It must be confessed that when Nat learned the clever and thorough way in which Minory had carried out the last part of his desperate plan for stealing the fruits of the professor’s inventive faculty, his heart rather sank. Somehow, he did not feel quite so sanguine as he had at first that they would succeed, either themselves or through their wide-flung messages, in capturing the fellow. The remarkable ingenuity he had shown in his attempts on the wireless torpedo in New York, in his successful espionage of the inventor across the continent, and in his last coup of getting himself on board the craft on which the man he had injured was being conveyed ashore all showed an acute intellect, a depraved sort of genius for carrying out whatever nefarious ends its possessor had in view. Nat didn’t underrate his antagonist. He knew by this time that they had a wily and perhaps a desperate foe to fight.
The sea was as smooth as glass, and, although the sun beat hotly down, there was yet a refreshing breeze. These factors would aid Minory in his long row, supplementing the work of his muscles, which, despite his scrawny form, Nat judged to be wiry and powerful.
The Nomad was crowded along to every ounce of her speed capacity. Ding-dong never left his engines a second, but watched them with anxious solicitude. He was fully aware of how much depended now upon the performance of the motor. So far it was running sweet and true, with a humming song that delighted the watchful boy engineer. Oil can in hand, he doused the bearings and moving parts with lubricant from time to time, feeling a shaft collar or an eccentric band to detect symptoms of overheating.
The distant coast range, faintly blue and luminous, loomed up through the heat haze before long, but although Nat stationed Joe with the binoculars to keep active and constant watch for the skiff, nothing appeared in the field of the powerful glasses to warrant Joe in giving the alarm.
Once he saw something black and was on the point of crying out. The next minute he was glad that he hadn’t. The object proved to be only a floating log with a solemn line of seagulls bobbing up and down on it as it rose and fell on the swells.
“Begins to look bad, Nat,” commented Joe, as the outlines of the rugged, bare coast range became clearer and still no sign of a boat swam within the horizon of the glasses.
“I must admit that it does,” rejoined Nat, “but it’s up to us to keep hoping against hope.”
Suddenly a thought came to Joe.
“See here, Nat, unless that fellow is as skillful a boat handler as he is a crook he couldn’t land on the bare coast. The surf would be rolling too high even on a calm day like this to permit him to do so even if he tried to.”
“That’s so, Joe; you do have a bright thought once in a while.”