“Hooray! But doesn’t it feel great to be 229 moving under one’s own power again!” chortled Captain Tom, as he felt the vibration of the propellers and swung the steering wheel.
Though the coast had been visible from daylight, the town of Mocalee was not in sight until the boat neared the mouth of a river. Up this stream, half a mile, nestled a quaint little Florida town, where, as one of the natives afterwards expressed it to Joe, “we live on fish in summer and sick Yankees in winter.”
“We’d better get on shore, all hands, and stretch our legs,” proposed Powell Seaton, after Skipper Tom had made the “Restless” fast at the one sizable dock of the town. “I see a hotel over yonder. I invite you all to be my guests at breakfast—on a floor that won’t rock!”
“I’ll stay aboard, then, to look after the boat,” volunteered Hepton. “And you can rely on me to keep a mighty sharp eye on that man, Jasper,” he added, in Halstead’s ear.
It was after seven o’clock in the morning when the shore party from the “Restless,” after strolling about a little, turned toward the hotel.
As they passed through a corridor on the way to the office Tom Halstead glanced at a red leather bag that was being brought downstairs by a negro bell-boy.
“Do you see the bag that servant has?” 230 asked Tom, in a whisper, as he clutched Powell Seaton’s arm. “Scar on the side, and all, I’d know that bag anywhere. It’s the one Anson Dalton brought over the side when he boarded the ‘Restless’ from the ‘Constant’!”