One of the fishermen threw off his shoes, and took a header into the water. The rest of the men stood by breathless, eagerly watching two heads bobbing up and down among the moonlit waves, two pairs of arms buffeting with the water. The force of the current drifted the two men far away from the schooner.
For an interval that seemed a long one, all was uncertainty. The schooner that had made so little way before seemed now to fly in the faint night-wind. At last there was a shout, and a head appeared above the water advancing steadily towards the vessel.
"I've got him!" shouted the voice of the fisherman. "I've got him by the belt!"
He came nearer to the vessel, striking out vigorously with one arm, and holding some burden with the other.
When he was close under the side, the captain of the Crow flung out a rope; but as the fisherman lifted his hand to grasp it, he uttered a sudden cry, and raised the other hand with a splash out of the water.
"The belt's broke, and he's sunk!" he shouted.
The belt had broken. A little ripple of light flashed briefly in the moonlight, and fell like a shower of spray from a fountain. Those glittering drops, that looked like fountain spray, were some of the diamonds bought by Joseph Wilmot; and Stephen Vallance, alias Blackguard Steeve, alias Major Vernon, had gone down to the bottom of the sea, never in this mortal life to rise again.
CHAPTER XLV.
GIVING IT UP.
The Pretty Polly went back to the port of Kingston-upon-Hull in the grey morning light, carrying Mr. Carter, very cold and very down-hearted—not to say humiliated—by his failure. To have been hoodwinked by a girl, whose devotion to the unhappy wretch she called her father had transformed her into a heroine—to have fallen so easily into the trap that had been set for him, being all the while profoundly impressed with the sense of his own cleverness—was, to say the least of it, depressing to the spirits of a first-class detective.
"And that fellow Vallance, too," mused Mr. Carter, "to think that he should go and chuck himself into the water just to spite me! There'd have been some credit in taking him back with me. I might have made a bit of character out of that. But, no! he goes and tumbles back'ards into the water, rather than let me have any advantage out of him."