They launched the dinghy, put out the stubby oars, and rowed away from the float.
“Where do we look first?” Sandy asked.
“We’ll just go the way the wind went,” Jerry said. “Luckily, the storm came from the mainland and blew out to sea. That means there’s a good chance that the boat didn’t pile up on the shore. Of course, there are a lot of islands out there, and plenty of rocks, but there’s a lot more open water. With any luck we’ll find her floating safe and sound, somewhere out in the bay. I don’t think she could have gone too far dragging that anchor.”
They headed down the channel, taking occasional side excursions around some of the small islands whenever they saw, on the other side, a mast that could be theirs. But none of the boats they found was the right one. The hot sun made rowing even the light cockleshell of the dinghy unpleasant work. Sandy paused at the oars and pushed back his cowlick, then wiped his perspiring brow. He was beginning to fear that he would never again see his trim new sloop—unless he was to see it lying shattered on one of these rocky islands. Then, with dogged determination, he picked up his oars once more and bent his back to the task of rowing.
Once or twice they asked passing sailors if they had seen an unattended sloop out of the mooring areas, but though everyone offered sympathy and promised to help if they happened to see it, none had any information to offer.
The morning wore on slowly as Sandy and Jerry pulled farther and farther away from the mainland, exploring every possible hiding place the bay had to offer.
By noon, Sandy’s spirits were at low ebb, and he was beginning to wonder how he would tell his Uncle Russ the bad news. Then, almost tipping the unsteady dinghy, Jerry half rose from his seat and pointed. “Look!” he shouted. “Over there! I think that’s her! And will you look at where she drifted to!”
Sandy dropped the oars and turned to look at the small white sloop with the green decks that lay quietly bobbing at anchor just outside the entrance of the cove where, yesterday, they had been welcomed by a gun!
“Of all places to drift to,” he gasped. “It’s a darn good thing she didn’t drift inside his cove, or she might be shot full of holes by now!”
Then, with a lighter heart than he had felt all morning, Sandy picked up the oars and sent the dinghy fairly flying to the side of the trim sloop.
“From now on,” he said, “sleeping bags and air mattresses or not, we’re sleeping on board until we get a permanent mooring for this boat near home!” Relieved and happy, Sandy climbed on board as Jerry tied the dinghy to the stern.
“I’ll go below to get the sails out,” Sandy said, “while you unship the boom and get the rigging ready.”
He opened the hatch cover and slid back the doors, then stepped down into the little cabin. As he started forward to the sail lockers, he had a sudden, odd feeling that something was wrong, something out of place; a strange notion that he had seen, out of the corner of his eye, something that was not what it should have been.
Pausing to look around, he saw what had bothered him. Clamped to the bulkhead over the port bunk was a large, oddly shaped brass pistol, like the kind he had always imagined the old-time pirates carried. He had never seen anything like it before—and he was almost positive that it had not been there yesterday!
“Jerry!” he called, sticking his head out of the hatch. “Come here! I want you to see something and tell me what you think.” As Jerry poked his head into the cabin, Sandy gestured at the brass pistol. “Was that thing here yesterday, or have we gotten into somebody else’s boat?”
Jerry brought his dark brows together in a frown and scratched his crew-cut head. “I don’t think it was here. I probably would have noticed it. But maybe we just didn’t see it. We were so busy with other things.”
“But why would Uncle Russ have left a pistol on board?” Sandy asked, puzzled.
“He probably wouldn’t have,” Jerry said. “But he might have left one of these. That’s a flare gun, not a regular pistol at all. You use it as a signal of distress. It shoots a rocket. Still ... I don’t remember seeing it. And I know that your uncle didn’t mention leaving one.”
“Well, I don’t know whether he did or not,” Sandy said, “but we’d better make sure this is our boat before we go sailing it off. If it belongs to that guy on the island, we could get into some pretty bad trouble if we took it by mistake!”
