“Yes, but I don’t see what good it would have done us to have come up with him, if it was the man,” replied Allan Harding. “We could only have taken a look aboard. What else could we have done?”
“I’ll tell you what,” answered Harvey, emphatically. “It would have done a lot of good. I tell you that wherever and whenever I meet that yacht, whether it’s night or day, I’m going to run alongside, and you fellows and I are going aboard. I’ve been doing things to be ashamed of long enough,—not that I’m ashamed of them, either, as I know of. Only they have been things that I didn’t dare tell of afterward, and I’m sort of tired of it. I tell you, I want to do something for once that I can boast of and that people won’t hate me for. That’s why I’m so anxious about this, if you must know it.”
“Whew!” cried Joe Hinman. “That’s something new for you, Jack. I didn’t suppose your conscience ever troubled you.”
“It don’t,” said Harvey, angrily.
But perhaps it did.
By the end of a few days more, Harvey had given up the search, convinced that they had seen the last of the black yacht, if, indeed, they had seen it at all.
“I give up,” he said. “I’m beaten, and that’s all there is to it.”
And so the idea of ever seeing the strange yacht again was given up by all. The yachts came back to harbour, and the impression became general that they had all been fooled; that what they had sought was a delusion.
Tom and Bob were the last to give up. Partly because they liked these long paddles together and the long walks along the island roads, and partly because they had helped start the renewed hunt for the yacht Eagle, and did not like to admit that they had made a mistake.
So they did not wholly discontinue their evening paddles nor their lonely rambles along the shore. It was good exercise, at all events, they argued.