A STERN CHASE.

In the meantime, from station to station, within a radius in which it was reasonable to suppose the fugitive would land, the wireless was sending out its waves of alarm. The various stations attached to life-saving headquarters along the coast took the message and, in turn, telephoned the local authorities of near-by towns. Ding-dong received these assurances through the ether and transmitted them to his friends. Excitement was rife. It looked as if by means of the wireless they had spread a net that left not a mesh for the fugitive to slip through.

Nor was this all on which they based their hopes of overhauling him. It was a long, weary row to the shore, and, as Nat had pointed out, Minory, deeming himself secure from pursuit, would probably be in no particular hurry, but conserve his strength. From the bridge of the Nomad such an object as a rowboat would be conspicuous for a long distance. If only Captain Thompson hastened his return with the wandering motor craft, they stood about an even chance of capturing Minory themselves. It was a situation that thrilled them, and the time dragged wearily till smoke on the horizon announced the approach of the Hattie and Jane.

She anchored off the island and flashed ashore a message of greeting. Attached to her stern by a stout hawser was the errant Nomad. At sight of the returned wanderer the boys set up a ringing cheer. Captain Thompson, a weather-beaten old salt, rowed ashore in the dory that the Hattie and Jane lowered, and received his reward. He pocketed it with a grin, as much as to say, “A pretty good morning’s work”; but the boys did not grudge it to him. The return of the Nomad meant much more to them than that.

The dory was loaded up with gasolene, and after two trips between the shore and the Nomad, the latter was ready, with full fuel tanks, “to receive passengers.” Professor Jenkins, still so weak that he had to be supported to the boat, was the first to be taken off. Then the boys closed up the shanty and the wireless station and within half an hour were under way, with the Hattie and Jane flying a bunting salute in response to the boys’ string of flags which spelled out to the fishing steamer “Good luck.”

“Now, Joe, keep your eyes peeled,” ordered Nat. “I’d give a whole lot to run that fellow down and land him ourselves. If once he gets ashore, he’s slippery enough to get clear away.”

Dr. Chalmers, who had gone below with his patient, and also to make an examination of the professor’s trunks, came on the bridge at this moment with a dismal report.

As they had apprehended, Minory, before cutting the Nomad loose, had ransacked the trunks. The model was gone, and the doctor feared that to inform the professor of the loss might cause a serious relapse in his condition.

It was agreed, therefore, to reply only vaguely to any questions he might ask. But fortunately the inventor, completely worn out by excitement and weakness, sank into a deep sleep almost as soon as he was laid on the divan below, and they were spared the necessity of evasive replies to the questions he would have been sure to ask about the safety of the model.

It must be confessed that when Nat learned the clever and thorough way in which Minory had carried out the last part of his desperate plan for stealing the fruits of the professor’s inventive faculty, his heart rather sank. Somehow, he did not feel quite so sanguine as he had at first that they would succeed, either themselves or through their wide-flung messages, in capturing the fellow. The remarkable ingenuity he had shown in his attempts on the wireless torpedo in New York, in his successful espionage of the inventor across the continent, and in his last coup of getting himself on board the craft on which the man he had injured was being conveyed ashore all showed an acute intellect, a depraved sort of genius for carrying out whatever nefarious ends its possessor had in view. Nat didn’t underrate his antagonist. He knew by this time that they had a wily and perhaps a desperate foe to fight.

The sea was as smooth as glass, and, although the sun beat hotly down, there was yet a refreshing breeze. These factors would aid Minory in his long row, supplementing the work of his muscles, which, despite his scrawny form, Nat judged to be wiry and powerful.

The Nomad was crowded along to every ounce of her speed capacity. Ding-dong never left his engines a second, but watched them with anxious solicitude. He was fully aware of how much depended now upon the performance of the motor. So far it was running sweet and true, with a humming song that delighted the watchful boy engineer. Oil can in hand, he doused the bearings and moving parts with lubricant from time to time, feeling a shaft collar or an eccentric band to detect symptoms of overheating.

The distant coast range, faintly blue and luminous, loomed up through the heat haze before long, but although Nat stationed Joe with the binoculars to keep active and constant watch for the skiff, nothing appeared in the field of the powerful glasses to warrant Joe in giving the alarm.

Once he saw something black and was on the point of crying out. The next minute he was glad that he hadn’t. The object proved to be only a floating log with a solemn line of seagulls bobbing up and down on it as it rose and fell on the swells.

“Begins to look bad, Nat,” commented Joe, as the outlines of the rugged, bare coast range became clearer and still no sign of a boat swam within the horizon of the glasses.

“I must admit that it does,” rejoined Nat, “but it’s up to us to keep hoping against hope.”

Suddenly a thought came to Joe.

“See here, Nat, unless that fellow is as skillful a boat handler as he is a crook he couldn’t land on the bare coast. The surf would be rolling too high even on a calm day like this to permit him to do so even if he tried to.”

“That’s so, Joe; you do have a bright thought once in a while.”

“Thank you,” grinned Joe; “and now let me go on to say that in my opinion he’ll make for some cove.”

“Of which there are none too many hereabouts,” responded Nat. “Let’s see, which one is the nearest?”

“Why, Whale Inlet, in the salt meadows beyond Point Conception.”

“That’s right, but he’d hardly know of that unless he is more familiar with this coast than it is reasonable to suppose.”

“But having observed what the conditions were along the beach and realizing that he couldn’t negotiate the surf, he’d be likely to go hunting for such an inlet, wouldn’t he?”

“Sounds reasonable. But the point is just this, why wouldn’t he go toward Santa Barbara itself?”

“Why, because, if he’s as shrewd as I think he is, he will have guessed that we have sent out a wireless alarm for him by this time.”

“But how does he know we have such an apparatus?”

“Just this. If for no other reason, he knows we picked up that wireless from the Iroquois, that message that got us into all this pickle.”

Before Nat could reply, the sailor whom they had rescued with his employers the night before, and who had been standing with Mr. Anderson on the bridge, gave an exclamation.

“I don’t want to give a false alarm, gentlemen, but what’s that object off there?”

“Where?” demanded Nat. “Give me the glasses, Joe, quick.”

Something in the sailor’s voice had made him alert and active in an instant.

He applied the glasses to his eyes and gazed through them for a few seconds.

“It’s a boat, a rowboat,” he announced after his brief scrutiny.

“Our boat?” asked Joe almost tremulously.

“I think so,” was the reply, as the Nomad’s course was altered and she was headed directly for the distant speck that the sailor’s sharp eyes had espied.