As they looked for some identifying marks, an idea suddenly occurred to Sandy. “Maybe this isn’t our boat, but one just like it, and maybe the man with the gun was expecting it with somebody else on board! That might explain his actions!”
“That makes sense,” Jerry said. “And in that case, we’d better find out fast if it’s ours. Look—our boat didn’t have any name on it, and most boats do. If this has a name, we’ll know.” He hurried to the stern to see, and then to the bow, where some boat owners fasten name plates, but none was to be seen.
“That doesn’t prove anything, though,” Sandy said. “But I have an idea. Let’s look in the food locker. I remember pretty well what was in there yesterday, and I doubt if two boats would have the identical food supplies. One look should tell us.” He reached above the galley stove and slid back the doors of the locker, then stepped backward as if he had been hit.
“It’s sure not our boat,” Sandy said in hushed tones, for in the locker there was no food at all. Instead, where food should have been, was what appeared to be a fortune in fresh, green money!
CHAPTER SEVEN
A Million Dollars’ Worth of Trouble
Sandy and Jerry, stunned for the moment, stood in silence, gazing at the neatly wrapped stacks of tens, twenties, fifties, hundreds and five-hundred-dollar bills—more money than either of them had ever dreamed of!
“I don’t know whose boat this is,” Sandy said, “but whoever he is, he can sure afford a larger one!”
Awed by the sight of the money, Jerry reached out and slipped a five-hundred-dollar bill from its wrapper. “I just want to look at it for a minute,” he said. “I’ve never seen a five-hundred before!”
Sandy joined him to look at the crisp bill. “Neither have I,” he said. Then, stooping to look closer, he took the bill from Jerry’s hand and examined it with the most intense interest.
“Jerry!” he said, almost in a whisper. “I think we’ve found more than a stack of money in a peculiar place! I may be mistaken, but I think this thing is counterfeit!”
“Counterfeit!” Jerry said, with a gasp. “How can you tell, if you never saw a five-hundred-dollar bill before?”
“Come on over into the sunlight where we can see better,” Sandy replied, “and I’ll show you what I mean.” They moved to the rear of the little cabin, where the sun poured in through the open hatchway cover. Sandy held the money up to the light.
“Look at the corners,” he said, pointing to the lower right-hand corner of the bill. “You see all those fine hair lines that make the looping, criss-cross pattern you see on all paper money? Well, I read once that those loops and swirls are the hardest part of a bill to counterfeit, and if you’re on the lookout for phony money you should always look there first. Ones or one-thousands, they’re all very complicated to engrave. On a genuine bill the lines are sharp and clear. On a counterfeit, they’re usually a little fuzzy, especially where two lines cross. Look over here, right next to the five-hundred-dollar mark, for instance.”
He pointed to where a complicated series of fine lines that came together had made a small smear, instead of a sharp, well-defined pattern.
“You’d never find sloppy work like that on a genuine government bill,” Sandy said, pointing to this and to another telltale spot his sharp eyes had uncovered.
“I see what you mean,” Jerry said. “Boy, there must be more than a million dollars’ worth of this useless stuff in that food locker!”
“It’s not so useless to someone,” Sandy returned. “Whoever made this stuff and is responsible for it is sure making real money out of it in the end—and an awful lot of real money, too!”
Jerry nodded thoughtfully, then said, “Where do you suppose it’s coming from?”
“That shouldn’t be too hard to figure out,” Sandy answered. “That man on the island was pretty nervous about having any unexpected guests, I’d say. I’ll bet you this whole stack of money that he’s behind the whole thing, and that this is his boat that we’re on!”
“You must be right,” Jerry said. “From the way that he came racing down that path with his gun yesterday, he must have been watching us all along, yet he didn’t come to stop us until we had dropped our anchor, lowered our sails, and were halfway in to shore in the dinghy! We should have realized when he didn’t stop us sooner what that meant. It meant that something funny was going on here!”
“That’s right!” Sandy agreed. “He must have been expecting somebody else to come along in this boat—the same class and colors as ours—and he thought that we were whoever he was expecting—until he saw us in the dinghy! That’s why he was acting so confused and excited that he didn’t know whether to shoot at us, or to be nice and let us get our water and be on our way. We really caught him off guard!”
