“I beg you to forgive me, Halstead, you and your mates. But I hardly know what I am thinking or saying. My mind is in too deep a turmoil.”
“We’ll forget it, Mr. Seaton,” continued Halstead, as he pressed the other’s hand. “I can, easily, and I hope you’ll do your best to believe that you can trust us as fully as others have done.”
“You may just as well come forward, Hepton,” hailed Captain Tom, a few moments later. “And I want to thank you for the way you stood by me when I needed help so badly.”
“Ever since we’ve been at the island I’ve felt that I didn’t believe any too much in that man Jasper,” muttered Hepton. “He has been acting queer some of the time.”
“How?” asked Mr. Seaton.
“Well, for one thing, he always wanted the night guard duty. And he growled at taking the porch or the dock. What he wanted to do was to roam off about the island by himself. 123 Whenever he came back he wanted to sit in your sitting-room, at the bungalow, and the fellow scowled if some of the rest of us showed any liking for staying in that sitting-room.”
“What do you make of that, sir?” asked Captain Halstead, looking significantly at Powell Seaton.
“It sets me to thinking hard,” replied that gentleman, gravely.
Hepton glanced with natural curiosity from one to the other. Then, finding that he was not to be enlightened as to what had happened ashore, he soon stepped aft again.
“Here’s what you want to know, I reckon,” announced Joe, in a low voice, as his head bobbed up out of the motor room. In one hand he held a slip of paper on which he had just taken down a message. “Twenty miles north of us is the Langley Line freighter, ‘Fulton.’ She’s headed this way, and coming at fourteen knots.”