As a point of truth, Mr. Neale at almost that moment gave up his waiting vigil, and with dejected shoulders bent to the oars for a long, grilling pull across the Sound. His purpose was to try to reach some revenue guards or others who could help him to overtake theTreasure Belle.
They were not to meet their chief again for some time!
They dressed when their clothes were dried. The first effort they made to retrace the way down the trail was met by the appearance of the Seminole; he was on guard if not always visible.
Seated, dejectedly idle, the chums waited. A brief exploration by Cliff toward the side of the trail they had not traversed yielded no way of escape. It ended at another water path, this one going off from what might be a transfer and landing dock, off toward the North.
“That’s where the Indians come with their own canoes,” Cliff told his companions.
“But where do they take the liquor?” Nicky wondered. “Up at the north of the Everglades there isn’t anything much.”
“Just the place to load trucks, I suppose,” Cliff surmised.
The afternoon dragged. They were not fed and no offer was made by the Seminole to converse. He seemed not to understand Nicky’s attempt to address him in English, but shook his head, waved the youth back and touched his belt significantly.
Night came and still they were in their uncomfortably hard position, and growing very hungry indeed.
“If he means to starve us, why I’m going to make a break as soon as it gets pitchy dark,” Nicky whispered.
But as soon as it got pitchy dark there came a peculiar call from the dock where Indians were supposed to arrive, and the young adventurers soon found themselves the center of a small group of the Indians, one about their own age, but not at all approachable. With the green-glassed ship’s lantern to show them, their captor made an explanation in his guttural dialect and then left the younger member of the party on watch while, with the others, began transferring the cases from the further end of the trail to the dock, and thence, the chums inferred, to canoes.
Cliff tried to establish conversation with their young guard.
“No-chit-pay-lon-es-chay!” he said. They did not comprehend that he ordered them to lie down and sleep, and kept eagerly arguing that they were hungry, pointing to their open mouths, in the dim light, and rubbing their stomachs.
“So-toke-kee-aw-mun-chee!” he said, holding out his hand, palm up. He meant, “Give me money,” but they had none and so the negotiations were suspended.
Finally, when, as Nicky declared, their backbones were shaking hands with their stomachs, a new voice was heard on the trail.
Preceded by their earlier captor, bearing the lantern, whose queer light he threw full in the chums’ faces, there came a squatty, burly, ape-like white man, with a jutting jaw, sharp, mean eyes, but with a quirk of a smile at one side of his twisted mouth.
“Ho!” he said, in a deep rumble, “thought you cleared out this morning. Saw the craft up anchor!”
He made a gesture that sent the Indian away; the lantern, set down as he left, gave the scene a weird green light.
“Well, my lads,” began the man, “how’d you come to stay here, when the sloop sailed?”
Nicky told him about their colored man and his terror of the ghostly boat the night before.
“Ho-ho-ho!” laughed their new acquaintance. “Scared him, did it? We aimed to scare the whole passel of you—we went to enough trouble.”
“Why did you want to scare us?” demanded Nicky eagerly.
The other did not answer. He seemed to be deep in thought.
“When are you going to feed us?” demanded Tom, more practically. Fearful though he might be in face of the unknown, he was no coward when face to face with a situation he could understand. And hunger was such a situation.
“No eats! Hum—well—” The man rubbed a stubby, brownish beard, reflectively. “We can’t starve you—we aimed to drive you away, but that didn’t work—still, no use to starve you till we know all we want to——”
He made a sign, as if he had decided on his course.
“Go ahead, back down the trail,” he ordered. Nicky, Tom and Cliff lost no time in complying.
Following, with the light, he directed them to the inlet where most of the cases were now being carried away. He spoke rapidly to the Seminole who seemed to be the leader of the Indian faction, gave him some coins, and then ordered the three chums into his boat—the same one, for all they knew, which they had seen the night before.
“Now I see how they got away after scaring us,” whispered Tom as the crew of four stoutly-built white men used their oars as paddles, working the boat further along the inlet until they came to a point where they made still another turn and went down another narrow stream toward the Sound.
