—"
"I’ll know whom not to engage," said Miss Chalmers, finishing the sentence.
The boatman laughed, started the engine, and headed across an open space in the river. Miss Chalmers glanced about her with a sigh of weary satisfaction. It was one o’clock, but she had arrived!
That particular insular possession owned by Mr. Stephen Witherbee was, indeed, a dark corner of the earth. It was also insistently quiet and lifeless. Just which one of the insufficiently enumerated Thousand Islands it was did not concern Miss Chalmers in the least, any more than it concerns the reader. All she sought was shelter and a couch.
She walked the length of the little wharf and stared in among the trees that came down to meet it. Somewhere beyond was a house she knew—a house that contained Mr. and Mrs. Witherbee, Miss Gertrude Witherbee, perhaps Mr. Tom Witherbee, and various other persons who constituted a Witherbee house-party.
There was not the least doubt that they were all asleep. Miss Chalmers could not hear a sound save the ever-diminishing _thump-thump_ of the one-cylinder launch.
"Asleep they are, certainly," she observed aloud. "I’ve done a ridiculous thing, of course. It serves me right for coming a day ahead of time. That boatman—ugh!