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CHAPTER IX.
A STERN CHASE
In the meantime, from station to station, within a radius in which it was reasonable to suppose the fugitive would land, the wireless was sending out its waves of alarm. The various stations attached to life-saving headquarters along the coast took the message and, in turn, telephoned the local authorities of near-by towns. Ding-dong received these assurances through the ether and transmitted them to his friends. Excitement was rife. It looked as if by means of the wireless they had spread a net that left not a mesh for the fugitive to slip through.
Nor was this all on which they based their hopes of overhauling him. It was a long, weary row to the shore, and, as Nat had pointed out, Minory, deeming himself secure from pursuit, would probably be in no particular hurry, but conserve his strength. From the bridge of the Nomad such an object as a rowboat would be conspicuous for a long distance. If only Captain Thompson hastened his return with the wandering motor craft, they stood about an even chance of capturing Minory themselves. It was a situation that thrilled them, and the time dragged wearily till smoke on the horizon announced the approach of the Hattie and Jane.
She anchored off the island and flashed ashore a message of greeting. Attached to her stern by a stout hawser was the errant Nomad. At sight of the returned wanderer the boys set up a ringing cheer. Captain Thompson, a weather-beaten old salt, rowed ashore in the dory that the Hattie and Jane lowered, and received his reward. He pocketed it with a grin, as much as to say, “A pretty good morning’s work”; but the boys did not grudge it to him. The return of the Nomad meant much more to them than that.
The dory was loaded up with gasolene, and after two trips between the shore and the Nomad, the latter was ready, with full fuel tanks, “to receive passengers.” Professor Jenkins, still so weak that he had to be supported to the boat, was the first to be taken off. Then the boys closed up the shanty and the wireless station and within half an hour were under way, with the Hattie and Jane flying a bunting salute in response to the boys’ string of flags which spelled out to the fishing steamer “Good luck.”
“Now, Joe, keep your eyes peeled,” ordered Nat. “I’d give a whole lot to run that fellow down and land him ourselves. If once he gets ashore, he’s slippery enough to get clear away.”
Dr. Chalmers, who had gone below with his patient, and also to make an examination of the professor’s trunks, came on the bridge at this moment with a dismal report.
As they had apprehended, Minory, before cutting the Nomad loose, had ransacked the trunks. The model was gone, and the doctor feared that to inform the professor of the loss might cause a serious relapse in his condition.
It was agreed, therefore, to reply only vaguely to any questions he might ask. But fortunately the inventor, completely worn out by excitement and weakness, sank into a deep sleep almost as soon as he was laid on the divan below, and they were spared the necessity of evasive replies to the questions he would have been sure to ask about the safety of the model.
It must be confessed that when Nat learned the clever and thorough way in which Minory had carried out the last part of his desperate plan for stealing the fruits of the professor’s inventive faculty, his heart rather sank. Somehow, he did not feel quite so sanguine as he had at first that they would succeed, either themselves or through their wide-flung messages, in capturing the fellow. The remarkable ingenuity he had shown in his attempts on the wireless torpedo in New York, in his successful espionage of the inventor across the continent, and in his last coup of getting himself on board the craft on which the man he had injured was being conveyed ashore all showed an acute intellect, a depraved sort of genius for carrying out whatever nefarious ends its possessor had in view. Nat didn’t underrate his antagonist. He knew by this time that they had a wily and perhaps a desperate foe to fight.
The sea was as smooth as glass, and, although the sun beat hotly down, there was yet a refreshing breeze. These factors would aid Minory in his long row, supplementing the work of his muscles, which, despite his scrawny form, Nat judged to be wiry and powerful.
The Nomad was crowded along to every ounce of her speed capacity. Ding-dong never left his engines a second, but watched them with anxious solicitude. He was fully aware of how much depended now upon the performance of the motor. So far it was running sweet and true, with a humming song that delighted the watchful boy engineer. Oil can in hand, he doused the bearings and moving parts with lubricant from time to time, feeling a shaft collar or an eccentric band to detect symptoms of overheating.
The distant coast range, faintly blue and luminous, loomed up through the heat haze before long, but although Nat stationed Joe with the binoculars to keep active and constant watch for the skiff, nothing appeared in the field of the powerful glasses to warrant Joe in giving the alarm.
Once he saw something black and was on the point of crying out. The next minute he was glad that he hadn’t. The object proved to be only a floating log with a solemn line of seagulls bobbing up and down on it as it rose and fell on the swells.
“Begins to look bad, Nat,” commented Joe, as the outlines of the rugged, bare coast range became clearer and still no sign of a boat swam within the horizon of the glasses.
“I must admit that it does,” rejoined Nat, “but it’s up to us to keep hoping against hope.”
Suddenly a thought came to Joe.
