"The women were here to sell baskets and such like truck while you girls were off crabbing, this morning," said Mrs. Stryver. "It gives me the shivers to have those folks around. I think we ought to have these tent camps policed."
"I'll 'tend to this fellow," promised Mr. Stryver, who was a burly man, and not afraid of anything.
Ruth hurried Agnes away toward the bend without another word.
"Why didn't you tell them Tess and Dot were lost?" asked Agnes, gulping down a sob.
"I don't want anybody to know it, if we can help," returned Ruth. "It just looks as though we didn't take sufficient care of them."
"It--it was all my fault," choked Agnes. "If I had tied the boat as you told me----"
"It doesn't matter whose fault it is," said Ruth, quickly. "Or, if it is anybody's fault! We don't want folks to say that the Corner House girls from Milton don't know enough to take care of each other while they are under canvas."
"My!" Tess gasped, sitting in the stern of the drifting boat, "how fast the shores go past, Dot! We're going up the river awfully quick."
"And so j-j-jerky!" exclaimed her sister, clinging to the Alice-doll.
"You aren't really afraid, are you, Dot?"
"No-o. Only for Alice. She's always been weakly, you know, since that awful time she got buried alive," said Dot, seriously. "And if she should get wet and catch her death of cold----"
"But you mustn't drop her overboard," warned Tess.
"Do you s'pose I _would_, Tess Kenway?" demanded Dot, quite hurt by the suggestion.
"If she did fall overboard, Tom Jonah would save her, of course," went on Tess.
"Oh! don't you say such things," cried Dot. "And _do_, please, stop the boat from jerking so!"
"I--I guess it wants to be steered," Tess said.
The tiller ropes were at hand and Tess had observed Ruth and Agnes use them. She began experimenting with them and soon got the hang of using the rudder. But as the boat was propelled, only by the tide, it _would_ "wabble."
Tom Jonah watched all the small girls did with his keen eyes. But he scarcely moved. The boat floated on and on. Tess did not know how to work the boat ashore--indeed, caught as the craft was in the strong tide-rip, it would have taken considerable exertion with the oars to have driven it to land.