“A NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK”
To say that Clarence Neale, the leader at the start of the Mystery Boys’
adventure, was worried would be a tame statement of the truth. Clarence
Neale was more than that. He felt that without intending to do so he had
shirked a responsibility.
Mr. Gray, the scholar and writer, had entrusted Cliff to his care on an
adventure that promised to be merely a cruise; Nicky Lane, and Tom, had
come under his protection without permission from their relatives; and
not one of them was with him, nor was their whereabouts known to him.
No wonder the young archaeologist, himself not too far from boyhood to
recall what dangers its headstrong impulses lead to, dreaded many dire
things.
Two things he knew definitely. The boys were not on Crocodile Key, nor
did any boatman or native in Little Card Sound or on its shores know a
thing about them. The second point he was sure about was that they were
not on Sam’s sloop. He had overhauled that in the government cutter and
made sure.
Where were they?
A lieutenant in charge of the patrol had set him ashore where a
government sub-station of the patrol service enabled him to use the
telephone, to communicate with other stations. Not a sign of the boys
resulted from his several calls.
“No word?” asked the young lieutenant later in the afternoon.
Mr. Neale shook his head dejectedly, climbing aboard the cutter.
“I can’t see anything to explain it except that the lads must have gone
inland, and become lost,” he asserted. Lieutenant Sommerlee discounted
such a suggestion. The outcrop of coral on which they landed while he
went to interview Nelse and Pompey, was cut off by water too deep to
wade; they would hardly dare swim to the further shore; it was swampy as
could be seen from Crocodile Key if they took pains to look, he
declared.
“I suggest that you come aboard again,” Lieutenant Sommerlee invited,
holding to his own idea, without stating it, that the boys had been
taken off the key by some fisherman. “I have word that a band of
hi-jackers is somewhere around and I have to watch for them; we can
easily hail the different natives as we pass up and down the coast and
see which one rescued the boys.”
Clarence Neale accepted the invitation and was on board the cutter when,
that night, she pursued, and lost touch with, the _Senorita_.
It was Lieutenant Sommerlee’s notion that the _Senorita_, if it was she,
had turned tail and run for her home port in Cuba. He was ready to give
up the search for her, and the more so because of a growing intensity of
interest in the boys.
Naturally, not knowing they were on the _Senorita_, or that she had gone
into the archipelago, neither Mr. Neale nor the lieutenant thought of
such a thing as looking for the adventuresome trio in those waters. It
seemed almost certain that they must have hailed some small boat, and on
being taken aboard, had found no means of communicating their plight, or
of getting back.
But as day followed day, the idea had to be given up. There was no spot
that the cutter had not touched, where the boys could possibly be.
Unless they had been taken off on a coasting sloop—but none had been
seen in Little Card Sound, nor would it have excuse for being there. Of
course the few who knew the truth about the _Senorita_ and her hiding
place on the day that the boys had been missed, kept their mouths
tightly closed.
“I cannot imagine what has become of them,” Mr. Neale said, with anxiety
in his voice and deep wrinkles of worry on his forehead.
“Oh, they’ll turn up, as boys do, and usually safe and sound,” the
lieutenant said.
One of their men sighted a sail and gave her position. Lieutenant
Sommerlee gave orders; the helm was shifted and a course was laid to
intercept the vessel, not because the boys might be on it, but to hail
it and see if any news had been picked up somewhere.
As they came within better sighting distance, Lieutenant Sommerlee
handed Mr. Neale his binoculars.
“Didn’t you say Sam’s sloop we overhauled was going back to Jamaica?” he
asked. Clarence Neale nodded. “I told Sam he was discharged, as far as
our party was concerned,” he acknowledged.
“Look!” ordered the lieutenant. Mr. Neale lifted and focused the
glasses.
“Great—guns!” he cried. “That’s the _Treasure Belle_, now, as sure as I
live!”
They lost no time in laying alongside and hailing.
But Sam did not answer. Instead one of two men spoke through the
deepening twilight.
“Sam—why he’s sick in the cabin. We’re taking him to a doctor!”
“Sam—sick,” Mr. Neale said to the cutter’s officer, “but we left him on
the way to Jamaica the afternoon before the squall. How did these men
get on his boat?—and——”
“And why are they bound Eastward along the coast when he ought to be
nearly to Jamaica by now—here, heave to!”
The sail came down with a run—the men were careless sloopmen or very
ignorant of a single-masted boat and her handling. The cutter swung in a
circle and ranged up beside the sloop.
It was practically dark, for the twilight is short in the season, and
the men sat with their heads well covered. But if this was a ruse to
escape detection of their identity it failed. Lieutenant Sommerlee
motioned to a patrol member, and the man caught the rail of the
_Treasure Belle_ and clung so that the boats lay sides-to.
The lieutenant stepped across the rails, and made his way to the cabin.
At the same instant the two men stood up, but before they could carry
out their intention—which might have been to plunge over the side and
take chances of swimming away and escaping in the dark—the young officer
had his pistol trained, drawing it as he whirled.
“Throw up your hands!” he snapped, “and sit down again!”
“Sam,” called Mr. Neale, clambering into the cockpit of his old sloop,
“where are you?”