“Just ‘ring-around-a-rosy,’” Cliff declared. “That makes the spot those three trees are on an island—a key—after all!”
“But we’ll get no chance at any treasure, there,” said Nicky dejectedly.
Apparently the nearest of the crew thought this was important enough to call to the attention of his captain. He turned and repeated Nicky’s words, with a guffaw.
“Treasure, hey?” cried the bearded white man. “Who told you there was treasure there?”
“Why—” Nicky stammered, hesitated, then decided that it could make no difference anyway whether he told it all or not—with Mr. Neale unaccounted for, with Sam and his sloop gone, with their own selves captive, what chance had they for treasure? They’d be lucky, he thought, to be set ashore, marooned like old-time sailors—and spared a worse fate!
He told of finding the old can on the islet.
“Hum-m-m!” mused the man, clearing his throat. “Maybe you won’t find a treasure—but, anyhow, you’ll get a square meal—then, we’ll see!”
“Where are you taking us?” demanded Nicky, once more brave.
“Why, to our floating palace. Maybe—who knows—maybe it’ll turn out to be a treasure hunt, after all. In that case the boys’ll welcome it for a change from hi-jacking!”
“Hi—hi—” Cliff gasped.
“Hi—jacking, he said,” Tom explained.
“I know it,” Cliff shivered, “and that makes it worse.”
“Worse than being in the hands of rum-runners?”
“Worse! I’d say so! Hi-jackers are pirates if ever anybody was. The rum-runners bring contraband, and illegal liquor, into the States against the law. But the hi-jackers are men who hold up their boats and trucks and steal from them.”
“I hadn’t heard about them,” said Nicky.
“Well,” said Cliff under his breath as their boat scudded over the waters of the Sound toward a small island near the upper end, “well, it would be bad enough to be caught by people who break the law; but the ones who prey on them are about the roughest and toughest people in the world. They are modern pirates and no mistake!”
“Well,” said Nicky, shrugging his shoulders, “we’ll get through somehow, and anyway—we eat!”
Behind the island they found a trim, beautifully built, low, rakish craft. She was a power boat, about sixty feet long—a little more, perhaps. She lay low in the water and was of such a dull color that she could scarcely be seen in the dark.
They touched her side at a hanging ladder.
“Up you go!” said the man, under his breath. Then, to someone at the rail, “Here’s three young recroots, Don Ortiga!”
“Don—” Nicky gulped. “What’s the matter?” whispered Tom.
“Ortiga—” Nicky returned, “that’s the name of the man who owned that other speed boat, back in Jamaica! Now—I wonder——”
“What do you wonder?” asked Tom, when the chums were herded into the small forecastle in the bow, vacant at the moment.
“The man who owned that boat, back in Jamaica—theEl Libertad—was named Senor Ortiga,” Nicky answered. “I wonder if this one is the same fellow.”
“But this isn’t theLibertad,” Tom objected. “It’s a bigger boat and it isn’t white.”
“And that fellow called this man ‘Don’ and not ‘Senor,’” Cliff added. “They may be relatives. Mr. Neale saw the man in Jamaica—he would know. I wonder where he is!”
As he expressed this wondering about their chief, the latter was holding a conference with a Government Revenue Officer in the tiny cabin of a very swift little revenue cutter which was cruising among the reefs and keys, in search of the very hi-jackers and rum-runners among whom the chums were quartered.
The revenue cutter was on patrol duty, but so far its quarry had, by virtue of a system of signals from allies on shore, eluded capture; with its gray hull, its absence of lights, its quiet and speedy engines, the light-draught craft had been able to slip into hiding while its cargo was transferred to shore, whence the Indians in the extensive gang would convey it in their canoes to a northern point in Florida where trucks could receive the cases of illicit liquor.
“I wish there was some way for us to capture these fellows,” said Tom. Now that he knew that there was nothing ghostly or unnatural about the band, he was his usual, cool, calm self. Nicky and Cliff echoed his wish, in low tones. But they had no time for speculation or planning. The ape-like man appeared in the forecastle companionway and beckoned abruptly.