“Right,” Jerry said. “And now we’ve confused the boats the same way he did, and we’ve caught him off guard again!”
Sandy sat looking silently at the counterfeit five-hundred-dollar bill, frowning. Then he looked up at his friend and said, “The question now is, what are we going to do about it? We’re pretty lucky that we weren’t seen coming on board this boat, but do you think our luck is going to last? I’m worried that we won’t be able to get away from here again without being seen.”
“We haven’t got much choice in the matter, have we?” Jerry answered. “The longer we stay here, the worse our chances will be. There’s no telling when the man with the gun or somebody else will come out here to do something with this money, and if they find us here....”
“I’d sure hate to cross that fellow,” Sandy agreed. “I don’t like the way he handles that rifle of his. He looks too darn ready to use it!”
Stuffing the counterfeit five-hundred-dollar bill into his pocket, Sandy stood up. “We’d better get going now, while we still have a chance,” he said. “The only thing to do now is to get this bill to the police as evidence of what we’ve found, and to put them on to this island.”
Sandy started up from the cabin but, as his head emerged from the hatchway, he stopped dead in his tracks, for floating in a dinghy just a few feet away was the mysterious owner of the island accompanied by two tough-looking sailors! Sandy looked in dismay from their three faces to the muzzles of three guns pointed directly at him!
It was not a pleasant smile that the man from the island gave him as he said, “Well! This is quite a surprise for all of us, isn’t it? Are you still looking for water? Or do you have a better story to entertain me with today?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Double Blackout
Sandy tried his hardest to look unknowing and innocent, and at the same time shocked and outraged. With the three guns aimed at him, it was not an easy job.
“What’s the idea?” he exclaimed. “I’ve never seen anybody so ready with a gun as you are! We were only looking for our boat. You know it looks the same as yours. We thought for a while that this was it, but....”
“But you found out, after some thorough snooping, that it wasn’t, didn’t you?” the man sneered. “Of course you did. It’s my boat, all right! And you’re trespassing on it! And this is my island too, and you were trespassing there yesterday! And if I were to shoot you, I would be perfectly within my rights as a landowner!”
Sandy tried with difficulty to smile reassuringly. “Take it easy, mister,” he said. “Honestly, we were just looking for our boat. It dragged anchor in the storm last night, and when we saw yours we made a natural mistake and thought it was ours. Okay, it isn’t. We made a mistake, that’s all. Now if you’ll just let us apologize, we’ll get off your private property and go looking again.”
But the man didn’t show the slightest intention of even moving his rifle from the ready, much less of letting the boys go.
“Of course you’ll go looking again,” he said. “Looking for what you were looking for yesterday and today. Oh, no! I hardly think I can let you go!” Then he smiled his peculiar smile again. “What’s more,” he added, “even if I were to let you go, I would first have to ask you to return the money you stole—the money I see sticking out of your pocket!”
Sandy’s heart sank. There was nothing he could think of to say now, and he could see no way out of the situation. He sank wearily to a seat in the cockpit and sighed.
“I guess we can both stop play-acting about this trespassing thing,” he said. He pulled the telltale bill out of his pocket and threw it on the deck. “This is what you’ve been so upset about all along, isn’t it?”
“You’re a very bright boy,” the man with the gun said. “Far too bright, I’m afraid. You have this whole thing figured out already, haven’t you?”
“Most of it,” Sandy admitted. “At least the parts that count. You’re using this island to make counterfeit money, and you’re using this sailboat to take it somewhere. That’s about all I know, but it’s enough to get you in trouble, isn’t it, Mr.—?”
“Jones is the name,” the man said. “Yes, I would say it was quite enough. The only mistake you’ve made is your conclusion. What you know is enough to get you in trouble—not me. In fact, I should hate to be in as much trouble as you two boys are in right now!” Jones put down his rifle for a moment and said, “Do you mind if I come on board my boat so that we can discuss your difficulties in more comfort?”
