Deep silence succeeded the roar of the wireless spark. It was broken only by low voices from the deck of the Marina, and the soft wash of the waves as the tide ran lazily out. Jim, making sure of his bearings, let go of his rope and began to swim as quietly as he could for the launch, where, he was sure, Dick and the others were anxiously waiting for him. But suddenly he found himself in the midst of a glare of white light. At the same moment, a cry arose from the deck of the schooner he was leaving behind—then not more than twenty feet behind him.
Jim realized at once that he was detected. An inopportune flash of the searchlight from the cutter, disturbed by the sound of the wireless, which did not make sense to her apparatus, had given him away. Even as the light winked away from him, he struck out vigorously, hoping to get to the launch, but in that instant a rope struck him, and, a noose, settling about his shoulders, he was dragged back through the water to the Marina and pulled up to her deck.
“What are you doing here—spying on us?” asked a man Jim had never seen before. It was Barrows. The gambler was furiously angry, and the glaring countenance of Svenson, who had been drinking, convinced Jim that he was, as Harry Maxwell would have said, “strictly up against it.”
But in the fact that he was unknown to Barrows lay his temporary salvation. Barrows himself would not in any case have sanctioned violence, but Svenson was of a different mold. The skipper, inflamed as he was with drink, might have perpetrated some great villainy had he known who Jim really was and what he had been about to tell Merriwell.
But Jim held his ground. He saw that Barrows was puzzled as well as angry.
“I fell overboard from a launch,” he said, “and I was trying to find a boat with some one on board awake when you picked me up. Would it be troubling you too much to ask you to put me on shore?”
Barrows hesitated a moment. He did not know what Jim might have heard. He knew that he had been incautious in talking to Svenson—but Jim, as a matter of fact, had heard nothing of that. The gambler finally decided to treat Jim pleasantly, for the moment, at least.
“You’d better stay with us till morning,” he said. “I can’t very conveniently put you ashore now—and you’d better turn in, anyhow, after your ducking, with a hot whisky, and get between some blankets. I’ll show you to a cabin.”
There was no fault to be found with the man’s manner. It seemed pleasant and hospitable. Jim thought, too, that he might, if he stayed aboard, get some more valuable information. But he wished there was some way in which he could get word of his safety to his friends. However, there was no help for it. He went below, and found himself in a roomy cabin, practically a prisoner.
He had to laugh, however, as he thought of the expressions that had chased themselves over the face of Barrows as he stood looking at him. He gave little heed to Svenson, estimating, and rightly, that the Scandinavian skipper’s interest in the affair was the use of his boat. Then he went to the window and looked out. And, stealing along, not far away, he saw the Elihu Yale, and Dick Merriwell’s anxious face. They had come to try to rescue him.