They followed him along a narrow deck to the dark cabin and went in. After passing through heavy sacking, double-thick, which served to block the passage of the least rays of light to the outer world, they found themselves in a long, quite roomy cabin, with a small electric dome light giving enough light to show the heavy black curtains tightly fastened over the circular ports, or windows. Well furnished with several easy chairs of rattan, with bunks that folded into the woodwork of the side walls and left a cushioned seat for use when they were not open, and with a veritable arsenal of automatic revolvers, rifles and knives of many shapes on the shelves of a cupboard at one end, the cabin looked both comfortable and dangerous.
A tall, slender man was replacing some weapon in the cupboard.
He turned as the chums entered; their guide stood blocking the doorway behind them.
The occupant of the cabin was of a Spanish type, with dark skin and sharp, black eyes, as black as his smoothly brushed hair. His movements were abrupt and nervous and his voice, when he spoke was curt and rather high in pitch, though kept at a low level of volume.
“Sit!” said the tall man, motioning toward the wall benches; the chums obeyed while the tall one dropped into a rattan chair and regarded them steadily.
“You came here to get buried treasure,” said the man in the chair. “Who told you there was treasure here?”
Nicky became the spokesman and related the story; he told how they had been cruising toward the Ten Thousand Island Archipelago.
“For why?” demanded their inquisitor sharply.
Nicky was about to open his lips; his eye caught a gesture of Tom’s. While leaning forward, chin on hand, elbow on knee, as if listening alertly, Tom was scratching his left ear absently. Cliff was folding his arms.
It was the secret sign-manual of their order—the Mystery Boys—by which Tom signified a call for a communication by gesture and Cliff, by folding his arms, indicated his agreement. Nicky folded his arms at the same instant, and then saw Tom grasp his coat lapel in his left hand.
That sign meant the third section of their secret oath—“Telling all, I tell nothing!”
Nicky clasped his hands on his knees, a sign that he agreed.
It all took place without apparent meaning and in a very brief time so that, although he made a sign of impatience, the tall man and his companion, leaning against the wall by the companionway, seemed to discern no hidden meaning in Nicky’s delayed answer.
“Come! Answer! Why were you among the islands?”
“I was trying to figure out why we were there,” Nicky replied, a candid look on his face. “You see, we had the ‘flu’ back at our school and we went to Jamaica to join this boy’s father—” he made a gesture toward Cliff and continued. “A young fellow was helping Cliff’s father collect old relics of the Indians and he brought us up to those islands in a sloop with a colored pilot—just for a lark on our part. I think he meant to get a canoe and maybe take us with him up the Harney River to the edge of the Everglades—or into them, to collect some things from the Seminoles.”
That was a part of Mr. Neale’s plan, if they did not find the treasure, or, perhaps, even if they did; so Nicky told the truth, though not all of it. Cliff unclasped his hands as if signifying that Nicky had done well.
“Si—yes, that is reasonable,” commented the tall man. “What then?”
Tom made no gesture, which Nicky correctly judged to mean that as long as he had told the man by the companionway about the can and the parchment he might as well repeat the story.
He did.
“Does that agree, Tew, with what they told you?”
At the name, Tew, Nicky started a little. In the early days of piracy, as his studies had told him, one of the most notorious of the old sea barons, Thomas Tew, had made piratical history; could this man be a descendant? Could he be filled with the same daring and ferocity?
“It agrees, cap’n,” responded Tew. Don Ortiga leaned back, tapping the arm of his chair nervously while he thought.
The chums sat in silence, their three pairs of arms folded in sign that they were still in secret communion and waiting. After a long silence during which he considered them shrewdly, the Spaniard spoke.
“I do not believe it! Do you, Tew?”
“Sounds ‘fishy’ to me,” answered the apelike fellow. “First of all, them three trees on that little key ain’t more’n fifty years old. And my folks, and Nelse’s folks, has lived about these waters for more time’n that and there ain’t been no treasure buried that I ever heard of—not in the last fifty years!”
