After Marzonij had left the harbor at Zenith, Hegarty waited impatiently for sunset before ordering the anchors up. He knew that it would have taken an hour or so for his henchman to contact Nevada and he did not want to get to Porpoise himself till nearly dark. As a matter of fact, it was nearly dark before the Sea Hawk moved in towards Black Cove.
And by that time the entire situation on the island had changed. Marzonij had contacted Cowboy, informed on Mr. Sandborn, it being dusk then, and had climbed into his boat to leave the cove, while Wan Ho Din looked on, when some one up on the west ridge began firing with a tommy-gun! Thinking the shots were intended for himself, Marzonij lost no time in getting under way and roaring through the channel into the semi-darkness outside.
But what had really happened was that some one in a machine gun nest on the ridge had spotted one of Hegarty’s men from the Malcon. The swift Malcon had anchored in the cove on the west end of the island, where the Staghound had moored before, and had sent men ashore as the land move of the Hegarty attack. These men had received orders to locate the gun nests but not to be seen; but one of them had made a mistake——!
Creeping through the underbrush towards the spot where they had been forced to abandon their weapons, the G-man’s son and John Tallman lay frozen as they listened to the rat-tat-tat of machine gun fire.
“Braid my dog’s great whiskers!” whispered John, “the fight’s on!”
“We’ve got to find our bows, John. Sooner or later in this scrap we’re going to need them! It’ll soon be too dark to find them!”
They moved on, hoping they were not moving into any zone of fire!
“I have to laugh every time I think of Butch’s face when he opened his eyes!” chuckled Stan. “He sure was a surprised man!”
“You’d be, too,” said John, “if you’d gone to sleep with a couple of kid prisoners and then woke up to find yourself bound and gagged! We had to work fast, though, didn’t we?”
Stan nodded.