“There’s that revenue cutter,” he reminded his mates.
“Her!” said Tew, sneeringly. “Ain’t we got plenty of ways to show her our heels?”
Nicky and his fellows wondered what these ways might be. They were to discover at least one of them.
They were given a plentiful meal in the cabin; the hi-jackers fared well, evidently, for the meal comprised fresh eggs, four apiece, fresh milk, since none of them cared much for coffee, white bread, corn pone as a second choice, and rice pudding.
The cook was an affable, smiling colored man from Miami, the flourishing tourist resort in Florida, who found his share of illicit gain more alluring than the wages of an honest chef in a hotel.
Besides the cook and Don Ortiga and his first mate, Tew, there were four deck hands who also rowed the boat with muffled oars and padded oarlocks, and who helped to load and unload what they carried; also there was the engineer and Nelse. The latter, they found out later, was only aboard for a certain purpose, not one of the crew.
While they noted the precision machinery for driving the boat, and saw the novel way in which the exhaust was deadened by being run through a large pipe through a sheathed channel in the hull, into a specially devised muffler which completely broke up the explosive force of the spent gases and silenced their noise, the chums marveled at the pains that had been taken to make a once innocent pleasure yacht into a craft suited for breaking its country’s laws.
Nicky reiterated his wish that they could do something to bring the lawbreakers to justice, but Tom, again cautious, urged him not even to think of it just then.
Mr. Neale, their chief in the beginning of the expedition, had overhauled Sam’s sloop with the aid of the revenue cutter’s men, had learned Sam’s side of the story, found Sam contrite but afraid to return, had discovered that the United States men could take no action against the Jamaican, and let Sam go his way rejoicing. The revenue cutter then returned toward the keys in order to land Mr. Neale at a base from which he could carry on his search for the missing boys.
But the cutter did not get there that night.