As a man who had hitherto trusted to his powers of persuasion, Mannice was unfitted to cope with this cruel emergency. He was a liar himself, but he sadly feared that this brute of a Dan Sloan had a habit of keeping his word. Moreover, it would be no trouble at all to dispose of a corpse and leave never a trace behind. It was a piratical game from start to finish, and he had fallen into the hands of the most desperate freebooter of the lot. If jealousy were a motive, the abduction was a bad joke because Eudora, in spite of his ardent efforts to win her regard, had shown an increasing dislike for him—to the utter surprise of Mannice, whose vanity was great.
“I came here partly to win the little spitfire,” thought Mannice, as they hustled him toward the dory. “But, confound her, I believe she would be mean enough to give me the laugh if she saw me now. I’m in the devil of a fix unless Captain Kempton pulls off some kind of a rescue stunt.”
This was a hope to cling to. Meanwhile, the wise course was to be docile and irritate his captors no more than possible. Meekly, therefore, he suffered himself to be shoved down the rocks and dumped into the dory; nor did he have anything to say. Dan began to fear he had swung the potato masher too hard and inflicted some real injury.
“Piffle! You didn’t dent his bean,” said the unfeeling Max, as the dory moved seaward. “He’s playing possum or scared stiff. I’ll bet I could bring him to with a rope’s end.”
“No violence! I’m opposed to it,” declared Dan. “At least, not till we have held a proper court-martial.”
They steered for the bay, but drifted outside, for the moon was climbing from the sea, and already a soft radiance etched in dark relief the rugged contour of the island and trembled on the rippling water. This made it difficult to put Mannice aboard the sloop and smuggle him into the cabin without arousing the attention of those on the beach.
“Leave him in the dory with me, then,” suggested Max. “I’ll make him lie flat and stay put, if I have to fan him with the butt end of an oar.”
“I get you. Slip me alongside the sloop, and I’ll work her out with the jib until she is clear of the bay. They’ll be glad enough to see us go. The old man will think we have chucked it up.”
“Not if he knows you as well as his daughter does.”
Most of the people in the camps went early to bed, and no alarm was raised when a windlass creaked and the unwelcome sloop moved slowly toward open water until her dory appeared to take her in tow. Harvey Mattoon still sat in the door of his tent, with his leg propped upon a box. The forced inaction made him restless, and this had been an exciting evening, what with the visit of Dan Sloan and the stolen tryst with Eudora. She, too, was wakeful and disinclined to leave the beach. When the sloop began to slide away so silently, she hastened to confer with the cook, who vouchsafed:
“He wouldn’t run off and desert you, no, not for a million dollars’ worth of Peleg Peterson’s gold and diamonds. Mebbe he cal’ates it’s rash to lay too close to a hostile coast, and I told him how dreadful careless the professor was with a rifle.”
“And he will come back, you are sure, Harvey? He told me to wait for him, but I heard a scrimmage and that was the last of Dan. Tom Fallon said not to worry, but he wouldn’t explain.”
“Dan is maneuverin’,” confidently replied the cook. “He may ha’ been free with his fists in times past, but he knows when strategy is the winnin’ card in the deck. You’ve steadied him, Eudora, and afore we left Falmouth I heard his uncle was mighty well pleased with him—Henry F. Bowers, the big man of the Blue Star Towin’ and Transportation Company. If Dan gets out of this without landin’ in jail, he’s more’n likely to get a boat of his own. Cap’n Sloan, hey?”
“It’s good news, and you do know how to cheer me up,” smiled Eudora, “but poor Dan is not yet out of this. Neither are we.”
“You can sleep easier than you have in weeks,” said old Harvey. “Dan is maneuverin’, I tell ye.”
With a languid breeze, the sloop crept away from the reefs and then coasted along the western side of the island until her crew felt secure in anchoring so long as the weather should hold fair. William Marmaduke Mannice, who had been rudely flung into the cabin, was invited to present himself on deck and be sociable. His was disconsolate, and he tenderly caressed his left ear. Courteously Dan waved him to a seat and observed:
“Tell a funny story. Make us laugh. Show us how your entertaining ways made such a hit with Captain Kempton.”
“Nothing doing,” was the sulky reply. “It’s your move. Supposing you explain this outrage.”