PLAYING A SAILOR’S TRICK
“FIGHT, if we have to,” was Tom’s laconic reply.
“Oh, dear, I do hope that won’t be necessary,” cried Moddridge, in
deeper agitation. “All quarrelsome noises and thoughts get upon my
nerves to a dreadful extent.”
“We won’t fight unless they put us to it,” answered Halstead. “And, of
course,” he added, with a slight smile, “we may get the worst of it. We
may get ourselves fearfully whacked about.”
“Oh, dear!” groaned Moddridge again.
Nor was the nervous man one whit reassured by seeing Joe, after slowing
up the engine somewhat, step up on deck bearing a couple of wrenches.
As for Jed Prentiss, that youth had laid down the marine glasses to
pick up a formidable looking boat-hook.
Even with her lessened speed the “Rocket” was now within less than a
quarter of a mile of the racing craft.
“Confound it! Now, what does that mean?” vented Tom, disappointedly,
as he beheld one of the men aboard the other craft leap to his post
at the wheel. In another moment the answer came. The racing boat was
moving through the water again. Every instant her propeller churned up
the water a little faster.
“They’ve fixed their engine,” quavered Captain Tom. “What we’ve now got
to find out is whether their motor is strong enough to get them away
from us.”
For some three or four minutes the two craft remained about the same
distance apart, despite the fact that Joe Dawson, who had dropped
down once more into the engine room, was coaxing his motor along as
skilfully as he could. Then, at last, the stranger began to draw ahead.
“The lucky scoundrels!” gritted Tom. “They’re able to go at least
pretty close to their full speed. See ’em eat up the miles again!”
“At least, then, there’ll be no fight,” declared Mr. Moddridge, in a
tone of relief.
“Nor will your friend and our employer have any chance to get back to
his own boat at present,” retorted Tom Halstead. Ordinarily he could
stand this nervous man’s agitated spells, though just now they wore
upon the young skipper’s patience.
For a few miles the chase continued, the stranger gaining all the
while. The two boats had been running, lately, about five miles off the
Long Island coast. Now, the stranger could be seen heading much more
to the northward, as though intent on making the coast.
“Jed,” directed the young skipper, “see whether you can pick up the
mouth of Cookson’s Inlet ahead of the stranger.”
“There’s a break in the beach over yonder,” reported Prentiss, soon.
“It doesn’t appear to be more than fifty feet wide.”
“It’s sixty-two feet,” responded Tom Halstead, who had made a hard
study of all this part of the Long Island coast “And confound them if
they try to go in there.”
“Why?” inquired Eben Moddridge.
“It’s mighty shallow water, the other side of the inlet,” Captain
Halstead explained. “That other boat probably doesn’t draw more than
two and a half feet of water. Our draught, on account of our very heavy
engine, is nearer nine feet. I don’t know just how far we can follow
them in that little bay. In some places the water isn’t over four feet
deep.”
“Then they are not playing fairly,” muttered Moddridge, in a tone of
deep disgust.
“Rascals rarely do play a fairer game than they’re obliged to do,”
answered Tom, with a queer little smile. “However, all we can do is to
stick to them as long as we are able.”
With two boats going at such high speed it was not long before the
mouth of the inlet was made. The stranger, however, passed through
about four minutes ahead of the “Rocket.”
Once in the bay the motor boat boys found themselves not far from a
low, sandy island, on which were a few trees and three small cottages.
“There they are, passing the other side of the island,” hailed Jed,
pointing to the top of the stranger’s single mast, visible for an
instant before it disappeared behind a rise in the sandy surface of the
island.
“It looks as though they’re just running around the island,” muttered
Tom Halstead. “We won’t follow; we’ll meet ’em.”
Putting the “Rocket” about, the young skipper steered for the other end
of the island. In a few minutes he passed around it, to discover that
the strange craft had put about, and was going back the way it had come.
“I think, sir,” explained the young skipper, turning to Mr. Moddridge,
“that the shortest way out of this hide-and-seek game will be to keep
right after that pirate’s stern.”
