THE CHASE
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!