MORE BAD LUCK.
“Oh, thunderation!”
It was Ding-dong who uttered the exclamation as a sharp crack sounded in
the engine room and he sprang forward to shut off the motor. An
eccentric band had snapped with a report like a pistol, and the _Nomad_
was temporarily out of commission.
Down the speaking tube came an impatient query.
“What’s up? What’s happened?”
Ding-dong shouted up a reply.
“How long will it be before you can fix it?”
“About fifteen minutes. Luckily I’ve an extra band handy.”
The stammering boy, as was usual with him in stress of circumstances,
had temporarily overcome his impediment in speech.
“Bother!” exclaimed Nat in a vexed tone. And there was good reason for
his impatient intonation. Bit by bit the _Nomad_ had been creeping up on
the solitary rowboat.
Hardly more than a few hundred yards now separated them, and they could
see Minory, with white, anxious face, straining at his oars—as if any
human power could get him beyond reach of the fast motor cruiser! Ahead
of him lay an inlet meandering up among some salt marshes. It was Whale
Creek, so called because a huge whale had once been stranded there.
Nat knew that at the mouth of Whale Creek lay shoals and quicksands
among which the _Nomad_ could not navigate. If they could not cut off
Minory before he gained the entrance to the creek, his escape appeared
certain, for the _Nomad_ carried no dinghy and Minory had the whip hand
of them in the shallow water.
“You’d better give up!” Nat had hailed to Minory across the water. “Even
if you get ashore the authorities are already on the lookout for you,
warned by wireless. You don’t stand the chance of a rat in a trap.”
Minory’s answer had been to stand up in the skiff, holding aloft in one
hand the model and in the other the plans and calculations that had cost
the sleeping inventor below so much effort.
“If you come any closer, down these go to Davy Jones!” he had yelled
desperately.
“To do such a thing would be only to increase the sentence you will get
in a court of law!” Mr. Anderson had shouted back indignantly.
“He’s only bluffing!” Joe had rejoined.
It was just at this instant that the unlucky disaster in the engine room
had occurred. Joe could have cried with vexation.
“Of all the luck!” he exclaimed as the _Nomad_ lost way and came to a
standstill, swinging seaward with the outgoing tide. Minory stood up in
his skiff and shook a triumphant fist at them. They turned away from
him, and the next moment something came buzzing and singing past their
ears.
It was followed by a sharp, cracking report. Then came a yell of defiant
laughter.
“The rascal’s shooting at us!” exclaimed Nat.
“Yes; duck quick!” cried Joe, as the revolver was once more leveled.
“You’ll have to get up early to get ahead of me, you whelps!” was the
insulting cry borne over the waters.
Nat’s teeth clenched; his cheeks flamed red. He did not often lose his
temper, but the ruffian’s audacity had made him mad clear through.
Regardless of his danger, he sprang erect and faced the man in the
skiff.
“We’ll get you yet, Minory!” he shouted.
For an instant the occupant of the small boat appeared taken aback, and
that for a good reason. Obviously, if they knew his real name, the
professor must have not only discovered his loss, but recovered
sufficiently to tell the whole story. His acute mind reasoned this out
in a jiffy, and it gave him pause. But only for a fraction of time. The
next minute, with a cry, “Take that, you young cub!” another bullet came
singing and whinging through the air.
“I’ll go below and get the rifle!” cried Joe furiously. “We’ll show him
two can play at this game; we’ll——”
“Do nothing of the sort,” said Nat calmly; “he can hardly get much of an
aim standing up in that cranky skiff, and if he wants to get away he’ll
do better by taking to his oars than by blazing away at us.”
“There he goes now,” cried the sailor. “I guess he was so plumb mad
clear through at the quick tracks we made after him that he just
naturally had to blaze away at us.”
As the man spoke they saw Minory, with another mocking laugh, bend to
his oars once more and row rapidly toward the creek mouth.
“Once let him get in there and we’ve lost him,” cried Nat despairingly.
“Better lose him than have any bloodshed,” declared Mr. Anderson. “That
fellow is a desperate man, and wouldn’t hesitate to use firearms to
protect himself from capture.”
“It looks that way,” commented Joe. “Whee! Look at him row!”
“Consarn him, I wish he’d bust an oar!” growled out the sailor gloomily.
“No, all the busting seems to be done on this ship,” was Joe’s dismal
response.
“Now, Joe, no grumbling,” warned Nat, always optimistic even when things
appeared blackest; “we may get him yet. ‘There’s many a slip——’”
“‘’Tween the law and the crook,’” growled out Joe, finishing the
quotation for him.
“Oh, put it the other way round,” advised Nat.
Just then Ding-dong appeared on deck.
He held up the broken eccentric ring which he had just detached.
“Here it is,” he said; “that’s what has crippled us.”
“Broken?” asked Joe.
“Yes, snapped clean through.”
“And it was a new one not long ago!” exclaimed Nat.
“Yes, and the best made. It beats me how it came to fly off the handle
that way.”
“Good thing it didn’t wreck the whole engine,” was Joe’s comment.
“Yes; lucky I was below, or it would have,” rejoined Ding-dong,
stammerless in his excitement.
“Let me look at that eccentric strap a minute, Ding-dong,” said Nat
quietly, but with a strange ring in his voice.
Ding-dong, looking rather surprised, handed it over to the young captain
of the _Nomad_. Nat didn’t often have anything much to say about the
machinery. He left that part of the running of the boat to Ding-dong and
Joe, although he was quite conversant with it.
They watched him while he examined it carefully at the broken ends.
“It’s a wonder this lasted as long as it did,” he said.
“Why! It was new and——”
“Yes, I know, but see these marks on it. What are they?”
“Cantering cantilevers, the marks of a file!” cried Joe.
“That is what I thought. That fellow was too slick not to have turned
some trick like that.”
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