The sailor's orders evidently did not warrant him to resist further.
Dick looked about for his bearings. Dimly he could make out the islands to the left. “What does she draw?” he asked.
“Two feet.”
With only two feet of draft he could take chances. He was directly on the course that the Merry Anne had taken in leaving the cove, and he felt as certain, with the compass before him, as if he had made the trip by night a hundred times. There was very little sea, and the launch made good progress. “You might tell the engineer to crowd her all he can,” he said to Beveridge. “It's quite a run.”
Once Dick glanced back; and he winced. There sat Wilson, on his left hand and not a yard away, with a rifle across his knees. At this moment Beveridge returned from a whispered consultation with the engineer, and scowled at his assistant. “That isn't necessary, Bert,” said he. “Put it up.”
The overzealous young man laid the rifle on the seat behind him; and Beveridge, after a moment of hard thinking, his eyes fixed on Dick's muscular back, came up beside the wheel and leaned on the coamings. Dick's gaze left the compass only for the darkness ahead, where the outline of something that he knew to be a coast line was, to his trained eye, taking shape.
“Say, Smiley,”—the special agent's voice was lowered; his tone was friendly,—“don't let that bother you. Nobody is holding a gun on you here. That isn't my way—with you.”
Dick's eyes were fixed painfully on the compass.
“I just want you to know that it was a mistake. These guns aren't for you.”
Beveridge, having said enough, was now silent. Apparently too boyish for his work, often careless in his talk, he was handling Smiley right, and so well did he know it that he was willing to lounge there at his prisoner's elbow and watch the course in silence. If Beveridge was ambitious, greedy for success and promotion, frequently unscrupulous as to the means to be employed,—as now, when he was deliberately going into English territory, an almost unheard-of and certainly unlawful performance,—hard, even merciless, so long as he regarded only his “case”; he was also impulsive and sometimes warm hearted when appealed to on the personal side. He had, before now, gone intuitively to the heart of problems that stronger minds than his, relying on reasoning alone, had been unable to solve.