"I can't argue it out with the fool boy. And what gets under my skin, too, is the way Dan Frazier has handled himself since that night in Pensacola. He must have got wind of the Kenilworth job then. I hate to be under obligations to anybody, and Jim Wetherly and that boy have been keeping it all back from my boy. Why? So Barton wouldn't be ashamed of his daddy. That's a cheerful notion to take to bed with me."
He had begun to feel that it might be unfair to his son's faith in him to engage in any more shady wrecking operations, and he was nearer being ashamed of himself than he had been in many years. It seemed as if Captain Jim Wetherly read his thoughts, for he halted him next day long enough to say:
"You have taken hold in great shape. It helps square matters, Jerry. It is your duty to get this ship off the Reef; you know that. And you will never be able to look that boy of yours in the eye until the Kenilworth is towed into port and made ready for sea again."
Mr. Pringle was in no mood to have his sins or his duty flung in his teeth, and he retorted savagely:
"Don't preach at me, Jim Wetherly. I break even with you by helping you get this vessel afloat. And I won't make you pay for smashing the Henry Foster. That squares all debts between us."
Meanwhile Dan and Barton had explored the Kenilworth from end to end, Dan telling at great length the story of his imprisonment among the cargo in the hold. When he came to the chapter dealing with the visit of the Bahama wreckers, he hurried Bart to the spot where he had found the lighted fuse and sack of powder. Alas, even the fragments of the fuse had been swept away in the task of lightering the cargo. Dan headed for the nearest hatchway to search for the powder. The compartment into which he had thrown it was cleared of water, the débris shovelled out, and the shattered bottom plates covered deep with cement and timber bracing.
"Our wreckers didn't find the powder bag, or Captain Jim would have told me," mourned Dan. "The canvas may have ripped open or rotted where it fell. You believe it all, don't you, Bart? But that hatchet-faced old Prentice as much as called me a liar. And I won't be happy till I can make him take it back. He thinks I was trying to pull his leg with the explosion yarn. Why, I couldn't have made up a story like that in a thousand years."
"Don't you care. Of course it's true. And it was splendid. I am certainly proud of you," declared Bart who was anxious to make amends for the rift in their friendship. "You and I will back old Prentice into a corner first chance we get and make him apologize—won't we?"
The underwriters' agent came on board two days later and had a long interview with Captain Jim behind the locked door of the chart-room, after which Captain Bruce and Jeremiah Pringle were singly summoned for more mysterious conferences. But no attention was paid to Dan who felt that he moved in a cloud of suspicion and dismally reflected:
"Old Prentice has set me down as a liar and won't even give me a chance to deny it. I wish I could have kept that fuse to hitch to his coat-tails. I won't save another ship for him,—that's one thing sure."