“You’re a lubber yourself,” retorted Walter, who, although he considered himself a prisoner in hands of the smugglers, was not the one to listen tamely to any imputation cast upon his seamanship. “I can handle a craft of this size as well as anybody.”
“I don’t see it,” answered the master of the schooner. “My vessel is larger than yours, and I brought her in here without smashing everything in pieces.”
“That may be. But the way was clear, and you came in under entirely different circumstances.”
“Well, if you will bear a hand over there we will clear away this wreck. I want to go out again as soon as this wind goes down.”
Wondering why the captain of the smugglers did not tell them that they were his prisoners, Walter and his crew went to work with the schooner’s company, and by the aid of hatchets, handspikes, and a line made fast to a tree on the bank, succeeded in getting the little vessels apart; after which the Banner was hauled out into deep water and turned about in readiness to sail out of the cove. Walter took care, however, to work his vessel close in to the bank, in order to leave plenty of room for the tug and the revenue cutter when they came in. How closely he watched the entrance to the cove, and how impatiently he awaited their arrival!
While the crew of the schooner was engaged in repairing the wreck of the bowsprit, Walter and his men were setting things to rights on board the yacht, wondering exceedingly all the while. They did not understand the matter at all. Pierre and Coulte had brought Chase to the island, intending to leave him to starve, freeze, or be taken off as fate or luck might decree, and all because he had learned something they did not want him to know. Fred Craven was a prisoner on board the very vessel that now lay alongside them, and that proved that he knew something about the smugglers also. Now, if the band had taken two boys captive because they had discovered their secret, and they did not think it safe to allow them to be at liberty, what was the reason they did not make an effort to secure the crew of the Banner? These were the points that Walter and his men were turning over in their minds, and the questions they propounded to one another, but not one of them could find an answer to them.
“Perhaps they think we might resist, and that we are too strong to be successfully attacked,” said Eugene, at length.
“Hardly that, I imagine,” laughed Walter. “Five boys would not be a mouthful for ten grown men.”
“I say, fellows,” exclaimed Bab, “what has become of Chase all of a sudden?”
“That’s so!” cried all the crew in a breath, stopping their work and looking up at the bluffs above them. “Where is he?”