"I would give six months' wages if I could make Bart stay home. Do you suppose his father is really going to sea at daylight, or is he just using Bart to fool us?"
"I haven't been walking in my sleep," dryly responded Captain Jim. "There's a hundred and fifty miles of the Reef between here and Miami and I don't intend to follow any decoy ducks and fetch up at the wrong end of it. I figure on getting a report of any disaster as soon as the next man."
The next day passed without tidings. Jeremiah Pringle had vanished from his haunts in Key West, and four of his schooners were not to be found at their moorings. Another day dragged by, Bill McKnight was stewing with impatience and Dan Frazier was losing his appetite while Captain Jim Wetherly remained cheerful and unruffled.
He was like another man, however, when a message came to him at noon on the fourth day of waiting. It was from the cable office and he had no more than glanced at it before he darted on deck, ordered the mate to get the crew aboard, shouted down a speaking-tube to Bill McKnight, and took his station at the wheel. His keen-witted, masterful energy seemed to thrill the Resolute with life and action. Black smoke gushed from her funnel as her stokers toiled in front of the furnace doors. The engines were turning over when the last deck-hand leaped aboard, and as the dripping hawsers were hauled in, the tug was moving out into the stream.
Key West island was over her stern before Dan found time to run up to the wheel-house. Captain Jim slipped a crumpled bit of paper into his fist and motioned for him to keep it to himself. It was from the marine observer at Jupiter Inlet, a hundred miles to the northward of the Florida Reef:
"Steamer Kenilworth southbound passed seven this morning. Signalled steering gear disabled by heavy weather but able to proceed."
Dan's faith in human nature, as it had to do with the master of the Kenilworth, had been so severely shocked that he wondered whether the report of her mishap could be true. He was not shrewd enough to perceive, however, what Captain Jim whispered as he went below to see how things were moving in the engine-room.
"Crippled steering gear, bosh. Her skipper has to fake up some excuse for striking the Reef."
Dan could scarcely believe that the curtain had really risen on this seafaring melodrama in which he was to be an actor. A stately ship was moving blindly toward an ambush which might be the death of her. And racing to find and befriend her was this lone tug whose throbbing heart of steel shook her stout hull from bow to stern as she tore through the long head-seas on the edge of the Gulf Stream. The afternoon was already waning and night would overtake the Resolute before she could reach the upper stretches of the Reef. Captain Wetherly felt certain that the Kenilworth would not be rammed on the coral ledges in broad daylight, and he foresaw a desperate game of hide-and-seek between darkness and dawn. But he held to the doctrine that with anything like even chances an honest man will win against a rascal in the game of life, afloat or ashore.