Page:The Missing Chums.djvu/68

62 It was evening before they reached the first village on the coast, after leaving the bay, and although they made numerous inquiries they failed to find any trace of their chums. No one in the village had seen or heard a motorboat during the storm, although they readily admitted that the craft might have passed without being noticed, owing to the gloom and the violence of the gale. The chums spent the night at this village and resumed their journey the next morning, going farther up the coast.

Their progress was necessarily slow because there were numerous small villages and they stopped at them all to make inquiries.

But in every case the answer was the same.

No motorboat answering to the description of the Envoy had been seen. None of the fishermen had heard of the craft.

"It's ten chances to one that they was wrecked in that storm," an old fisherman at one of the villages declared when they told him their story. "Unless they were mighty lucky they wouldn't get past Ragged Reef. They might get this far up the coast, but they'd never get past the Reef."

"Where is that?"

"Not far from here. Up past the next point. Seems to me I heard one of the boys sayin' this mornin' that there was some wreckage on the reef yesterday. There's none of our boats