Jones stepped out of the dinghy to the deck of the little sloop and settled himself comfortably in the stern seat while his two silent crewmen kept Sandy covered. When he was set, with his ever-present rifle held at ready across his knees, he was followed on board by the larger and meaner looking of the two sailors, who stationed himself beside Jones.
“Oh, yes,” Jones repeated, “I should say that what you know is quite enough! And, since you already have too much information to ever let you leave here with, I’ll be happy to satisfy your immense curiosity by giving you a little more. But why not have your friend join us on deck?”
When Jerry had come up from the cabin and was sitting beside Sandy, Jones cleared his throat, as if he were about to give a formal speech.
“As far as you went in your thinking, you are most certainly right,” he said. “I use this boat to transport counterfeit money which I make on my island. I take it to a waiting freighter that meets me five miles off shore—well beyond the legal jurisdiction of the United States government, in international waters. The freighter takes my pretty counterfeit money and disposes of it in foreign markets, where I get a good price for it, and where not every bright and nosy boy is out to make a nuisance of himself.”
Then, once again, Jones smiled his peculiar and unpleasant smile. “I find the foreign markets most useful for disposing of items which are too difficult to get rid of here. I expect that you will not be much harder to dispose of than this money, when you are beyond the limits of U.S. waters!”
Sandy looked at Jerry in silence, desperately hoping his friend would come up with some flash of inspiration—some idea—which would help them to get out of this situation. But Jerry was no help. For that matter, Sandy reflected, he was not much help himself. But as long as he kept “Jones” talking, he’d get some more information and meanwhile, perhaps, he or Jerry might think of something.
“There’s only one thing that has me puzzled in all this,” Sandy said therefore. “Why did you leave this boat full of money floating around outside of the cove?”
Jones laughed. “There you have the full essence of our little comedy of errors,” he said. “Last night’s storm probably tore more than one hundred boats loose from their anchorages and moorings. Yours, I assure you, wasn’t the only one that drifted a good distance, and neither was mine!”
“Yours?” Jerry gasped. “You mean that our boat did drift over this way? And that you—?”
“I think you understand,” Jones replied. “But it wasn’t I. It was these stupid fools who work for me. They had loaded the money on board the boat last night before the storm. Then, when it blew up, we knew that it was impossible to sail to the freighter until the storm had passed. They failed to take the money out of the boat for the night, trusting to luck that nothing would go wrong. But something did go wrong! My boat broke loose and floated out around the point to where it is now. Your boat drifted up to the entrance of my cove. When they came out this morning, my assistants saw your boat, and did not see mine.”
Jones laughed a short, sharp laugh. “They actually sailed your sloop five miles out to the freighter! Of course they discovered their mistake when they opened the money locker and found it full of canned food!”
He looked at the sailors with disgust, then continued. “When they realized their error, they promptly sailed back here, but by that time you had found my boat and assumed it to be yours. When they told me their story, I guessed at once what had happened and went to correct the mistake before you found out about our little business. If you had only come a half hour later, you would have found your own boat and sailed it off in perfect safety. Unfortunately for you, you were just a little too soon.”
“As long as you’re telling us the whole story,” Jerry said, “will you answer a question for me? I don’t understand why you bother with sailboats, when a power boat could do the job so much faster.”
“That’s a fair question,” Jones said. “You are smart boys, aren’t you? Well, I pride myself on using my brains, too. I use this innocent-looking sloop for several reasons, one of which caused this whole ridiculous mix-up. For one thing, an individual member of a popular class of sailboat is very hard for the casual observer to identify. This we have both seen to be true. For another thing, everyone thinks of a sailboat as being merely a pleasure craft, and would never suspect it of anything illegal. It can go in and out of the harbor on a regular schedule and nobody will notice it or even realize it’s the same boat they are seeing. Third, all power boats have to be registered and licensed by the Coast Guard, while a sailboat is so anonymous that it doesn’t even have to have a name. Fourth, it gives me a reason to live on this island. To the people who stop to think of me, if they think of me at all, I am a retired gentleman whose principal hobby is sailing, and who lives on an island in order to get the most enjoyment out of the sport.”
