"Storm King, ahoy!" yelled the midshipman, utterly amazed, and wondering what sort of a craft the Sweepstakes was, anyhow, that she could slip out of a narrow channel under the very noses of so many watchful students. "Where is she, sir?"
"Whom do you mean?" asked the first lieutenant, beginning to feel uneasy at once.
"The schooner. She has left the cove. Didn't you see her when she went by you, sir?"
Harry understood from this that the Sweepstakes had again escaped. She certainly had not run past him, as the midshipman had intimated; the Crusoe men could not have taken her out of the cove and carried her across the island, and yet she had escaped. Harry asked himself if he had ever seen her at all that night. He turned and gazed at the second lieutenant, who stood at his side looking the very picture of consternation and bewilderment.
"I don't understand it, sir," said the latter.
"Neither do I," replied Harry. "Run alongside the bank and take those men on board."
While the order was being obeyed, Harry paced up and down the deck, racking his brain in the hope of finding some explanation for this second disappearance of the schooner; but the only conclusion he could come to was, that he had been outwitted in some mysterious way, and that Tom Newcombe, or whoever was the presiding genius of the Crusoe band, possessed more brains than he had given him credit for. He saw now that the pirate captain knew what he was doing when he ran into the cove.
"I will tell you what I think about it, Harry," exclaimed Johnny Harding, who was the first to board the sloop. "The Sweepstakes crossed the shoals farther down."
"Impossible!" cried the first lieutenant.
"Perhaps it is, but how, then, could she get out of the cove without your knowing something about it? From this time forward it will be hard work to make me believe that any thing is impossible. If a man had told you, an hour ago, that a boat could live on those shoals, you would have thought he was crazy, wouldn't you?"