CHAPTER VI.
A SWIM FOR LIFE.
Thinking that his friends were close beside him, Harrie dropped into the boat arranged for their flight. At the same moment Francisco landed in the bow of the slight craft rocking at its moorings, while flashes of light and wild orders of men under the stress of great excitement came from the deck of the Libertador.
"Are you all here?" asked the young Venezuelan, while he looked hurriedly upward to the scene of excitement Over their heads, rather than about him.
"Jack and Ronie are not here!" replied Harrie. "Hark! That must be them engaged in a hand-to-hand fight."
"We must cut loose!" exclaimed Francisco, through his clinched teeth. "Some of them are coming over the rail!"
"Boat ahoy!" thundered a stentorian voice from the vessel.
Francisco was in the act of cutting the boat adrift at that moment, and before the sound of the speaker's voice had died away the fugitives were several yards astern.
"Ply the oars, for your life!" said Francisco. "Our lives depend on our work for the next few minutes."
Loath as he was to make this flight without his friends, it was really all that Harrie could do, and he lent his arm to that of his companion, and with each stroke of the oar they were taken farther and farther from the scene of wild commotion reigning upon the deck of the outlawed ship.