“I’ve got a plan. I want to know what you and Uncle Charlie think of it.”
“Fire away, Biff,” his uncle invited.
“It’s this. Suppose tomorrow, we pretend to find the fishery. We’ll fire off guns. Blast off on the boat horn. Dance around the beach like mad. In full sight of Dietz, of course. Make him think we’ve located the site. Only, of course, we’ll do all this where we know there are no pearls. We’ll put on our act at one of the first places we tackled, before Dietz became so vigilant. What do you think?”
“You’ve got something there, Biff. I’m proud of you,” Biff’s uncle replied.
“It would be fun, too, to fool Dietz,” Derek chimed in excitedly.
“To make it even more convincing,” Biff went on, “we could break camp tomorrow afternoon. Pull out fast. Dietz wouldn’t follow us immediately. Not until he’d done some diving and oyster shucking himself. He’d surely want to make certain we had located the fishery.”
“You’re darn right he would,” Charles Keene said.
“That would give us a chance to get back to Trinité, slip out of town, and really concentrate on looking for your father.”
Biff paused. He looked first at Derek. He felt sure Derek would be enthusiastic about his plan. Then he looked at his uncle. He knew his uncle was considering the plan in every detail.
Uncle Charlie finally spoke. “Well, Biff, I like your plan. You didn’t know this, of course, but I was getting more and more worried about having you and Derek on the bottom of the ocean, with Dietz in his high-powered boat ready to strike at any moment. Calling off the pearl search for the time being makes a lot of sense.”