“By heck, young feller, that beard’s as gen-u-ine an article as my goatee,” declared the constable.
Several others echoed this opinion. Even the village barber, for the burned barn was close to a small hamlet named Hexham, declared that he would stake his professional reputation on the veracity of the bound man’s whiskers.
But alas for all these wiseacres! The heavy rain accompanying the storm had done what nothing else could have accomplished, without design on Duke’s part.
It had loosened the foundation which stuck the hairy growth to his face. Jack, determined in his own mind from Duke’s frightened look that he had hit the right nail on the head, gave the whiskers a good tug.
They peeled off like a porous plaster, while the crowd yelled and Duke swore. Stripped of his disguise, Duke’s face was instantly recognized from the portrait which adorned the police circular. Two hours later he and his cronies were in the Hexham lock-up, waiting to be taken to the county seat for trial.
It may as well be set down here that at the subsequent proceedings, inasmuch as the chief complainants did not appear, all three got light sentences, the judge remarking that they were extraordinarily lucky.
But while that trial was going on our young friends were facing dangers and difficulties in tropic waters to which all that had gone before appeared tame. Their return with their supplies to Mr. Dancer’s workshop and their stories of the night’s events, had resulted only in the White Shark’s not clearing on her adventurous cruise till early dawn. Otherwise their start for Cuba was made as previously planned.
Nobody saw the dull white form of the diving boat slip seaward and then head due south. Had any persons witnessed the departure, they would not have had long in which to watch it, nor could they have explained the phenomenon of the queer form slipping through the quiet sea and then suddenly vanishing from view.
Had they attempted it, another “sea-serpent story” might have enlivened the columns of the newspapers, for, as the White Shark got beyond shallow water, she dived like one of her vicious namesakes—the tigers of the deep—and the waters closed over her.