“Tell her! There isn’t anything to tell her, is there? Tell her what we have been talking about. Tell her every idea that has occurred to us about the matter. Tell her that we are legging it back for New York and Nick Carter just as fast as this blessed old tub will carry us. Tell her that when we get there I’ll pull down stars out of the sky and dig up mountains with my two hands to save Bess. Tell her—she already knows it, but you can remind her of it, just the same—tell her that your chump husband is worth a number of millions of dollars, and that he’ll spend every last dollar he’s got to find Bess and save her, and to hunt down the fellow that stole her, no matter what has happened; and tell her if she can think of anything else that she would like done, it shall be done if there are men in the world to do it. And tell her not to cry. Crying won’t help the matter any, and it interferes with good, clear eyesight. I’d like to swear, but swearing doesn’t assist the judgment any, as I have discovered, so you see I don’t do it. Brace up, Cora, girl! Bite on the bullet. It hurts, I know. It hurts me just as much as it does you. But let me tell you this much before we part—and it means a good deal, too.”
“What, Max?”
“Nick Carter thinks a lot of Bessie, if anybody should ask you. He won’t require any seven-league boots behind him to spur him on in this matter; and if there is a man on top of earth who can figure this thing out about the way it really is, that man is Nick Carter. He will see through it like a glass, and blow me if I don’t somehow feel as if he would know at once just about where to look for Bessie and the pirate.”
CHAPTER XVI.
THE PIRATE’S BEAUTIFUL CAPTIVE.
And now we must return for a space to the pirate cruiser, the Shadow. Although Bessie Harlan did not faint when the pirate chief seized her and bore her aboard of his own craft, from the deck of the yacht, she was in reality so near to doing so that she was rendered as helpless as a babe in the arms of the man who carried her.
She was conscious only that she was borne from the deck of one vessel to the other, and that then her abductor carried her down a short flight of steps into the interior of the boat. She heard him open a door, and she was conscious then that she was in a lighted room, although she could not have opened her eyes to save her life, it seemed to her.
They traversed this room, or cabin—she did not see what it was—and presently passed through a second door. Inside this second apartment the air was cool and sweet. She could hear the bur-r-r of an electric fan and could feel the draft it created.
But still she did not open her eyes. Then she realized that her captor was putting her down, and he did it so quietly and so tenderly that she decided he must believe that she had fainted, and, in order not to undeceive him, she kept her eyes closed.