“Ah!” he breathed, lifting the glass to his eyes. Digging into a pocket, he dragged out a pencil and a small notebook. After that, for fully ten minutes, he held the glass with his left hand while setting down numbers. 5 - 7 - 11 - 9, 13 - 6 - 3, 4 - 9 - 2 - 7. He wrote down figures and more figures, until a strange, rushing sound reached his ears.
Startled, he sprang to his feet. On the shore side he saw a broad band of white foam rapidly approaching the boat. Standing there, mouth open and staring, he watched it sweep toward him. With a hissing roar it swept beneath the boat and, without causing the least movement of the craft, went rushing on.
“False alarm,” he murmured. “Probably what they call a rip-tide.”
Turning back to sea, he looked again for the blinking green arrow. But it was gone. The distant island hill, too, now was entirely dark.
“Strange,” he muttered, as again he paced the deck.
And indeed it was strange, for the ship’s log had recorded no boat in sight at sundown!
From then, until Johnny’s vigil ended with the dawn, there was nothing to disturb the calm stillness of the tropic night.
CHAPTER IV
SPIES
On board the Sea Nymph was a small boat known as the Tub. Very short and broad, it rowed like a washtub, and in a storm, would have been about as safe as a laundry basket. But water held no terrors for Johnny, so, late the following afternoon, he pushed the Tub into the sea and headed for shore.
“You came! How grand!” Mildred Kennedy came racing down a palm-lined path to greet him.