“We’ll make ’em smart for what we have suffered to-day, eh, colonel?” growled the squire.
The colonel grunted assent. He was not yet sufficiently himself to be very aggressive.
“What on earth are they doing?” said Captain Sam, a few moments later. “Looks as though they were trying to hide away among the rocks, like a mink in a hole. They’ll have the Spray aground if they jam her in among those ledges.”
The Spray, however, slipped in among the rocks, and was shut out from the view of the pursuers.
“Let ’em hide,” said Captain Sam, contemptuously. “That is a boyish trick. We’ll be up with them now in fifteen minutes.”
But the Spray, hidden from view of Captain Sam and the colonel and the squire, was not running itself upon the rocks nor poking its nose, ostrich-like, among the ledges.
The instant the sails were dropped young Joe sprang out on the bowsprit and lay flat, holding a pole, with which he took soundings as the others pushed and poled with the sweeps of the yacht.
They ran the bow gently on to rocks a dozen times, but a warning yell from Joe stopped them, and they turned and twisted and wormed and worried their way in among the ledges, turning about where a larger craft would have had no room to turn, and slipping over reefs that just grazed the bottom of the little Spray, and which with two inches lower tide would have held them fast.
“It’s just the right depth of water,” said Arthur, exultantly. “Luck is with us this time, for certain. An hour later and we could not have done it. But we’re going through. There is only the bar ahead now. If we clear that we are free of everything.”
Just ahead, where two thin spits of sand ran off on either end of the two islands into shoal water, was a narrow, shallow passage, where the water was so clear that it looked scarcely more than a few inches in depth, as it rippled over the bar.