For a short time they walked on the sand without speaking. The winter storms had washed up quantities of driftwood that now lay, dry and bleached white, in tumbled heaps here and there above high water mark. The two sat down by one of them at last, when they became weary of tramping up and down. Suddenly Sally lifted her head to listen.
“Why does the bell-buoy ring louder?” she questioned.
It was true that the far-off clanging voice sounded clearer, all at once; it rang loud and steady through the quiet night for a moment, then dropped again to the faint, intermittent “clang-clang-clang,” to which Billy had listened all the afternoon.
“What could ring it like that?” he was asking himself, but even while he was so thinking the answer came to him. The waves of a passing steamer would rock the buoy for just that length of time, setting it to calling louder through the windless silence. They sat waiting and by and by heard a sharp swish, swish, as a succession of heavier swells broke upon the sandy beach. Yes, it must have been a steamer, coming close in, under cover of the dark. What was she? The shore boat?
