Coincident with the taking over of the yacht by the mutineers, the engines stopped; but after Lequat had locked us in and left us, the trampling tune of the machinery began again, though it presently became apparent that we were proceeding at something less than half speed. At first I thought the creeping progress might be Haskell's way of showing his reluctance to obey his new masters; but after the engines had made a few of the slow revolutions we heard the sing-song cry of a seaman in the main chains taking soundings.
"Feeling for an anchorage," said Van Dyck, speaking for the first time since he had asked Lequat that mush-mild question as to whether or not the outbreak was a mutiny. "Wouldn't you put it up that way?"
His query seemed too trivial to merit an answer.
"I haven't any time to waste on the guesses," I said, and most likely the tone was as crabbed as the words. Then: "Are you fully awake at last? Do you realize that you've been held up and robbed of a five-hundred-thousand-dollar yacht?"
His shrug was perfectly spineless.
"'What can't be cured must be endured'," he quoted, handing me the time-worn maxim as if it sufficiently accounted for everything. "Of course, as the person chiefly responsible, I'm all kinds of sorry for you and the others. It's a horribly rude interruption to our pleasure jaunt, and I take it there is no telling what these fellows may do to us." Then, with still more of the air of the completest detachment: "The nervy beggars! Who would ever have suspected it of them? And to carry it off so neatly, too."
"It was all plotted and planned beforehand, of course. Didn't this man Lequat say that it was cut-and-dried? Goff is the head and front of it, isn't he?"
"Heaven knows. You wouldn't imagine it of Goff—or would you?"
"I can easily imagine him breaking rock in a Federal prison—which is what he will do—if he succeeds in keeping his leathery old neck out of the hangman's noose!"
"Naturally," Van Dyck agreed easily. "But that is an after consideration. The present realities are what concern us just now. I'm wondering what their next move will be."