“So! Again, Tew,” the Don ignored his young captives in the intentness of some point he was trying to make, “again, a tin can would have rusted away and crumbled, or sank into the soil. You know that most of those islets are not really built up from the coral foundation. They are mostly thickly matted vegetation, roots and so on, with a thin covering of soil; if you stamp hard on many of them you can shake them.”
“I know that,” agreed Tew. “Besides, from what these fellows claim, there was a funny light and something knocked on their boat—if you was to ask my opinion, cap’n, I’d say I think these lubbers is makin’ it up out o’ the whole cloth!”
“We are not!” defended Nicky sharply.
Don Ortiga regarded him steadily for a while, then nodded.
“What was the message on the paper?” he asked suddenly.
There was no help for it. All three chums realized that. If Nicky hesitated their captors would be certain that he was inventing a message. Then there was no telling what might happen to them! The men who had them as captives were hi-jackers, the lowest form of seafaring marauders. One of them had a name indicating descent from the old pirate stock. The truth—and the truth quickly—seemed to be the only course open to Nicky.
His glance toward his friends showed them with both hands in coat pockets—“Tell the truth!” that meant.
“This is the message,” Nicky declared without delay, all that swift querying and decision having occupied only the time it took for him to understand the question, a split second.
“This is the message,” he declared, “‘Treasure found long ago. Dig under tallest of three trees on Crocodile Key for more.’”
Tew rushed close to his captain.
“Crocodile Key!” he almost shouted; then he lowered his voice. “Nobody knew that name but us—” he stopped, his face working with what the chums took to be anger and surprise.
“Yes—yes—somebody did!” he gasped. “Cap’n—your brother——”
Nicky exchanged glances with his comrades. In their eyes he read the same thought that was in his mind. They had given these men some clue that proved to them that the message was a false lead and—more—had told them who prepared it! Don Ortiga had a brother. That must be the Senor Ortiga—or might be, Nicky thought. If the message was a false lead, then it had been deliberately placed where they found it, to mislead them. Yes, and not only that, but deliberate methods of making it seem supernaturally discovered had been used—the light and the raps on the hull of their sloop!
“Yes,” Don Ortiga was saying, “my brother—Rodriguez—these boys say they were in Jamaica—that is where he gets the rum he brings to the keys inEl Libertad.”
The whole mystery was beginning to become as clear to the chums as it seemed to their captors.
“These fellows say they left Jamaica to go to the archipelago,” Tew took up the reasoning. “For pleasure? For relics? My eye! No! They knowed somewhat about a treasure—and so did your brother.”
“But he didn’t—” Nicky cried incautiously in his excitement, and then stopped, too late.
“There was a treasure!” Tew exulted, and his eyes took on a bright avaricious glitter. “Cap’n, these boys know somewhat about a treasure on them islands. Recall? Ships has been wrecked there—in the old days there was a story about a Spanish——”
“I know,” broke in the Don, bending forward, making jerky, excited movements of his fingers and with snapping eyes. “A ship laden with gold bars! It was never discovered—the gold! The ship broke up, and parts of it were picked up in the Gulf of Mexico.”
In spite of themselves, at this verification of the old map and message of Captain Kidd, the chums took fire from their companions.
“Senor Ortiga must have knowed about it—or learned that these lads did,” Tew went on, never questioning the chums, taking it for granted that his logic was sound. “He must of saw them sail in a slow sloop—he had a fast cruiser. He beat them to the islands and took a chance he could send them somewhere else while he searched. He picked our place—But why? They’d discover us. He’d know that!”
Don Ortiga sprang from his chair; his hands were clenched, his eyes sparkled with an angry light.
“He sent them here because he has a grudge for us ever since we bought a faster boat and a bigger one and took his trade away from him!” he cried in a fury, but remembering to keep his tones fairly low.
“Well,” began Tew, after a moment, “here’s how I tote it up! We can get more out of a chest of treasure than we can from a hold full of rum, and with no fightin’. These lads must know where the gold is—we don’t! So we can use them! At the same time we can get revenge on your brother for sendin’ them where they might of found out about our racket and told the revenue men——”
The chums saw what was coming; their arms were folded again and they were waiting, trembling a little with the excitement. What decision must they make? What decision could they make? Was there any way out? They could see none!
