He thrust the papers back to the captain, who tossed them on the table, and both together they broke out afresh.
"Excuse our laughing," Jack said, turning to the inspector, who gazed from one to the other as if he thought they had gone mad; "but really it's too ripping!"
"Ain't ye the parties?" demanded the official sternly.
"Oh, we're the parties all fast enough; but—Well, now, look here. This yacht belongs to my uncle, you see."
"Yes, sir," replied the honest Mainbrace, evidently puzzled, as he would have put it, to make out the other's numbers, but still Britannically deferential to the nephew of a man who was able to own a yacht such as the Merle.
"Well, you see, I ran away with her because he wouldn't let me come across, and he's had no good of her the whole summer. From your papers I judge he looked for me on the other side six weeks before he notified you at all. You see how much of the summer that leaves him; and now, just as I'm starting to carry her back as fast as the wind will take her, you step in and stop us."
"Why, ye see, sir," began the inspector, evidently endeavoring to accommodate himself to the new light thrown by the captain on the situation, "the fact is 'e says 'e wants 'er in a 'urry."
"He won't get her, then," Jack said with a grin. "By the time you've red-taped her, and charged for her, and negotiated her, and sent her over with a hired crew, it'll be December at the very earliest—to say nothing of the twenty or thirty pounds he'll have to pay you and the cost of the crew you send her over by. It is hard lines for Uncle Randolph."
"It is so," Jerry agreed, fervently glad to be at last in possession of the way Jack meant to work.