“Let them come, Stan. We’ll fight.”
“Don’t forget this, John—we’ll be fighting for our lives! And it will be bows and arrows against bullets!”
“Chills and fevers! Bones of long-lost galleons!” John cried. “Do you really think they’d kill us?”
“I do! We’ve got a reputation, John, as Sleuths, and they know we’ve got clues enough to start an investigation. Any attitude of innocence we may have kept up was finished by my swim into the cove to-night!”
Lights were now winding down into the cove the boys had just left, but Stan was wrong in one thing.
“Get those kids alive, do you understand?” Mr. Nevens, back at the barge, had ordered as soon as Stan had been spotted in the water of the cove. As soon as Dago had captured Stan and was taking him away in the rowboat, another boat had pushed off to the other side of the cove, bearing two men with lights. And still others had begun to scour the island in other directions. Only the bare feet of the boys, treading in silence and speed along the pathways, had saved them from being taken before reaching the Water Witch—that and the fact that Mr. Nevens and his men did not know where the sloop was anchored. He had ideas, but it would take time to verify them.
One speedboat from the boat-house had gone humming out of the channel and along the sea side of the island, searching for a little black sloop. Another had followed the first outside, then turned eastward, rounded the snout of the Porpoise and gone down the north side. But Porpoise Island has dozens of fine little anchorages along its shores and it took time to go in and out in the dark with all eyes watching for a tell-tale mast against the stars and an almost invisible hull! That alone had helped to delay the pursuit so that the Water Witch was well on her way before the men had covered the island and surrounding waters.
“They ain’t-a here, men!” Dago remarked, in one of the gray boats, the one in the bay. “Let’s swing out and zig-zag the bay. I’d like ta get my paws on the kid that slung that arrow! I break-a the neck!”
“Talk’s cheap, Dago!” remarked one of the other men who, at the wheel of the swift boat, guided it expertly across the dark waters while spray cascaded on either side. “You hurt either of those kids and Cowboy will chop your ears off!”
“I s’pose he wants-a to make soup of them himself, eh, Butch?” queried Dago sarcastically.