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.”