“Put it up to ’em!” urged Tew. “Will you ‘throw in’ with us, takin’ a small share, or will we put them in the hold till we get what they know—we have ways!” he added with a meaning glare, “and when we get the treasure we’ll—well, whatever you decide, Cap’n—I know you can think up some pretty interestin’ ways to get rid of folks we don’t need——”
Nicky made a gesture; his right hand rubbed his nose, from his eye to his lips, as if removing a smudge; Cliff and Tom answered his sign, “Shall we say ‘yes’?” by nodding.
“What’s your say?” demanded Ortiga. “Tell all or——”
Nicky stood up.
“Share-and-share-alike!” he demanded with a defiant effort that seemed to please Tew. Don Ortiga nodded, “Share-and-share!”
“Deal out our cutlasses an’ bandanas,” said Nicky with affected ferocity. “We’re with you till the last man walks the plank!”
Although Nicky had put a brave face on a bad situation, all three chums realized how grave was their danger. Their word had been accepted without question and they were given the freedom of the ship, after its crew had been summoned to the cabin and a vote taken. Only one member, the engineer, put in a word of dissent to Don Ortiga’s suggestion that they start at once for the archipelago.
“There’s that revenue cutter,” he reminded his mates.
“Her!” said Tew, sneeringly. “Ain’t we got plenty of ways to show her our heels?”
Nicky and his fellows wondered what these ways might be. They were to discover at least one of them.
They were given a plentiful meal in the cabin; the hi-jackers fared well, evidently, for the meal comprised fresh eggs, four apiece, fresh milk, since none of them cared much for coffee, white bread, corn pone as a second choice, and rice pudding.
The cook was an affable, smiling colored man from Miami, the flourishing tourist resort in Florida, who found his share of illicit gain more alluring than the wages of an honest chef in a hotel.
Besides the cook and Don Ortiga and his first mate, Tew, there were four deck hands who also rowed the boat with muffled oars and padded oarlocks, and who helped to load and unload what they carried; also there was the engineer and Nelse. The latter, they found out later, was only aboard for a certain purpose, not one of the crew.
While they noted the precision machinery for driving the boat, and saw the novel way in which the exhaust was deadened by being run through a large pipe through a sheathed channel in the hull, into a specially devised muffler which completely broke up the explosive force of the spent gases and silenced their noise, the chums marveled at the pains that had been taken to make a once innocent pleasure yacht into a craft suited for breaking its country’s laws.
Nicky reiterated his wish that they could do something to bring the lawbreakers to justice, but Tom, again cautious, urged him not even to think of it just then.
Mr. Neale, their chief in the beginning of the expedition, had overhauled Sam’s sloop with the aid of the revenue cutter’s men, had learned Sam’s side of the story, found Sam contrite but afraid to return, had discovered that the United States men could take no action against the Jamaican, and let Sam go his way rejoicing. The revenue cutter then returned toward the keys in order to land Mr. Neale at a base from which he could carry on his search for the missing boys.
But the cutter did not get there that night.
Nicky, Tom and Cliff stood on the foredeck of the hi-jackers’ ship as the anchor was quietly drawn up and the engines began turning over, their twin-four cylinders thudding with little outward noise.
“Here we go!” Nicky whispered. “Off on our first piratical cruise.”
“Off to be shot,” Cliff corrected, “if that revenue cutter they spoke about ever see us.”
“They wouldn’t shoot us,” Nicky protested.
“They wouldn’t mean to,” Tom agreed. “But they will chase—and this boat will run. That means a shot across the bows and more if we don’t ‘heave to’—which this crew won’t do if they can see a chance to escape.”
“What are they ‘advertising’ for, then?” demanded Cliff. His comrades stared at him; for answer to their unspoken question he pointed upward.
Looking toward the tip of the short spar that served for a signal mast and for the radio aerial for the small receiving set with which the cabin was equipped, capable of tuning-in short wave stations and the Navy broadcasts of weather, signals, and so forth, they all saw a small electric bulb glowing finely into the dark night.