Again Jones smiled, and Sandy shivered. “It’s quite a neat setup, don’t you agree?” Jones said. “And, with the same neatness that is a part of my way of life, I am now going to put an end to this whole unpleasant interruption.”
Suddenly dropping his lazy conversational manner, Jones sat upright and pointed his rifle at Sandy. Not moving his eyes from the boys, he spoke to the sailor who was still standing silent by his side. “We’ll have to take them out to the freighter now. There’s nothing else to do. I’ll decide what to do with them later on. You and Turk sail this boat and I’ll follow in theirs. Lock them below,” he added, nodding toward Sandy and Jerry.
For the first time since they had seen him, the sailor spoke. “Okay,” he said. “We won’t mess it up this time.” Then, this being apparently the longest speech of which he was capable, he shut his mouth into a thin, hard line, and moved heavily to the boys.
Using his pistol as a goad, he poked Sandy in the ribs and motioned him to go below. As Sandy started to take his first step down into the cabin, the sailor shoved him roughly and sent him sprawling onto the deck below. His head spinning, Sandy looked up to see the giant sailor towering above him. He was conscious of an odd noise, like a strangled, slow sobbing, far away. What was it? He had never heard such an ugly sound in his life....
Then, as his head cleared, he realized what it was that he was hearing. The sailor was laughing!
Afterward, Sandy was unable to explain why the strange laughing sound, and the sight of the warped expression that only faintly resembled a smile, should have made him behave as he did. An uncontrollable fury filled him and he jumped to his feet with a headlong rush!
Caught off guard by Sandy’s sudden attack, the sailor made a clumsy move to sidestep, but not before Sandy’s swing had caught him a terrific blow in the ribs. All of Sandy’s six feet of wiry muscle went into the blow, and the sailor reeled back, staggering.
Sandy followed him into the cockpit to take advantage of the surprise attack, just in time to see Jones bring down the barrel of his rifle sharply on Jerry’s head. Sandy whirled to face Jones as Jerry dropped to the deck.
He started forward, cocking his fist to lash out before Jones could raise his rifle again, but suddenly, with a sound like a bat striking a ball, a blinding light seemed to explode in his face. This first sensation was followed by a dull roaring sound and a spreading pool of inky blackness. He felt his knees buckle....
Somewhere, from afar, he heard Jones speaking in bored tones.
“Bull,” he was saying, almost lazily, “you know how I dislike unnecessary violence in any form. If you hadn’t shoved the boy, this little scene would never—”
And that was the last Sandy was to hear for quite a while.
CHAPTER NINE
To the Freighter
When Sandy came to, the first thing he was aware of was a terrific headache. This was accompanied by such severe dizziness that when he tried to sit up he sank back immediately, holding his head. Gingerly, he ran his hand over his skull as if to make sure that it was still all in one piece. Then he lay still for a while, afraid to try moving anything else, and looked at the ceiling above him.
Slowly, the dizziness ebbed away and the pain lurking behind his eyes settled down to a more bearable level. When he felt it was safe to try, he moved more cautiously than the first time, sat up and swung his long legs over the edge of the bunk.
For a moment, he simply sat there with his elbows on his knees and his head propped in his hands, and looked at the decking. He had to think hard, as if he were remembering a dream that was fast fading away. Why was he in this bunk below? How was Jerry handling the boat alone? He frowned, pushed back his cowlick and raised his head.
As he did so, he caught sight of the brass flare gun clipped to its bracket on the opposite bulkhead, and suddenly he remembered everything that had happened. Of course! This was not his boat at all, and Jerry wasn’t sailing it alone—or in any other way, for that matter!
Jerry lay on the opposite bunk below the flare gun, propped up on one elbow and looking at him with a grin.
