Where were they?
A lieutenant in charge of the patrol had set him ashore where a government sub-station of the patrol service enabled him to use the telephone, to communicate with other stations. Not a sign of the boys resulted from his several calls.
“No word?” asked the young lieutenant later in the afternoon.
Mr. Neale shook his head dejectedly, climbing aboard the cutter.
“I can’t see anything to explain it except that the lads must have gone inland, and become lost,” he asserted. Lieutenant Sommerlee discounted such a suggestion. The outcrop of coral on which they landed while he went to interview Nelse and Pompey, was cut off by water too deep to wade; they would hardly dare swim to the further shore; it was swampy as could be seen from Crocodile Key if they took pains to look, he declared.
“I suggest that you come aboard again,” Lieutenant Sommerlee invited, holding to his own idea, without stating it, that the boys had been taken off the key by some fisherman. “I have word that a band of hi-jackers is somewhere around and I have to watch for them; we can easily hail the different natives as we pass up and down the coast and see which one rescued the boys.”
Clarence Neale accepted the invitation and was on board the cutter when, that night, she pursued, and lost touch with, the Senorita.
It was Lieutenant Sommerlee’s notion that the Senorita, if it was she, had turned tail and run for her home port in Cuba. He was ready to give up the search for her, and the more so because of a growing intensity of interest in the boys.
Naturally, not knowing they were on the Senorita, or that she had gone into the archipelago, neither Mr. Neale nor the lieutenant thought of such a thing as looking for the adventuresome trio in those waters. It seemed almost certain that they must have hailed some small boat, and on being taken aboard, had found no means of communicating their plight, or of getting back.
But as day followed day, the idea had to be given up. There was no spot that the cutter had not touched, where the boys could possibly be. Unless they had been taken off on a coasting sloop—but none had been seen in Little Card Sound, nor would it have excuse for being there. Of course the few who knew the truth about the Senorita and her hiding place on the day that the boys had been missed, kept their mouths tightly closed.