“If they get this fellow, we shall be just where we were before,” was the detective’s reflection. “I’ve got to prevent that. It will be a hard swim to shore. But I believe I can make it if I am not interfered with.”
The boat was rowing swiftly toward him, and soon there came a long flash of white light across the water which struck him squarely in the face.
Simultaneously, the man who sat in the bows, looking ahead, called out, in a gruff tone:
“Pull hard! And you, at the helm, steer toward the shore a little. I see him right ahead!”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
Nick Carter was quite aware that he could not beat the boat to shore. Even if he had been unencumbered, he could not have expected that he would swim faster than a husky man could pull a light boat containing only three persons.
But it was not the habit of the detective to yield until he was overcome by the enemy. “Fight to the end,” was his motto, and he had won many a seemingly hopeless battle by adhering to this determination.
“I wish you could swim a little yourself,” he said, in a gasping whisper, to the unconscious man who now weighed so heavily across his shoulder. “I’ll have to get you in some other position, I am afraid, or you’ll drag both of us under.”
He began to shift his burden a little, but without much advantage, when suddenly there came to his ears the low chugging of the launch.
“She hasn’t got all the power on,” he muttered. “But, by Cæsar, she is moving it a little. I always knew that girl was better than the average. She’s as good as a man in many things that you wouldn’t expect a girl to know much about.”