“Ain’t no one there,” said one of the men. “Lieutenant, will you promise
us a fair break if we tell you the truth?”
“Yellow-livered, of course,” he said. “I guessed you would try that.” He
went close, called for a flashlight and trained it on the two anxious
sailors. “Ho! You—‘Runty’—you, too—‘Jack O’ the Keys.’ What are you
doing in this sloop? Where is Sam—but I may as well tell you that you
are under arrest right now, and if you expect any leniency, which I
won’t promise at this moment, you had better say what’s on your minds.”
Then they told him. He, and Clarence Neale, learned of the escape of the
_Senorita_, as well as of Nelse’s part in that, and in the hi-jacker’s
plans, in which Nelse figured as a receiver for their stolen cargoes,
since he owned Crocodile Key; they also learned of the wreck, of the
boys’ ruse, and escape, and of the latest escapade, as far as the men
knew it.
Full speed for the archipelago, was the present order, after the two
sailors had been handcuffed and two of the cutter’s crew took over the
_Treasure Belle_, to sail her to the patrol base until Sam could claim
her.
“It looks as though there’s a fire up yonder,” said Lieutenant
Sommerlee, as the cutter doubled the Westermost nose of Florida, “See
the light in the sky?”
“I hope the boys aren’t in any danger!” cried Clarence Neale.
None of the crew, neither Mr. Neale, the lieutenant, nor Uncle Sam’s
sailors, could resist a cheer of delight when they got close enough to
see that the fire was merely a great heap of wood, on a small islet near
the channel to Shark River.
They sent up a rocket at the first verification of this fact, and urged
their speedy engine to its fullest power as rockets began to burst in
the sky, blue, green and red flares showed and a dull boom from a
signaling cannon floated across the water to them.
It seemed an age, but was not so very long, before the chums were
leaping, skylarking, dancing, standing on their heads, slapping one
another on the back, adding a slap or so for delighted Sam.
They had collected wood, cut parts from the wrecked vessel, made a
signal fire on the islet, and kept it burning all day, and into the
night, since the discovery that they were marooned, that morning. The
purpose was to create a smoke smudge during the day, and a light at
night, with the certainty that some coasting vessel or other ship must
see it and come closer to investigate.
The rockets and colored flares were the signal stores of the _Senorita_,
used more as fireworks for the celebration than with any other purpose,
for the signal rocket of the cutter had been read by Sam as the patrol’s
own signal.
“Thank Heaven you boys are safe!” cried Mr. Neale for the tenth time,
pumping Nicky’s hand again and again, sharing fist-cuffs impartially
between the shoulderblades of Cliff and Tom in his elation.
“And thank Lieutenant Sommerlee too,” said Cliff. They did.
“But now,” said Nicky, soberly, “what to do about the gold!”
They had, of course, told all their adventures.
“Now that you are all right,” Lieutenant Sommerlee said, “I feel that we
shall have to let the gold wait. What I am interested in is not gold
but—hi-jackers!”
“And pirates,” added Cliff. “Don’t forget they are in a stolen boat—the
_Libertad_ belongs to one Ortiga, and the other one has it.”
“But, Lieutenant,” protested Nicky, “if you get the hi-jackers we’ll get
the gold. They have it!”
“That is true,” agreed the officer. “At the moment I am puzzled about
the course through which we can secure either men or gold.”
Nicky jumped up eagerly.
“When the _Senorita_ was running away,” he reminded his chums, “remember
that Tew told us they would hide up in Shark River?”
“I do,” agreed Cliff.
“And Sam, when they took his sloop, thought the men said something to
the two on her about bringing liquor cases or cases of liquor, and
something was said about sharks——”
“That’s so!” Sam exclaimed.
“I believe they’ve gone into Shark River—” Nicky declared.
“But we are at the mouth of the channel into Shark River,” objected Tom.
“And they captured the _Libertad_ North of this place, and turned North
again from there.”
“They may have doubled back; Nicky defended his idea.
“I think there is a more likely solution,” suggested the lieutenant.
“They went to the channel at the opening of the Harney River, above;
there they could go back into the inner channel—above Whitewater Bay,
and down that, again, to the landward entry into the Shark.”
Plans were discussed, ideas proposed, until far into the night. In all
that the chums proposed, they figured; in those their elders discussed,
they did not.
But because of the crew’s depletion by the departure on the sloop of two
of her fighting patrols, and because neither Sam nor Mr. Neale was an
expert with a rifle or pistol, the more vigorous plans for pursuit and
capture had to be shelved in favor of more adroit measures.
And so it came about that a plan partially suggested by Nicky and
elaborated by the lieutenant, in which the boys must figure, was the one
to be adopted.
And again the Mystery Boys were adventure bound.
“But,” said Cliff, as a new thought struck him, “those hi-jackers must
have seen our lights—we made plenty of excitement.”
“Yes,” agreed Tom. “They may have seen them—then, they will either turn
and run across the Gulf, or somewhere else, or they will unload the
treasure in Shark River and hide it in the Everglades.”
“Once it’s hidden there, any effort to find it would be like looking for
a needle in a hay-stack!” declared Mr. Neale.
“Then let’s hurry!” cried Nicky, and from that instant all was activity
on the stranded _Senorita_.