  Although Nicky had put a brave face on a bad situation, all three chums realized how grave was their danger. Their word had been accepted without question and they were given the freedom of the ship, after its crew had been summoned to the cabin and a vote taken. Only one member, the engineer, put in a word of dissent to Don Ortiga’s suggestion that they start at once for the archipelago. “There’s that revenue cutter,” he reminded his mates. “Her!” said Tew, sneeringly. “Ain’t we got plenty of ways to show her our heels?” Nicky and his fellows wondered what these ways might be. They were to discover at least one of them. They were given a plentiful meal in the cabin; the hi-jackers fared well, evidently, for the meal comprised fresh eggs, four apiece, fresh milk, since none of them cared much for coffee, white bread, corn pone as a second choice, and rice pudding. The cook was an affable, smiling colored man from Miami, the flourishing tourist resort in Florida, who found his share of illicit gain more alluring than the wages of an honest chef in a hotel. Besides the cook and Don Ortiga and his first mate, Tew, there were four deck hands who also rowed the boat with muffled oars and padded oarlocks, and who helped to load and unload what they carried; also there was the engineer and Nelse. The latter, they found out later, was only aboard for a certain purpose, not one of the crew. While they noted the precision machinery for driving the boat, and saw the novel way in which the exhaust was deadened by being run through a large pipe through a sheathed channel in the hull, into a specially devised muffler which completely broke up the explosive force of the spent gases and silenced their noise, the chums marveled at the pains that had been taken to make a once innocent pleasure yacht into a craft suited for breaking its country’s laws. Nicky reiterated his wish that they could do something to bring the lawbreakers to justice, but Tom, again cautious, urged him not even to think of it just then. Mr. Neale, their chief in the beginning of the expedition, had overhauled Sam’s sloop with the aid of the revenue cutter’s men, had learned Sam’s side of the story, found Sam contrite but afraid to return, had discovered that the United States men could take no action against the Jamaican, and let Sam go his way rejoicing. The revenue cutter then returned toward the keys in order to land Mr. Neale at a base from which he could carry on his search for the missing boys. But the cutter did not get there that night. Nicky, Tom and Cliff stood on the foredeck of the hi-jackers’ ship as the anchor was quietly drawn up and the engines began turning over, their twin-four cylinders thudding with little outward noise. “Here we go!” Nicky whispered. “Off on our first piratical cruise.” “Off to be shot,” Cliff corrected, “if that revenue cutter they spoke about ever see us.” “They wouldn’t shoot us,” Nicky protested. “They wouldn’t mean to,” Tom agreed. “But they will chase—and this boat will run. That means a shot across the bows and more if we don’t ‘heave to’—which this crew won’t do if they can see a chance to escape.” “What are they ‘advertising’ for, then?” demanded Cliff. His comrades stared at him; for answer to their unspoken question he pointed upward. Looking toward the tip of the short spar that served for a signal mast and for the radio aerial for the small receiving set with which the cabin was equipped, capable of tuning-in short wave stations and the Navy broadcasts of weather, signals, and so forth, they all saw a small electric bulb glowing finely into the dark night. “Well—I’ll be—switched!” gasped Tom. “Now why should they show a light?” “It’s the law—” began Nicky, but he stopped, realizing that these men, all of whom were silent but fierce-looking, obeyed no law as to lights or other rules of the seaways. The lookout just forward of their group was staring toward the horizon as they nosed gently forward out of a small strait between a key and a section of the bay shore. He turned and made some sort of signal with a tiny, blinking flashlight in his cupped hands. Instantly the wheel went hard over, the vessel swung in a long curve and began to straighten her wake as speed increased on a straightaway run down the shore. “I see her,” Nicky whispered, directing his chum’s gaze. “There’s a boat and she’s heading for us.” Far off across the water there came a dull report. At the same instant Nelse came on deck, gazed for a moment, said “Couldn’t be better!” to Don Ortiga, and walked aft rapidly, while the captain stood watching him. Nicky left the group, took the other side of the cabin and slipped along the deck. To his amazement Nelse was dropping into a small boat that was towing. A deckhand pushed a long, slim pole, with something at its tip, into the small boat. Nelse lifted the pole which looked like a rather long fishing pole, and seemed to be stepping its butt in a place in his forward thwart. Forward Tom and Cliff watched with straining eyes, as did the Don. Another vivid, but distant flash was followed by a dull report and there came a faint “plash-thunk!” in the water far ahead. At the same moment a sailor loped forward. “All clear, sir,” he muttered. Don Ortiga turned, lifted a hand. Tom, his eye cocked aloft, saw that their masthead light disappeared instantly. He turned to see if Cliff had noticed it, and then saw what Nicky, at the stern, had already guessed. Nelse’s boat was a decoy. His stout pole once firmly stepped his ty-line was dropped off the cruiser’s stem, and as the masthead light winked out he, in some fashion—it was too dark for Nicky to see how—completed an electrical circuit to a small, similar light on his pole, so that, if the cutter missed the light for an instant she would pick it up again and yet it would be the decoy and not the real ship she would thereafter pursue. “But what will happen to Nelse?” Nicky wondered when he rejoined his friends and gave them his information. “He will row into some little inlet, unship his pole, maybe pull his boat up on shore and hide.” Don Ortiga furnished the information. “But haven’t they seen us?” demanded Nicky. “We are low and gray and hard to see. It remains to be learned,” the captain replied. He watched for an interval while their boat with only her propeller thrash to carry a message of her direction, held on swiftly. The ruse had failed. They could see the cutter holding a course slantwise to their own! They must have been seen in spite of the camouflaging color. Tew was with Ortiga. “There’s a chance—in the channel to port!” he grunted. “Take it!” Then began the most breathless and thrilling half hour or more that the chums had ever been through. Swinging sharply on her heel, so to speak, their lithe greyhound doubled back into a narrow lip between two clumps of cocoanut or mangrove, it was too dark to see which they were; it seemed as though she were running smash into the land but there was a way that opened thinly before her scudding bow. Once the keel groaned and rasped on coral, and once a bough was snapped on a tree leaning far over the water by the short mast. Then they were in open water. Would the cutter know where they went? Would she follow? They squared away and ran, full speed, down the Sound, and with keel almost aground, shoved—literally grated their way—over a bar and into the outer waters again. And the cutter had not followed! She had done better! Anticipating some such double-back among the waterways, she had eased her way and lay beyond the reef. With a word of muttered anger, the captain rushed for the pilot house in the forward end of the cabin. The small cannon on the revenue cutter spoke with its sharp bark but the phantom cruiser did not heave to. Instead her engines fairly shook her hull in their race for freedom. Fast as she was the revenue cutter was not fast enough to overtake the other. Her gun spoke, but at a distant range and on a bad target—the tail of a flying ship without lights is no easy thing to hit in the dark! The cutter dropped back slowly and then, sure that they were no longer in sight of her watchful crew, the hi-jackers flung their tiller hard a-starboard, heeled with the swerve and their speed, heard the grate of coral on one side, and—were again in a hidden cove! |
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