“You tell Mr. Fogg, who chartered your tug, that I have his man under lock and key and that the more riot he starts over the matter the better I will be satisfied. And don't bring any more passengers out here unless they are police officers.” Then he roared in his master-mariner tones: “Cast off your lines, sir. You know what the admiralty law is!”
The captain nodded, closed his pilot-house window, and clanged his bell. Mayo knew by his mystified air that he was not wholly in the confidence of his passenger and his employer.
This bungling, barefaced attempt to destroy the steamer touched Mayo's pride as deeply as it stirred his wrath. Fogg evidently viewed the pretensions of the new ownership with contempt. He must have belief in his own power to ruin and to escape consequences, pondered the young man. He had put Mayo and his humble associates on the plane of the ordinary piratical wreckers of the coast-men who grabbed without law or right, who must be prepared to fight other pirates of the same ilk, and whose affairs could have no standing in a court of law.
Even more disquieting were the statements that the avenues of credit ashore had been closed. Malicious assertions could ruin the project more effectually than could dynamite. But now that the Conomo had withstood the battering of a gale and bulked large on the reef, a visible pledge of value, it did seem that Captain Candage must be able to find somebody who would back them.
For two days Mayo waited with much impatience, he and his men doing such preliminary work as offered itself.
He expected that Fogg would send a relief expedition, but his apprehensions bore no fruit. His prisoner was sourly reticent and by the few words he did drop seemed to console himself with the certainty that retribution awaited Mayo.
On the third day came the schooner. She came listlessly, under a light wind, and her limp sails seemed to express discouragement and disappointment. Mayo, gazing across to her as she approached, received that impression, in spite of his hopes. He got a glimpse of Captain Candage's face as he came to the steamer's side in his dory, and his fears were confirmed.
“'Tain't no use,” was the skipper's laconic report as he swung up the ladder.
“You mean to say you didn't get a rise out of anybody?”
“Nothing doing nowhere. There's a fat man named Fogg in Limeport, and he is spreading talk that we 'ain't got law or prospects. Got a few men to listen to me, but they shooed me off when they found that we wouldn't take 'em in and give 'em all the profits. Went to Maquoit and tried to get Deacon Rowley into the thing—and when I go and beg favors of Deacon Rowley, you can imagine how desperate I am. He's a cash-down fellow—you have found that out.”