“You have good eyes, Mr. Carter,” remarked the girl. “I don’t see anything on the yacht at all.”
“The red light of his cigar appears now and again, as he shifts his position,” explained the detective. “Now I catch the odor of the cigar. The wind is blowing this way. Don’t you get the Havana fragrance? It is very faint, but it is there.”
But Claudia’s senses were not as keen as Nick Carter’s. She could neither see nor smell the cigar.
Nick ran the launch up to the bank, and found a small landing stage, with several iron rings.
Up the hill he could make out one of the lights in the house he had discerned from the middle of the river. This landing stage was placed here for the use of the occupants of the house, of course.
Once the launch had been secured, Nick looked about him for some means of getting to the yacht without being perceived by the man smoking on the cabin, or anybody else who might be on watch.
“I can’t take the launch,” he muttered. “The chugging of the engine will attract attention at once. I’ll have to drift in with the tide and paddle with that emergency oar to get there at all. But I cannot handle such a cumbersome craft as the launch in reconnoitering. I want to go right under their counter.”
It was true that Nick had shut off the engine of the launch when some distance from the yacht. He had also put out the one light they had carried.
His object was to make the people on the yacht suppose it was some gay party taking a ride on the river at night—a common-enough proceeding—and that the ceasing of the engine sound was due merely to the launch passing on its way.
The detective was accustomed to consider all contingencies when working on a case, and it was seldom, indeed, that any of his plans miscarried through carelessness or lack of foresight on his own part.