“We’ll be right up. Stay right where you are.”
“Pop an’ I were just comin’,” Skippy cried to them, “that is, we were just goin’ back to the yacht—the A—Apollyon an’ tell them how it all really happened. Pop ran away on accounta me, but after we talked about it he decided to go back an’ tell.... Mr. Flint was dead before Pop got there—he was; honest!”
“Oh yeah?” laughed the first officer to reach the deck. “Now that’s interestin’. But I’d wait till the rest of the gang gets up, kid, because they all got ears too.”
Skippy watched them troop up until the last man set foot on the barge’s worn deck. Six men, he thought, with not a little fear. How weak would his father’s story seem to these frowning cops? Would they believe him as he had believed him?
His fingers were entwined in his father’s in a tight grip and yet he had the feeling that Toby was already snatched away from him. Now that the police confronted them he was terribly afraid and in that instant his hopes fled as quickly as the stars in the face of gathering storm clouds overhead.
Then Toby spoke in his hoarse, broken voice....
CHAPTER VIII
ALONE
Skippy’s hopes were somewhat rekindled during Toby’s recital of his visit to the yacht. The story sounded so straightforward as he told it, that it did not seem possible that these representatives of the law could find a single flaw in it. And yet to his utter dismay they found more than a flaw in it; they found it sufficiently damning to threaten his unhappy father with certain conviction.
They had already seen Inspector Jones and had had his word for it that Toby Dare had threatened to “fix Josiah Flint,” and there was also the corroboration of the inspector’s men. There was also the strongly incriminating statement of the second mate of the Apollyon and the charge that Toby refused to stop when called to from the yacht by Skinner.
“My Pop never carried a gun!” Skippy cried in protest. “You can’t say that he did!”