“All right,” nodded Moddridge, hesitatingly. “Yet why do you call that
other boat a pirate?”
“Any boat deserves the name that sails on queer business, and is even
afraid to show her name-plate at her stern,” Halstead rejoined.
The stranger still led, in that race in the narrow way between the
island and the main shore.
“Good enough, too,” growled Halstead, as his keen eyes noted a slight
change in the color Of the water ahead. “They are leading us into the
shallows. Jed, get the lead, run up to the bow and cast it in a hurry!”
Even as he gave the order, the young skipper, his hands trembling
slightly from vexation, turned the speed control to lessen the
“Rocket’s” headway.
Jed, poising the lead, made the neat cast of a practiced sailor,
letting the flannel-tagged line pay out rapidly between his fingers. At
the instant the line slackened Prentiss, half-turned toward the helm,
sang drawlingly back:
“And a qua-arter, two!”
That signified two and a quarter fathoms, or thirteen and a half feet
of water under the bottom of the cruiser, which drew about nine feet.
Rapidly hauling in, while the “Rocket” now hardly more than crawled
along in these shallows, Prentiss heaved the lead once more.
“And a scant—two!” he reported. Joe Dawson, leaping to the deck, ranged
up alongside of Jed. The water had a shallower look ahead.
“A-a-and three-qua-arters—one!” came the hail from the leadsman.
Ten and a half feet meant a foot and a half to spare under the deepest
point of the cruiser’s keel.
Once more Jed poised the lead for the heave, but Joe, taking a more
knowing look, shouted back:
“Reverse her, captain, or you’ll poke her nose in the mud!”
Instantly Captain Halstead’s hand flew to the reversing lever. Slowly
the motor boat stole backward. The stranger had passed around to the
seaward side of the little island, and was making for the inlet.
“They’re playing with us!” grumbled Skipper Tom. “The fun’s all theirs,
for they’ve got the faster craft.”
Just as soon as the “Rocket” had once more five feet of water to spare
under her hull Halstead decided to head about, the way he had come,
and put on all speed for the inlet. Yet, so expensive of time was this
proceeding that, when the Delavan boat once more glided through the
inlet, the stranger was three miles out to sea, heading south.
“That fellow must be laughing at us,” faltered Eben Moddridge.
“Of course he is,” flared Tom Halstead. “And I could grind my teeth, if
that sort of work would do any good.”
“W-w-what can we do?” stammered the nervous one.
“Only keep up the chase until one or the other breaks down, or runs
out of gasoline,” replied the young skipper, doggedly.
For almost an hour more the boats continued to head south. All but the
high parts of Long Island were below the horizon. Yet Halstead, calling
Jed to the wheel, though still directing the course, believed that he
was gaining on the other boat, even if very slowly.
“We’ve gasoline enough aboard,” the young skipper explained to the
nervous man, “to keep running for twenty-four hours yet. I hope that
other fellow hasn’t.”
“B-b-b-but see here,” quavered Moddridge, a new alarm dawning upon his
mind, “if that other crowd should let us get alongside, and th-then
s-s-s-shoot at us—it would be awful!”
“That’s a chance we’ve simply got to take,” replied Tom Halstead,
coolly, “if we’re to try to reach Mr. Delavan and get him back aboard
his own boat.”
“I—I—I couldn’t s-s-stand anything of that sort!” almost screamed the
nervous one.
“Then will you get off the boat, sir, and walk?” inquired the young
skipper, with perhaps pardonable irritation. This exhibition of
weak-kneed manhood made him indignant.
Erelong the stranger was a good twenty miles south of the nearest
point on the Long Island coast. Both boats had traveled fast over the
gently-rolling sea. The conditions would have been ideal for a race,
had the stakes been less important.
“Maybe their gasoline is running so low that those fellows are ready to
be reasonable,” grinned Joe Dawson, turning from the stand he had taken
near the bow. It could be seen, now, that the stranger was slowing down
her speed. Presently she was lying to.
