“I know him, but I don’t know you.”
“We don’t want to go back to the village,” continued Mr. Craven. “A matter of the utmost importance to this gentleman and myself demands our immediate attention. You never saw a smuggler fitted up like this yacht. Look about her, and you can easily see that she has no place for stowing away a cargo.”
“That is no part of my duty,” replied the officer. “I was told what to do under certain circumstances, and I must obey orders. I’ll trouble you to step into this boat.”
By this time the yacht was in full possession of the cutter’s men. The boy-crew had been ordered below, and were now in the cabin under arrest; a sailor had taken Bab’s place at the wheel, and Lieutenant Butler stood on the quarter-deck with Walter’s speaking-trumpet in his hand. It made Walter angry to see his beloved yacht under the control of strangers; but knowing that there was but one way out of the difficulty, he sprang into the boat, followed by Mr. Chase and Mr. Craven.
“Don’t take it so much to heart,” said the latter, addressing the dejected young captain. “This man is only a second lieutenant, and of course he is acting under orders. When we arrive on board the cutter we’ll talk to the captain. If he wants to find the smugglers we can tell him where to look for two of them.”
Walter caught at the encouragement thus held out, as drowning men catch at straws; but his hopes fell again as soon as he found himself in the presence of the captain of the cutter. The latter, who was a very pompous man, and for some reason or other seemed to think himself of considerable importance, listened to the report of his officer, and after telling him that he had done perfectly right, and that the prisoners looked like a desperate lot, turned on his heel, and ordered the first lieutenant to fill away for Bellville. Mr. Craven tried to gain his ear for a moment, but the captain told him rather sternly that he was very busy just then, and would attend to him after awhile.
Walter had not been long aboard the cutter before he became aware that he was an object of interest to her crew. The officer who had commanded the boat pointed him out to his mess as the captain of the yacht, and they all looked at him with curiosity, especially the young third lieutenants attached to the vessel, who congregated in the waist, and stared at him as long as he remained on deck. Walter was a handsome fellow, as neat and trim as the vessel he commanded, and the lieutenants told one another that he looked every inch a sailor; but they could hardly believe that he was the chief of the band of outlaws of whom they had heard so much. Walter was nettled by their close scrutiny, and, when the captain of the cutter, unbending a little from his dignity, intimated that, if his prisoners had anything of importance to say to him, they might step down into the cabin, he gladly accepted the invitation. He thought, however, that he and his friends might as well have stayed on deck and kept silent, for the captain wouldn’t believe a word of their story. He wasn’t going back to Lost Island on any wild goose-chase, he said. There might be two smugglers there with a boy prisoner, and there might not—he neither knew nor cared. When they reached the village he would go with Mr. Craven and his two friends to the collector of the port, and see if they were really what they represented themselves to be, and that was all he would do. That settled the matter; and Walter, greatly disgusted with the captain’s obstinacy, bolted out of the cabin, slamming the door after him.
The cutter stopped once on the way to the village long enough to overhaul a schooner that was coming out of the harbor. The second lieutenant boarded her, and when he came back reported that she was all right. She was the Stella, bound to Havana with an assorted cargo. But she was not all right, if the lieutenant had only known it. She had some articles on board that were not mentioned in her manifest, and among them was a boy named Fred Craven.
To Walter’s great relief the village was reached at last, and as soon as the cutter had dropped her anchor he stepped into the boat with the captain and the two gentlemen, and put off for shore to visit the collector of the port. Having business on hand that would admit of no delay, Mr. Craven did not hesitate to call him out of his bed to listen to their story and set them right with the captain of the cutter. The collector, little dreaming what had taken his brother into the Gulf at that time of night, laughed heartily at the idea of his being taken for a smuggler; and the revenue captain, finding that he had committed a blunder, apologized so freely and seemed to regret the circumstance so much, that Walter was almost ready to forgive him. Mr. Craven, however, was not so easily appeased, and neither was Mr. Chase. They had lost more than three hours by their forced return, and they did not know what might have become of their boys in the mean time.