“See here, Nat, unless that fellow is as skillful a boat handler as he is a crook he couldn’t land on the bare coast. The surf would be rolling too high even on a calm day like this to permit him to do so even if he tried to.”
“That’s so, Joe; you do have a bright thought once in a while.”
“Thank you,” grinned Joe; “and now let me go on to say that in my opinion he’ll make for some cove.”
“Of which there are none too many hereabouts,” responded Nat. “Let’s see, which one is the nearest?”
“Why, Whale Inlet, in the salt meadows beyond Point Conception.”
“That’s right, but he’d hardly know of that unless he is more familiar with this coast than it is reasonable to suppose.”
“But having observed what the conditions were along the beach and realizing that he couldn’t negotiate the surf, he’d be likely to go hunting for such an inlet, wouldn’t he?”
“Sounds reasonable. But the point is just this, why wouldn’t he go toward Santa Barbara itself?”
“Why, because, if he’s as shrewd as I think he is, he will have guessed that we have sent out a wireless alarm for him by this time.”
“But how does he know we have such an apparatus?”
“Just this. If for no other reason, he knows we picked up that wireless from the Iroquois, that message that got us into all this pickle.”
Before Nat could reply, the sailor whom they had rescued with his employers the night before, and who had been standing with Mr. Anderson on the bridge, gave an exclamation.
“I don’t want to give a false alarm, gentlemen, but what’s that object off there?”
“Where?” demanded Nat. “Give me the glasses, Joe, quick.”
Something in the sailor’s voice had made him alert and active in an instant.
He applied the glasses to his eyes and gazed through them for a few seconds.
“It’s a boat, a rowboat,” he announced after his brief scrutiny.
“Our boat?” asked Joe almost tremulously.
“I think so,” was the reply, as the Nomad’s course was altered and she was headed directly for the distant speck that the sailor’s sharp eyes had espied.
CHAPTER X.
MORE BAD LUCK
“Oh, thunderation!”
It was Ding-dong who uttered the exclamation as a sharp crack sounded in the engine room and he sprang forward to shut off the motor. An eccentric band had snapped with a report like a pistol, and the Nomad was temporarily out of commission.
Down the speaking tube came an impatient query.
“What’s up? What’s happened?”
Ding-dong shouted up a reply.
“How long will it be before you can fix it?”
“About fifteen minutes. Luckily I’ve an extra band handy.”
The stammering boy, as was usual with him in stress of circumstances, had temporarily overcome his impediment in speech.
“Bother!” exclaimed Nat in a vexed tone. And there was good reason for his impatient intonation. Bit by bit the Nomad had been creeping up on the solitary rowboat.
Hardly more than a few hundred yards now separated them, and they could see Minory, with white, anxious face, straining at his oars – as if any human power could get him beyond reach of the fast motor cruiser! Ahead of him lay an inlet meandering up among some salt marshes. It was Whale Creek, so called because a huge whale had once been stranded there.
Nat knew that at the mouth of Whale Creek lay shoals and quicksands among which the Nomad could not navigate. If they could not cut off Minory before he gained the entrance to the creek, his escape appeared certain, for the Nomad carried no dinghy and Minory had the whip hand of them in the shallow water.
“You’d better give up!” Nat had hailed to Minory across the water. “Even if you get ashore the authorities are already on the lookout for you, warned by wireless. You don’t stand the chance of a rat in a trap.”
Minory’s answer had been to stand up in the skiff, holding aloft in one hand the model and in the other the plans and calculations that had cost the sleeping inventor below so much effort.
“If you come any closer, down these go to Davy Jones!” he had yelled desperately.
“To do such a thing would be only to increase the sentence you will get in a court of law!” Mr. Anderson had shouted back indignantly.
“He’s only bluffing!” Joe had rejoined.
It was just at this instant that the unlucky disaster in the engine room had occurred. Joe could have cried with vexation.
“Of all the luck!” he exclaimed as the Nomad lost way and came to a standstill, swinging seaward with the outgoing tide. Minory stood up in his skiff and shook a triumphant fist at them. They turned away from him, and the next moment something came buzzing and singing past their ears.
It was followed by a sharp, cracking report. Then came a yell of defiant laughter.
“The rascal’s shooting at us!” exclaimed Nat.
“Yes; duck quick!” cried Joe, as the revolver was once more leveled.
“You’ll have to get up early to get ahead of me, you whelps!” was the insulting cry borne over the waters.
Nat’s teeth clenched; his cheeks flamed red. He did not often lose his temper, but the ruffian’s audacity had made him mad clear through.
Regardless of his danger, he sprang erect and faced the man in the skiff.
“We’ll get you yet, Minory!” he shouted.
