The next instant a shock, sharp as the sudden sting of a galvanic battery, shook him.
The girl was Miss Jarrold! She recognized him at the same instant and gave a little cry. Simultaneously Jarrold and Colonel Minturn came face to face. A hoarse cry broke from Jarrold’s throat. He reached into an inside pocket and drew out a bundle, which he threw overboard before Minturn could catch his wrist in an iron grasp.
But as the papers splashed, and Jarrold broke out into a mocking laugh and cried, “You thought you had me beaten, but it’s you that are beaten now, Colonel Minturn,” there came another splash, a bigger one.
“It’s the kid!” shouted one of the sailors. “He’s gone after that bundle!”
Mr. Metcalf jumped from his seat to the assistance of Colonel Minturn, for Jarrold, maddened by the series of disasters that had overtaken him, had reached for and drawn a pistol. A crack over the wrist from an oar wielded by the first mate, sent the weapon flying overboard.
A few moments later Jarrold, who fought like a tiger, was lying bound in the bottom of the boat with two sailors guarding him. His niece sat in the stern sheets sobbing hysterically over the ironic turn of fate that had caused the ship that they thought was to rescue them to be the very one they most dreaded.
Jack was hauled back on board after a few seconds’ immersion. In one hand he held high a dripping bundle of papers. A sailor reached out to take them from him. But the boy refused to give them up.
“Only one man gets these,” he said, shaking the water from his curly head, “and that is Colonel Minturn.”
With a gasp of thankfulness that was almost a sob, the colonel took the papers from the boy’s hands, thrust them within his coat and then fairly hauled Jack on board.
By a twist of fate, seemingly incredible, but really attributable to a logical chain of events, the papers relating to the priceless secrets of the Panama Canal were once more in the proper hands. They never left them again.