In a few minutes Dave was pushing the light but substantial launch along the waterway, and almost immediately it disappeared from sight, swallowed up in the darkness.
It returned in about half an hour, crowded to the gunwales, carrying the dozen men. In the meantime, a rather startling incident had occurred.
Dave and Alec had been gone only ten minutes or so, when the assembled pickets observed a bright light burst forth from the surrounding gloom and rapidly increase until it assumed the proportions of a large bonfire.
The outlaws were carrying out the first part of their plan, which was to attract the revenue men away from the vicinity of the cabins while they effected a loading of their munitions or other contraband goods upon the Esperanza's boat. They counted on the probability that the revenue men would hasten to put out the fire on the coast—-which was quite a little distance from the cabins—-and would be unaware of other operations at the same time.
But in this scheme they reckoned without their pursuers; for the crew of the Petrel—-even now hurrying to the scene of action—-had received information of this very ruse, and had decided to ignore it and to make directly for Durgan's Cove.
Not knowing that the Arrow was lying near, or that the dozen men from the fort, with the scout pickets, were already on the scene, those energetic seamen of the Petrel were bending every effort to reach the smugglers' headquarters on time.
Captain Bego, of the Esperanza, however, knew that the Petrel was on his trail, and he was all the more anxious to make "a getaway with the goods."
The bonfire, instead of dying down at last, seemed to rise higher and higher, casting a lurid glow over the marshes and streams, and even upon the dark waters of the ocean. Made of driftwood, bundles of dried saw-grass and withered cypress boughs—-industriously piled on by Max, the half-breed, who had been sent there for that very purpose—-it blazed merrily, and a shower of sparks swirled around it, veering toward the cabins. To all appearances, the three cabins seemed doomed to take fire; in which case nothing could save them or their contents.
The soldiers from the fort and Dave had disappeared into the darkness of the deeper shadows.
Eager to see the fire and to find out what was going on in that vicinity, Billy, Alec, and Roy Norton crept forth from their hiding place and approached the glowing beacon.