"What's that?" Ralph said suddenly with a mouthful of fruit.
The three other boys—a chubby boy with glasses and two identical twins—sitting around the fire glanced up. Following the fair-headed boy's gaze, they saw something dark floating in the lagoon.
It was coming closer.
When it came close enough for them to make out its shape and outline against the bright turquoise surface of the lagoon, the fat boy stood up almost involuntarily and gasped.
"Is that a—a canoe?"
Indeed it was. The person on the little canoe seemed to be rowing directly toward them. The sitting figure wasn't tall enough to be a grown-up, but he could be someone who was shorter than average.
Ralph reasoned silently in his mind that if it wasn't one of the other boys who suddenly knew how to make a canoe—and it probably wasn't, because the canoe seemed to be coming from the direction of the ocean, not around the island—then the stranger must have seen their smoke and came for them. Part of him hoped for a ship that anchored elsewhere due to the impassable coral reef hugging the lagoon and has sent forth a canoe to rescue them. His heart leapt at the idea; salvation was close.
But… a canoe? Don't ships usually have larger, wider lifeboats?
He frowned as the others did the same, squinting hard at the coming canoe.
It came closer and closer, until it reached the side of the platform. The person climbed out slowly and didn't seem to notice the four boys gaping at… her.
The girl had thick, messy waves of brown hair with sun-lightened highlights and ends, and her terra-cotta brown skin glistened with sweat as she proceeded to drag her canoe out of the shallow water and onto the beach. Still she did not give away any signs which would indicate that she has seen the four frozen boys. Ralph concluded that either she was blind like Piggy, the fat boy, or she was just too secretive and mysterious like all girls are to reveal a thing. Then she stumbled forward a little in plain exhaustion, and collapsed face first onto the wet, hard sand.