“That must be a confession of a tank low with gasoline,” cried Captain
Tom, jubilantly, hastening forward with the glasses. “Steer straight
for her, to come up on the port side, Jed.”
Seeing Joe again disappear below, to reappear with a pair of
ugly-looking wrenches, Eben Moddridge turned very pale, and next
hastened, shakily, to the steps leading down to the after deck. Thence
he vanished into the cabin.
“Say,” uttered Joe, disdainfully, “I wish I had _his_ fighting blood!”
Still the stranger lay to, only two men showing in her cockpit. As the
“Rocket” came much closer to her possible prey Tom Halstead again took
the wheel, while Jed stood close to where his prized boat-hook lay. Tom
shut off most of the speed as he ran in closer to port of the stranger.
The two men visible aboard the other boat were now standing by the
rail, looking curiously enough at the motor boat boys.
“‘Rocket’ ahoy!” hailed one of them, as Tom manœuvred his craft within
easy talking-distance of the other. “Have you been following us?”
“Some!” admitted Halstead, dryly.
“Why!”
“To see whom you have aboard.”
“Only us two boat-handlers on board,” replied one of the pair.
“Tell that to the mermaids,” retorted Captain Tom, grimly.
“Don’t you believe us?” demanded the same speaker, the larger of the
rough-looking seafaring pair.
“I’m not very good at believing,” was the younger skipper’s reply.
“Then wait until we get slowly under way, and you can come up
alongside. I guess you can board us, on this gentle sea, without
scraping either hull,” proposed the speaker aboard the racer.
That offer, made in seeming good faith, almost staggered Tom Halstead
for the moment. Why the stranger should run away for hours, then
suddenly agree to be boarded, was not at once apparent.
“Unless they want to get one of us aboard, or want to try the mighty
risky trick of capturing us on the high seas,” reflected the young
skipper. “However, all we’re here for is to find and rescue Mr.
Delavan. We’ve simply got to try to do that.”
So he nodded, allowed his boat to fall away, then come up alongside the
racing boat, now under slow headway.
As the two hulls bumped slightly, Jed Prentiss made fast to the other
craft’s rail with his boat-hook. Tom Halstead, with a wrench dropped
into a hip pocket out of sight, leaped over the other boat’s rail down
into the cockpit.
“You spoke about someone being aboard here?” quizzed the larger of
the two strangers. “You can go ahead and find out your mistake. Open
anything you want; look anywhere you please.”
Halstead’s first swift look in under the hood showed him only the
motor housed there. While Joe Dawson and Jed Prentiss watched keenly,
suspiciously, from the “Rocket’s” rail, the young skipper searched
minutely under that hood deck. There was not a human being there, nor
any trace of late occupancy by any. There were lockers. Tom raised the
lid of every one. He might, in his dismayed wonder, have explored the
gasoline tank, had he not known that the opening was too small to
permit the entrance of a man’s body.
“Through in there? Satisfied?” called the larger of the two men,
half-mockingly. “There are two lockers out here, and an after
compartment out here in the cockpit.”
As soon as he was satisfied that there was no other possible place
under the hood, Halstead accepted the invitation to make a search of
the cockpit lockers and storage spaces. Yet it was all quite in vain.
Suddenly, however, the young skipper straightened himself, glaring
down at a straight, not very distinct line that ran the length of the
cockpit, even extending under the hood. As he looked swiftly up, he
encountered the mocking gazes of the two boat handlers.
“That was a slick trick,” Captain Tom admitted, speaking dryly, though
with an effort. “That line was made by the dirty keel of a small boat.
In Cookson’s Bay, while hidden from us by that little island, you put
the small boat over the side, and some of your passengers went ashore.
Then you decoyed us all this distance out to sea to have the joy of
laughing at us.”
“Blessed if I can guess what the lad means, friend,” said one of the
rough pair to the other.
But Captain Tom Halstead, as he leaped back aboard the “Rocket,” and
turned to them with flashing eyes, retorted gamely:
“I’m planning to have the pleasure, mighty soon, of showing you the
value of the last laugh!”