For an instant the occupant of the small boat appeared taken aback, and that for a good reason. Obviously, if they knew his real name, the professor must have not only discovered his loss, but recovered sufficiently to tell the whole story. His acute mind reasoned this out in a jiffy, and it gave him pause. But only for a fraction of time. The next minute, with a cry, “Take that, you young cub!” another bullet came singing and whinging through the air.
“I’ll go below and get the rifle!” cried Joe furiously. “We’ll show him two can play at this game; we’ll – ”
“Do nothing of the sort,” said Nat calmly; “he can hardly get much of an aim standing up in that cranky skiff, and if he wants to get away he’ll do better by taking to his oars than by blazing away at us.”
“There he goes now,” cried the sailor. “I guess he was so plumb mad clear through at the quick tracks we made after him that he just naturally had to blaze away at us.”
As the man spoke they saw Minory, with another mocking laugh, bend to his oars once more and row rapidly toward the creek mouth.
“Once let him get in there and we’ve lost him,” cried Nat despairingly.
“Better lose him than have any bloodshed,” declared Mr. Anderson. “That fellow is a desperate man, and wouldn’t hesitate to use firearms to protect himself from capture.”
“It looks that way,” commented Joe. “Whee! Look at him row!”
“Consarn him, I wish he’d bust an oar!” growled out the sailor gloomily.
“No, all the busting seems to be done on this ship,” was Joe’s dismal response.
“Now, Joe, no grumbling,” warned Nat, always optimistic even when things appeared blackest; “we may get him yet. ‘There’s many a slip – ’”
“‘’Tween the law and the crook,’” growled out Joe, finishing the quotation for him.
“Oh, put it the other way round,” advised Nat.
Just then Ding-dong appeared on deck.
He held up the broken eccentric ring which he had just detached.
“Here it is,” he said; “that’s what has crippled us.”
“Broken?” asked Joe.
“Yes, snapped clean through.”
“And it was a new one not long ago!” exclaimed Nat.
“Yes, and the best made. It beats me how it came to fly off the handle that way.”
“Good thing it didn’t wreck the whole engine,” was Joe’s comment.
“Yes; lucky I was below, or it would have,” rejoined Ding-dong, stammerless in his excitement.
“Let me look at that eccentric strap a minute, Ding-dong,” said Nat quietly, but with a strange ring in his voice.
Ding-dong, looking rather surprised, handed it over to the young captain of the Nomad. Nat didn’t often have anything much to say about the machinery. He left that part of the running of the boat to Ding-dong and Joe, although he was quite conversant with it.
They watched him while he examined it carefully at the broken ends.
“It’s a wonder this lasted as long as it did,” he said.
“Why! It was new and – ”
“Yes, I know, but see these marks on it. What are they?”
“Cantering cantilevers, the marks of a file!” cried Joe.
“That is what I thought. That fellow was too slick not to have turned some trick like that.”
CHAPTER XI.
“THERE’S MANY A SLIP.”
Ding-dong accomplished his repairs in a shade under the fifteen minutes he had allowed for the operation.
“All ready!” he reported up the speaking tube.
“Come ahead!” cried Nat eagerly.
The skiff was once more a diminished speck, alarmingly close in to the shoals that Nat dreaded. Moreover, during the wait, while they had fretted and fumed, the outsetting tide had carried them further out to sea. Thus it appeared as if the very forces of nature were allied with Minory.
But the boys set up a triumphant shout as once more the bow of the Nomad began to cleave the water and all fixed their gaze eagerly on the object of their pursuit. He, for his part, must have been watching them closely, for Joe observed through the glasses that, as soon as they began to move once more, he quickened his stroke.
On and on rushed the Nomad, and the water began to grow yellow and green in patches about her, marking spots where there was shoal water. Between these patches threaded narrow streaks of blue which showed deep channels that could be safely traversed.
The man they were pursuing evidently knew the surface indications of the water as well as they did, for it was seen that he carefully navigated the skiff over the shallowest water where the yellow color showed that sand bars lay close to the surface. As the passages grew more and more intricate, Joe fairly gasped as Nat kept right on. But Nat showed not the slightest sign of relinquishing the chase, although all about them as the tide ran out the bars grew more and more numerous.
“Say,” Joe ventured to remark presently, “hadn’t we better slow down?”
“Not yet,” came through Nat’s gritted teeth. Joe saw the well-known forward thrust of Nat’s jaw that betokened that he was in deadly earnest, but he made no further comment.
Every minute, though, he expected to feel the grating jar that would announce the end of the chase and the grounding of the Nomad. So far everything was going smoothly and they were steadily overhauling the skiff, although their loss of way by the eccentric breakage and tide drift had been considerable.
Things were still in this condition when the skiff entered the mouth of the creek, and suddenly, after proceeding a few yards, vanished as if she had sunk. But Nat knew that no such thing had occurred.
