“Master Harry?” whispered the man.
“Yes.”
“All right, sir. You trust me. I’ll trust you. Night, miss. I’ll wait there if it’s a week.”
“Hah!” ejaculated Vine, as the man’s heavy step went on before them. “There is a way of escape for him. I am a father, and what I ought to do by my friend pales before that. Now to find him, my child, to find him. He must escape.”
Louise clung to his arm, and they stood there on the cliff-path listening, and each mentally asking the question, what to do?
“If I could only get the faintest clue of his movements,” muttered Vine. “Louise, my child, can you not suggest something?”
She did not answer, for a terrible dread was upon her now. Her brother might have been taken; and if so, there was no need to hesitate as to the way to go.
As if the same thoughts had impressed him, Vine suddenly exclaimed, “No, no, they would not have taken him. The man was a stranger, and Harry would be too quick.”
For the next hour they hurried here and there, passing Van Heldre’s house, where a dim light in the window showed where the injured man lay. There was a vague kind of feeling that sooner or later they would meet Harry, but the minutes glided slowly by, and all was still.
Out beyond the harbour light the faint gleam of a lantern could be seen, showing that Bob Perrow had kept faith with them, and that the lugger was swinging in the rapid current, fast to one of the many buoys used by the fishermen in fine weather. But there was no sign or sound apparent; and, with their hearts sinking beneath the impression that Harry had been taken, and yet not daring to go and ask, father and daughter still wandered to and fro along the various streets of the little town.