“Can’t hear you!” yelled John, and he trimmed the sheets of the sloop!
Then a voice which was none other than Mr. Sandborn’s bellowed, “You kids better come back here. You’ll get slugged if you don’t! We ain’t fooling!”
Did Mr. Sandborn mean for them to really surrender? Or was he bluffing to convince the other men. John knew no answer, and Stan, who came on deck just then, was hesitant.
A blast of tommy-gun fire, familiar thunder to the boys who had heard those guns used at Cedar Island in the Hogan case, reverberated among the hills! Water spattered about the sloop and slugs sang whining into the wake! Then the blast moved away to the left! It have been lucky shooting for the men could not have seen the sloop in the fog!
That decided the boys and with all sail crowded on, praying that the compass course was right, they headed on a course W.S.W. a little south! The wind had shifted to the east during the night and was almost dead aft, flowing over the hills of Porpoise Island, as they coursed with wings spread for the open sea!
“I told-a you they was-a at one of these coves!” yelled Dago back on the beach. “Gallagher, you gotta get those kids or we’ll all be in trouble!”
“Let’s get back and use the speedboats, men!” ordered Gallagher, rejoicing inwardly that his boy and the brave Tallman lad had escaped this present danger and taken Gagnon with them! He suspected they would head for Main Haven and he was proud of them for their grit and brains. Such conduct was worthy of G-men themselves!
The gangsters raced overland to the cabin and the boat-shed where, roundly cursed by a wild and purplish Nevada, the men put off in two gray speedboats on a weird chase! Mr. Sandborn longed for a chance to get at the wiring on those two boats and so stop the chase but realized it might look suspicious and end his activities. So he calmly took his seat with Butch and Dago in a boat and they hummed with bright lights for the entrance to Black Cove. They came out of that in the wet fog at forty miles an hour, thankful for sound knowledge of the lay-out of rocks and headlands.
One boat turned east, round the snout of Porpoise Island and down the north coast. The other flung itself into the rollers of the sea down the southern side. Both boats traveled at top speed but the fog ruined any chance of overtaking the fleet sloop which was somewhere out there, silently winging its way with a mobster prisoner! Naturally the boys were not showing any side-lights and thus, even without the fog, as Dago well knew from past experience, it would have been hard to locate and get them. Then, too, as Dago admitted privately to himself—the boys were pretty nifty with them arrow things!
They did have a chance, just one slim possibility of finding that sloop, but only the G-man saw it and he said nothing. For one instant, they were running by the close stern of a white sloop, for he saw both a faint shape of the sloop and the glitter of white water from her wake as she capped a big roller, but the light from the searchlight was being flung straight ahead and no one else knew that two boys had definitely escaped their pursuers!