And, as the dreary
day wore on, the motor girls, and the boys, too, felt themselves
coming under the spell of fear--not so much for themselves, as for
their loved ones aboard the Ramona, which was the name of the steamer
on, which Mr. and Mrs. Robinson and Mrs. Kimball had sailed.
"Oh, if anything has happened to them!" sighed Cora.
"Can't we get some news?" asked Bess, faintly.
"Surely there are telegraph lines and cables," spoke Belle.
"There are," the hotel clerk informed them, "but there are so many
small islands hereabouts, into the harbor of any one of which the
ship may have put, that it would be impossible to say where it was.
And not all the islands have means of communication. So I beg of you
not to worry, Senoritas. Surely they are safe."
Yet even the clerk, sophisticated as he was, did not believe all he
himself said. For the storm, as the girls learned afterward, was
almost unprecedented in the West Indies.
There was nothing they could do save to wait until it was over--until
it had blown itself out, and then to wait, perhaps longer and with an
ever increasing anxiety, for some news of those who had sailed.
"Oh, if Senor Robinson should be lost!" half sobbed Inez, on the
third day of the storm, when it showed no signs of abating. "If he
should he lost, my father would be doomed forever to zat prison."
"Nonsense!" exclaimed Jack, for it was in talking to Jack and Walter
that the Spanish girl gave utterance to these sentiments.
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