The detective made no sign. He suffered his eyes to close a little more, and when he was lifted and placed in the bottom of the boat, he allowed himself to drop limply just as he was put.
Valeria saw the boat shoved off from the bank toward the middle of the bay, and then swing around in the direction of the yacht.
“I wonder what Colonel Pearson will say to me when I go aboard the Idaline to-morrow,� she murmured, as she made her way back to the hotel.
She was still thinking this when she went to bed, and this time dropped into a sleep that lasted till morning.
Meanwhile, the two unwounded sailors took the oars and rowed hard toward the yacht, while the two other men, who were not shot—including the one who had been knocked out by Nick Carter, but who had now practically recovered—were ready to relieve their shipmates when they should grow tired.
Kennedy sat in the stern, steering, and apparently in a reverie. He was thinking what a good stroke of work he had accomplished that night.
Not only had he got the two prisoners made by the beautiful mistress of the yacht, and was taking them to the vessel, where they could be held in safety until the demanded ransom was paid, but he had actually got into his power the one man feared by Valeria and her crew of desperadoes who had made the Idaline the most annoying craft known to the police of a dozen countries.
If the yacht had not been so carefully changed in its appearance, by altering her rigging, shortening her smokestack by an ingenious telescoping device that was the invention of its fair owner, and giving a different look to her in several other ways, Nick Carter would have recognized her at once.
As it was, he had thought he knew it, although he could not reconcile the salient points of difference between the Idaline, as he remembered her, and this graceful pleasure steamer riding so calmly at anchor in the bay.
Now that he had found out who the Baroness Latour really was, and had actually been in conversation with her—following this up by running against Kennedy, whom[Pg 37] he also had met before—he did not need to hear the first mate mention the name of the Idaline to be sure of her identity.