Iff returned to the younger man’s side.
“Twenty miles an hour, Bascom claims,” he shouted. “At that rate we ought to be there in about fifteen minutes now.”
Staff nodded, wondering what they would find on Wreck Island, bitterly repenting the oversight which had resulted in Ismay’s escape from his grasp. If only he had not been so sure of his conquest of the little criminal ...! Now his mind crawled with apprehensions bred of his knowledge of the man’s amazing fund of resource. He who outwitted Ismay would have earned the right to plume himself upon his cunning....
When he looked up from his abstraction, the loom of the mainland was seemingly very distant. The motor-boat was nearing the centre of a deep indentation in the littoral. And suddenly it was as though they did not move at all, as if all this noise and labour went for nothing, as if the boat were chained to the centre of a spreading disk of silver, world-wide, illimitable, and made no progress for all its thrashing and its fury.
Only the unending sweep of wind across his face denied that effect....
“There....” he said, pointing.
Over the bows a dark mass seemed to have separated itself from the shadowed mainland, with which it had till then been merged. A strip of silver lay between the two, and while they watched it widened, swiftly winning breadth and bulk as the motor-boat swung to the north of the long, sandy spit at the western end of Wreck Island.
“See anything of another boat?” Iff asked. “You look—your eyes are younger than mine.”
Staff stood up, steadying himself with feet wide apart, and stared beneath his hand.