"Okay." Scotty leaned out into the slip stream and put the binoculars on the lights. When the ships were behind, he pulled his head in again and rubbed his cold face. "That other ship is a freighter, but not very big. I'd say less than four thousand tons. It's probably a coaster."
Rick wondered, if it was a coastal vessel, why he hadn't found anything in the New York paper at the Morning Record. It was probable, he decided, that the ship was heading for some other port, maybe Boston.
"Funny," Scotty said. "The other ship is heading south."
"South? No wonder we didn't find anything in the shipping news. Listen, Scotty, what if that's just an American coaster? You know what that would mean? That ship would have to rendezvous with some ocean-going freighter, or maybe several of them." His voice hushed. "What if we've run into something that's only a small part of a really big smuggling ring?"
His ready imagination pictured the coastal vessel sailing regularly between Baltimore and Portland, Maine, meeting ocean-going smugglers and in turn supplying small contraband runners like Brad Marbek and the Kelsos all the way up and down the coast.
"I expected some big ocean freighter," Scotty remarked.
They had been flying steadily out to sea. Now Rick banked around so Scotty could look through the glasses once more.
"I can see them on the horizon," Scotty said, glasses to his eyes. "They've met. The lights are almost together. Hey! The lights just went out!"
"Probably turned out so as not to attract the attention of any passing ships," Rick guessed. "They can't see, as we can, that they're the only ships around. We'll stall for a while before going back. Give them time to get rigged for passing cargo."
He lifted the camera to his lap, then trimmed the Cub so it would fly by itself. Scotty took the power pack on his own lap and checked again to see that the dynamo-driven spring was wound tight.