“Don’t know, Mr. Arnold,” replied Captain Southern. “Perhaps they’re crowded for room at the wharf. Looks like it.”
The commander had been gazing at the oncoming boat, as well as at the distant shore line, through his binoculars, and, almost mechanically, he gave orders to drop the anchors fore and aft.
“Going to stop, captain?” asked the millionaire ship owner.
“Yes. It will do no harm. And I want to see what these fellows in the boat are after.”
“I’ll come up on the bridge. I guess,” grunted Arnold. “Come on, Carter!”
The sacred bridge of a steamer is not going to be profaned by the feet of an uninvited person unless he happens to be the owner or some one of equal importance.
Jefferson Arnold and his friends, of course, had the privilege.
One of two young men who had been sitting in steamer chairs with Arnold and Nick Carter seemed to have some idea of following them to the bridge. But the elder of the pair shook his head.
“It wouldn’t do, Patsy,” he whispered. “Old Captain Southern is a crank about some things, and he looks on his bridge as a sort of private office. Let the chief size it up and tell us afterward.”
“I guess we’ll have to, Chick,” was the disgusted response. “But when I’m working on a case I like to see all I can from every angle.”