“Well—I’ll be—switched!” gasped Tom. “Now why should they show a light?”
“It’s the law—” began Nicky, but he stopped, realizing that these men, all of whom were silent but fierce-looking, obeyed no law as to lights or other rules of the seaways.
The lookout just forward of their group was staring toward the horizon as they nosed gently forward out of a small strait between a key and a section of the bay shore. He turned and made some sort of signal with a tiny, blinking flashlight in his cupped hands.
Instantly the wheel went hard over, the vessel swung in a long curve and began to straighten her wake as speed increased on a straightaway run down the shore.
“I see her,” Nicky whispered, directing his chum’s gaze. “There’s a boat and she’s heading for us.”
Far off across the water there came a dull report. At the same instant Nelse came on deck, gazed for a moment, said “Couldn’t be better!” to Don Ortiga, and walked aft rapidly, while the captain stood watching him. Nicky left the group, took the other side of the cabin and slipped along the deck. To his amazement Nelse was dropping into a small boat that was towing. A deckhand pushed a long, slim pole, with something at its tip, into the small boat.
Nelse lifted the pole which looked like a rather long fishing pole, and seemed to be stepping its butt in a place in his forward thwart.
Forward Tom and Cliff watched with straining eyes, as did the Don. Another vivid, but distant flash was followed by a dull report and there came a faint “plash-thunk!” in the water far ahead.
At the same moment a sailor loped forward.
“All clear, sir,” he muttered.
Don Ortiga turned, lifted a hand. Tom, his eye cocked aloft, saw that their masthead light disappeared instantly. He turned to see if Cliff had noticed it, and then saw what Nicky, at the stern, had already guessed.
Nelse’s boat was a decoy. His stout pole once firmly stepped his ty-line was dropped off the cruiser’s stem, and as the masthead light winked out he, in some fashion—it was too dark for Nicky to see how—completed an electrical circuit to a small, similar light on his pole, so that, if the cutter missed the light for an instant she would pick it up again and yet it would be the decoy and not the real ship she would thereafter pursue.
“But what will happen to Nelse?” Nicky wondered when he rejoined his friends and gave them his information.
“He will row into some little inlet, unship his pole, maybe pull his boat up on shore and hide.”
Don Ortiga furnished the information.
“But haven’t they seen us?” demanded Nicky.
“We are low and gray and hard to see. It remains to be learned,” the captain replied. He watched for an interval while their boat with only her propeller thrash to carry a message of her direction, held on swiftly.
The ruse had failed. They could see the cutter holding a course slantwise to their own! They must have been seen in spite of the camouflaging color.
Tew was with Ortiga.
“There’s a chance—in the channel to port!” he grunted.
“Take it!”
Then began the most breathless and thrilling half hour or more that the chums had ever been through.
Swinging sharply on her heel, so to speak, their lithe greyhound doubled back into a narrow lip between two clumps of cocoanut or mangrove, it was too dark to see which they were; it seemed as though she were running smash into the land but there was a way that opened thinly before her scudding bow.
Once the keel groaned and rasped on coral, and once a bough was snapped on a tree leaning far over the water by the short mast.
Then they were in open water. Would the cutter know where they went? Would she follow?
They squared away and ran, full speed, down the Sound, and with keel almost aground, shoved—literally grated their way—over a bar and into the outer waters again.
And the cutter had not followed!
She had done better! Anticipating some such double-back among the waterways, she had eased her way and lay beyond the reef. With a word of muttered anger, the captain rushed for the pilot house in the forward end of the cabin.
The small cannon on the revenue cutter spoke with its sharp bark but the phantom cruiser did not heave to. Instead her engines fairly shook her hull in their race for freedom.
Fast as she was the revenue cutter was not fast enough to overtake the other. Her gun spoke, but at a distant range and on a bad target—the tail of a flying ship without lights is no easy thing to hit in the dark!
