CHAPTER XI
THE STORY OF THE CASTAWAY
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
80