“He’s turned up into a side channel where he knows we won’t stand the ghost of a chance to nail him,” cried Nat. “Bad luck and more of it.”
“Nothing to do but to turn back, eh, Nat?” asked Joe, secretly rather relieved at this termination to the chase. He didn’t want to see the Nomad aground and helpless till high tide set her afloat again, or, worse still, till tackles had to be rigged or help sent for to drag her into deep water.
“Yes,” sighed Nat, “that’s about it.”
He was preparing to turn around in a rather larger patch of blue water than the others which lay amidst the yellow and green “danger signals,” when Joe tugged at his sleeve excitedly.
“Nat! Nat! Look there!”
Coming down the creek was a low, racy-looking motor boat without a cabin, but with a high, sharp cutwater that indicated that she was built for speed.
Nate, the sailor, gave a quick gasp of astonishment.
“Jee-hos-phat! That’s Israel Harley’s boat! Him as was suspected of smuggling opium for the Chinese smugglers but was acquitted on his trial.”
“I’ve heard of him,” said Nat, “but I didn’t know he lived back in there.”
“Yes, Whale Creek, or a tributary of it, runs miles back, right up to Martinez almost. It’s a cinch for Israel to get that light-draught craft of his’n back up there. He lives in a sort of shanty town with a lot of other fishermen, and they say that, although all the crowd are hard and tough, Israel is the toughest of ’em.”
“I know he has a bad reputation. He must have made a lot of money, though, to buy that boat. She’s a beauty, and fast, I’ll bet,” said Nat, casting admiring glances on the high-bowed motor boat which could be seen threading the intricacies of Whale Creek as it wound in and out among the greenish-gray salt meadows.
“Yes, they say that Iz would do anything for money and wasn’t no ways partic’lar,” was the response. “I’ve hearn, too, that in old days he and his gang made a lot of coin by setting false lights on the shore and then looting the ships that was wrecked on that account. But that’s all long ago. I guess opium smuggling from South Sea schooners is more in his line now.”
“How has he kept out of the clutches of the law so long?” asked Joe.
“He’s got some sort of political pull,” was the rejoinder, “and besides that, there ain’t hardly nobody would testify against him, they’re so all-fired scared of what would happen to them if they did. There’s a whole clan of Harleys back there at Martinez, and they’re all about as hard as old Israel, and that’s saying a heap.”
“Hullo! What’s up now? They’re slowing down!” cried Nat suddenly.
“So they are, and right by that little side passage that Minory vanished into.”
“Maybe he’s in trouble and they’ve stopped to see what’s up,” suggested Joe.
“No; look, they’ve stopped! Look there! Minory is rowing up to them and talking to them. Put the glasses on ’em, Joe, and see what they’re up to.”
Joe clapped the binoculars to his eyes.
“Crickey!” he cried excitedly, “I saw him pass something to old Harley, and he’s getting on board the black motor boat.”
“I’ll bet he’s cooked up some fairy story and that old Israel has agreed to take him some place down the coast, maybe Santa Barbara, and set him ashore where he can hit a railroad or a steamer,” suggested Mr. Anderson.
“That may be so,” was Nat’s thoughtful rejoinder; “from what Joe saw, it looks as if money had been passed. If he had kept on to Martinez he would have found himself miles out of civilization. It’s wild country back there, and I guess he is anxious to hit the railroad or the ocean right now.”
The black motor boat got under way again, leaving an abandoned skiff behind. What story the rascally genius had concocted, of course they did not know, but Joe could see old Israel, or a man whom he guessed was he, pointing at the Nomad as if she were the subject of the conversation on board the fast, rakish craft.
On she came with a bone in her teeth, and, heading round, threaded her way rapidly out of the intricate passageway and across the Nomad’s bow. Nat almost groaned aloud in his chagrin.
“Can’t we overtake her?” asked Mr. Anderson.
Nat shook his head despairingly as he watched the black craft cut smoothly through the water at a rate that he estimated at fully eighteen knots or over an hour.
“Not a chance on earth, sir,” he said.
“There’s not a boat round here can touch her,” declared the sailor with grim confidence. “I reckon old Israel uses her in his opium smuggling. He needs a fast boat for that, and maybe some of that political ring helped him put those speedy engines in her, for they must have cost a pretty penny.”
Suddenly one of the figures on the black craft was seen to move toward the stern. Then came a mocking wave of farewell and a shouted something that they could not catch.
Nat set his teeth forcefully.
“There’s one chance in a thousand that she’ll break down or something,” he said with grim determination, “and I’m going to follow her as long as I can.”
“Good for you, my lad,” exclaimed Mr. Anderson. “The luck’s bound to turn some time. So far it has favored them – maybe it will be our turn now.”