The cutter dropped back slowly and then, sure that they were no longer in sight of her watchful crew, the hi-jackers flung their tiller hard a-starboard, heeled with the swerve and their speed, heard the grate of coral on one side, and—were again in a hidden cove!
Clearly the churns saw that, although the hi-jackers had escaped for a time, they were really trapped. TheSenorita, their cruiser, if she lay where she was until dawn, must be discovered.
Within the Sound, reached with such daring and risk, there was no safety, now that Uncle Sam’s watchdog had their scent, so to speak.
But, with the perversity which Nature seems sometimes to show, the elements played a card in favor of the evil-doers. Heavy rain squalls came up, and the wind blew the water in sheets that made a perfect screen for a slipping, silent gray shape.
Captain Ortiga took quick advantage of his fortune. The graySenoritanosed out into Little Card Sound, crossed its end, skirting the shore, and, again at the outlet, nosed quietly, slowly out toward freedom. In the downpour it was unlikely that they could be sighted and the propeller thrash would be deadened by the wind and waves.
“I have a scheme,” whispered Nicky, as the chums stood at the bow, straining their eyes hopefully into the downpour, themselves heedless of the rain that stung their faces. Tew, with surprising kindliness, had loaned them oil-skins from the “slop chest” or supply reserve.
“What is your plan?” queried Tom, lips close to Nicky’s ear.
Three heads drew together.
“I was in the little steerman’s cubby at the front of the cabin, just now,” Nicky said. “I saw the place where the electric buttons are set. They control the electric lights.”
“I see what you mean,” Cliff broke in. “You want to get in there and work the electric lights.”
“Yes. Then the cutter will see us.”
Tom raised an objection. “If she chases us again,” he declared, “she will fire until she hits us.”
“That’s right,” Cliff agreed. “This time she won’t give up until she captures—or sinks us!”
“It’s a risk, I know,” Nicky admitted. “She won’t know we are on board and she will have a right to sink these fellows. But it would be one way to help to capture——”
Tom spoke practically.
“What good will it do us to have this boat sunk?” he asked. “In this rough water we wouldn’t have a chance to be picked up, maybe.”
“I guess it is too dangerous,” Nicky admitted.
“Better wait,” Cliff suggested. “We will get our chance. The right must win or there wouldn’t be any justice in the world!”
They watched eagerly for any sign of the cutter but Captain Ortiga stood well out from land before he swung west. The chums saw that the chances for the cutter to discover them were remote and went back into the cabin where they were assigned to berths.
But if the weather had seemed to aid the wrong side, there was another card to be played and it came as a surprise.
Instead of lying-to, close to land, the cutter had stood out to the deeper channels also!
There came a warning call from the man on watch on top of the cabin, echoed by the one at the bows. “Hard a-port!” was the call, “something ahead!”
The boys dashed again to the deck.
They quickly discerned the dim shape toward which theSenoritahad been directly advancing.
Had they, too, been sighted?
TheSenoritaswerved from her course, and made almost a right angle to her former course, though, of course, on a wide curve!
That swung them in toward land, again, for it was the safer way. Then, on a quartering line, partly on the true path and partly drawing toward land, they held steadily on.
There came across the water a vivid flash, but the wind swept away the cutter’s voice as her cannon spoke.
“Full speed ahead!” was the order to the engineer.
TheSenoritatrembled and strove, and behind her the cutter, her headway increasing, again took up the chase.
“But she’s behind us now, and she may have to turn around—I couldn’t see which was her bow, she was so far away,” Cliff said.
“I’m half afraid we’ll show her our heels,” Tom whispered. “And I’m half glad. If we can get to an island or close enough to swim to one, they can sink her and welcome!”
Nicky agreed.
From the stem they watched the chase. Several shots were fired at them, but they could guess, by the diminishing light of each succeeding flash, that they were drawing away from the cutter.
“But she won’t give up,” Nicky proclaimed. “She will hang on like a bulldog.”
“I wonder why Don Ortiga doesn’t give up the run for the archipelago and stand out to sea?” Tom said.
