“Yes; you should see him, fuming and fussing and strutting up and down like a mad turkey-cock, telling every one that ‘his friend’ will bail him out; that ‘his friend’ will make us all suffer for such insults. Much ‘his friend’ will ever help him! There really isn’t a thing to hold Jarreth for, I’m afraid, unless we catch the other one. Harvey has just been made a tool of, but he won’t believe it.”
“How did you know the man was down here at the mill?” Billy asked.
“We didn’t, for at first we had no notion that he was even on the Island. When he used to make his visits to Jarreth he always apparently came over from the mainland so that it was quite a time before it dawned on us that he was staying here all the while. He had covered up his tracks pretty well, but I don’t quite know how he meant to keep himself hid after he took to shooting. I suppose he was so excited that he hardly knew what he was about.”
Captain Saulsby moved and groaned a little. The sailor came over and stood looking down on him with good-natured and troubled sympathy.
“I ought to have made some one come back for you,” he said, “but the orders we landed with, were to hunt this fellow out, and we had no time to think of any one else. The two officers that were ashore had got wind of him already, so we had a time finding them, even, before we got after the German. We finally traced him down to the point here, but when we looked in at the window of the mill and heard the old captain swearing and shouting and saw only you two bending over him, we didn’t think our friend could possibly be there. I knew you had been here since morning and the fellow had been seen at the crossroads in the afternoon.”
“He must have come in when I was asleep,” said Billy. It seemed more and more that his nap had been an especially unfortunate one.
“I had orders to go down and signal to the ship that we hadn’t found him,” the sailor went on, “and as soon as I had finished the message I was coming back to find out if we could help you. I looked back over my shoulder to see if the others were coming, and it was then I happened to glance up and see our German friend in the window. He was so interested in trying to make out the message I was sending that he must have forgotten everything else. He had not even put out the lamp when he pushed the window wide open, so I could see him clear and black against the lighted room, and I guessed in a second who he was. I broke off my message and instead began telling the ship as quickly as I could that we had found him. He must have been able to read that, for the next minute—ping—a bullet went by me and stuck in the sand.”
One of the officers now appeared in the doorway, come to inquire into the welfare of Captain Saulsby.
“We will get him home,” he said; “the tide is off the causeway now and my men can carry him across to his own house, or perhaps on to the hospital in the village. I am afraid he is pretty sick after all these adventures! I wish we could have had time to help you sooner.”
Four of the sailors bore the old captain down to the shore while Billy went home with Sally Shute through the woods. The fog was clearing and it was getting light at last; the stars were growing dimmer and dimmer and the eastern horizon showed a streak of gold. The two stumbled along, too weary to watch the coming dawn, to hear the birds that were beginning to sing, or even to say much to each other. They plodded down the lane in silence and reached Sally’s gate at last.