“Jed,” directed the young skipper, “see whether you can pick up the mouth of Cookson’s Inlet ahead of the stranger.”
“There’s a break in the beach over yonder,” reported Prentiss, soon. “It doesn’t appear to be more than fifty feet wide.”
“It’s sixty-two feet,” responded Tom Halstead, who had made a hard study of all this part of the Long Island coast “And confound them if they try to go in there.”
“Why?” inquired Eben Moddridge.
“It’s mighty shallow water, the other side of the inlet,” Captain Halstead explained. “That other boat probably doesn’t draw more than two and a half feet of water. Our draught, on account of our very heavy engine, is nearer nine feet. I don’t know just how far we can follow them in that little bay. In some places the water isn’t over four feet deep.”
“Then they are not playing fairly,” muttered Moddridge, in a tone of deep disgust.
“Rascals rarely do play a fairer game than they’re obliged to do,” answered Tom, with a queer little smile. “However, all we can do is to stick to them as long as we are able.”
With two boats going at such high speed it was not long before the mouth of the inlet was made. The stranger, however, passed through about four minutes ahead of the “Rocket.”
Once in the bay the motor boat boys found themselves not far from a low, sandy island, on which were a few trees and three small cottages.
“There they are, passing the other side of the island,” hailed Jed, pointing to the top of the stranger’s single mast, visible for an instant before it disappeared behind a rise in the sandy surface of the island.