Captain Ortiga had a different plan. He knew that the Government boat would never give up, and he wished to use that very point for his own advantage. He planned to make the other boat very sure that he would continue along the Cape Sable coastline. He wished them to follow.
Therefore, to the chums’ amazement, he caused the mast light to be switched on, and even reduced their speed a little, so that the cutter would pursue, but would be just out of dangerous range.
“Why is he doing this?” Nicky wondered. “Let’s find out! We’re part of his crew, aren’t we? He ought to tell us.”
Cliff laughed at Nicky’s assumption that they were real hi-jackers, but the trio trooped into the cabin. They found Mate Tew there, going over some of the weapons in the arsenal.
“Well, my hearties!” Tew explained, “it’s this way. Don Ortiga’s got a grudge ag’inst them Government snoopers! He hates ’em!”
Don Ortiga, Nicky mused, seemed to have a grudge against almost everybody—the government men, his brother—who else?
“He’s going to lure them where he can—do—what he plans—” He did not make the plan clear but the chums felt that it was a very serious danger into which their countrymen, pursuing their duty, were being led.
“We’ll run up along them islands,” Tew went on, “to the mouth o’ the Shark River. O’ course it ain’t rightly the mouth o’ the river, out there in them islands—it’s just a channel through ’em opposite the Shark—that’s about fifteen miles back, at the mainland edge.”
“What good will that do?” Nicky inquired earnestly.
“Well, we’ll have theSenoritawell in the mouth o’ the river, come dawn! Then we lands, see? Then we waits. O’ course they’ll run up along the islands and if they miss us, well an’ good—but if they turn and come into the inner channel and spot us, they’ll put a crew onto the desertedSenorita, and keep some on their cutter—and then—we’ll spring a little surprise!”
There was little sleep for the excited chums during that night. It was quiet enough, and uneventful; but they were so excited and “worked up” that they could not stop discussing the situation long enough to fall asleep.
They made good progress and when the sound of running feet and low orders came, they all rose from their bunks and ran on deck.
“You’re sure you know the channel?” Tew was asking, as they came up to him and Captain Ortiga.
“Yes,” replied the latter, shortly. “You stand by to pass the word quickly to the man at the wheel.”
The first faint dawn light was visible in the East. Ahead were dim blotches on the water; to the right lay many other gloomy shapes. There seemed to be a wider space off the bow at one point. The order was given, the vessel swung her course toward the break and, still at good speed, bore on.
The dim islets closed in on each side.
“Starboard a point,” called the captain from the bows, his eyes probing the dark, just faintly glimmering water, “starboard a point!”
“Starboard a point!” relayed Tew.
“Starboard a point it is!” the helmsman, at his little wheel, drew down the spokes to the side.
“Port—port two points!”
“Port—two points!”
“Port two it is!”
“Hard a-port! Hard a-port—quick!”
“Hard a-port—quick!”
There came a shout of dismay, a call from the pilot.
“Tiller rope’s broken!”
“Stop the engines—hard a-starboard—hard over—reverse her!”
There were shouts, cries, dismayed questions, a jangle of a bell.
The whole fabric of the vessel seemed to shudder as if in the grip of an earthquake. The engines had not been stopped and reversed in time. The captain shouted and at the same instant there was a rasping rending sound—a sickening sound—a tearing, grinding, splintering as the ship tore her side on coral—and stopped, settling gently on her side!
There was every kind of excitement on theSenorita! Men rushed this way and that; they came together in excited groups, spoke quickly together, separated.
“The cutter’ll be on us any minute!” said a deckhand.
“This is no place to stand ’em off!” grunted another.
“Great captain, dat Don!” grumbled the cook. “Know de channel! Huh! Look whah we’s at!”
“Lower the tender!” called Tew. “We’ll get away. Grab what you can!”
“Bettah we do dat!” agreed the cook. “Ashore we gits tuh hide; heah dey kin shell us out-a de watah!”
Tom gripped Nicky’s arm. “Come on!” he cried, “let’s get there so they won’t forget and leave us!”
“No!” urged Nicky. “Wait—come on with me!”
“What for?” demanded Cliff. “Where are you going?”