And the pirate craft—the Shadow?
She was all that has been claimed for her. She had herself been stolen from her builders in France, at the very time when she was about to be delivered to a Russian prince, for whom she had been built. Operated by electricity, derived from storage batteries, which were supplied by a charging dynamo so that she never ran out of power, she was fleet and powerful, and half a submarine; that is, she could sink and rise again without remaining for a long time immersed; and she could skim swiftly along the surface of the water with only her turrets showing above it.
Madame Cadillac did not follow her husband to prison. She returned to France, a sadder and a much wiser woman. The count—he who was called Jean—disappeared from the club-house that night.
It was thought that he had somehow discovered the absence of Kane and the detective from the Goalong, and that he decided that it would be good policy to decamp. At all events, that is what he did do.
“Too bad!” murmured Nick. “That fellow will be up to mischief yet.”
CHAPTER XIII.
THE ROVER OF THE SEAS.
It was a month later. The Goalong was six hours out of Hamilton, Bermuda, bound for Newport News. The time was something after six o’clock in the evening, and the sun had just sunk below the horizon, thirteen miles away. The season was the first week in September—a month during which few if any tourists ever think of visiting the Bermudas.
But Maxwell Kane had for many years been in the habit of spending a week or two of the summer season in Hamilton, because having, on one occasion, visited the place by accident at that time of the year, he had discovered that the statement frequently made by the permanent residents of the place that Bermuda was much pleasanter in the summer than in the winter was true.