"Aye," replied the bluejacket, in the same low tone.
Broncho gave a keen glance round. Jack, with his right hand locked in Loyola's, was sleeping the sleep of the just, but the woman seemed to be crying softly.
Anxiously the cowboy bent over her.
"It's all right!" he whispered. "The poor gal's on'y a-whimperin' in her sleep, and I ain't none surprised."
Jim likewise, lying on his face, seemed dead to the world.
They then roused Tari, who sprang straight out of a heavy slumber to his feet without a word, and the three silent men crept softly away.
Tari glided ghostlike in the moonlight to the boat, and returned to the others with a coil of rope on his arm; and now all three approached the unconscious Hawksley.
Broncho had a ball of spun-yarn and a thole-pin in his hand. With these he scientifically gagged the terrified ruffian before he could make a sound; then, casting him loose from the tree, with Tari in the lead tugging on a rope made fast to the miserable wretch's wrists, and the other two on each side of him, they made an ominous-looking procession through the black patches of shadow and gleaming shafts of moonlight in the palm-grove.
Tari, his great harpoon like a wand of office in one hand and the rope attached to the prisoner in the other, sagging and tautening like a towline as the unhappy man hung back in terror and was jerked forward again, stalked ahead through the scrub and palms without a moment's hesitation as to his course, and in silence they threaded their way with stern eyes and grimly set jaws.
But what was that? Yes, there it was again! A human form dodging on their trail, taking advantage of every bit of shadow and gliding after them with the silence of a cat's tread.