“Are we going to catch up with her!”
“I don’t know, yet,” Halstead admitted. “The ‘Buzzard’ is a fast boat. Whether we can catch up with her only the next two hours can tell. We’ve got a mighty good boat under our feet, Mr. Tremaine.”
“We need one!” cried that gentleman.
It being none of their affair, particularly, for the present, the two Tampa officers were lounging in deck chairs aft, smoking quietly. The ladies, however, stood just behind the men, as close to the bridge deck as they could keep without interfering with the handling of the craft.
“Let me have the glass again, please,” begged Halstead, ten minutes later. “Yes, I thought so,” he continued, after looking. “That line on the water near the horizon is the ‘Buzzard’s’ hull showing once more. Then we must be creeping up on her.”
“Want me to take the wheel, Cap’n, for a spell?”—hinted Jeff Randolph.
“Not just now,” vouchsafed Tom Halstead. “Just now straight steering counts for as much as the speed of the propellers. You may be a better helmsman than I, by a good deal, but I can’t take a single chance for the next hour.”
In the next half hour, during which the Tampa harbor was left far behind, the hull ahead loomed up no larger. It remained an all but indistinct line on the horizon.
“If Mr. Dixon is on that boat, do you think he knows we’re after him?” Ida Silsbee asked.
“He must have more than a suspicion,” Tom Halstead grinned.