“I guess it isn’t funny,” he said, “but you sure took an awful long time to wake up and figure out what had happened to you! I’ve been lying here awake for five minutes now, just watching you come up from under!” Ruefully rubbing a hand across his black crew-cut, he added, “I guess I must have taken the same length of time doing it when I woke up, but there wasn’t anybody here to time me!”
“I saw Jones hit you,” Sandy said, “and he sure wasn’t making any special effort to be gentle. I guess that Bull, the big sailor, got me from behind when I turned to go after Jones.”
Still rubbing his head, Jerry sat up in his bunk and faced his friend. “Sandy,” he asked, “what made you take a swing at Bull like that? You sure must have known that the two of us didn’t stand much of a chance in a fight against three men with guns!”
“I don’t suppose I was really thinking at all,” Sandy answered. “I know it was a pretty foolish thing to do, but there was just something about Bull’s laugh.... Anyway, I’m sorry. It could have got us killed right then and there, I guess. As it is, I think we’re lucky to have got away with nothing more than a couple of headaches.”
“What do you mean, a couple?” Jerry said. “I’ve got two myself!”
Both boys laughed, but as their laughter died down, they became more serious than they had been before.
“Look, we can sit here and make jokes about the situation until they get us out to that freighter,” Sandy said, “but that isn’t going to help us to figure out a way to escape and get to the police.”
“You’re perfectly right,” Jerry agreed. “We’d better scout around and size things up while we’ve got a chance.”
“And we’d better do it fast,” Sandy added. “We don’t know how long we’ve been knocked out, so we haven’t any idea how much time we have left before we arrive at the freighter. And by then, it might very well be too late to do anything for ourselves at all.”
Half rising from their bunks, for the cabin roof was too low to allow them full standing headroom, they moved aft to the sliding doors that separated them from the cockpit. Gently testing the doors, Sandy found that they were locked, as he had assumed they would be. A crack of light showed where the two halves of the door met, and he placed his eye to it. With a frown, he turned around to look at Jerry.
“Boy, they’re not taking any chances this time,” he whispered. “Both of the sailors are out there in the cockpit, and the one called Turk has his pistol in his hand, and it’s pointed right at this door!”
Moving back to the bunks, Sandy and Jerry knelt to look through the small windows above them. On both sides of the sloop, there was nothing to see but water—not so much as a buoy or another boat in sight. Far off to the starboard side, they made out a low smudge that was the shore.
“We must be almost there!” Sandy said.
“Do you think there’s any use trying the forward hatch?” asked Jerry. “Or do you suppose that they have that one locked tight, too?”
“I don’t know if it matters much one way or the other,” Sandy sighed. “Even if it is open, I wouldn’t care to stick my head out—not with Turk sitting back there with his pistol ready! I think I’ve had enough of rushing into pistols for one day!” Putting his hand to his head, he felt the lump that was forming above his right ear.
Moving with the most extreme caution, so as to attract no attention from their guards, they started to explore the cabin for whatever possibilities it had to offer. Coming to the two tiny forward portholes, barely large enough to put a hand through, Sandy paused to take a look forward.
Before their bow, perhaps fifty yards away, was a boat sailing calmly along as if the whole world were on a holiday. For one short instant, Sandy thought that this might be their chance—perhaps a signal with the flare gun might bring aid from the passing sailor! But his hopes were shattered in no time as he realized that the sloop sailing ahead was his own, sailed by Jones who was leading the way to the freighter that waited, like doom, not far off.
Even in his hopelessness, Sandy could not help pausing to admire his boat, graceful and trim, making good time beating into a steady breeze. He thought for a moment of the preceding day when he had learned to take the tiller and had first felt the happy pride of ownership and accomplishment that comes to every boat owner. What a change in fortunes this new day had brought! Now his boat was no longer his and, instead of carrying him to pleasure, was leading him to what looked like certain disaster!
As he watched, his boat suddenly put about on a new tack. He saw Jones skillfully handling both the tiller and the sheets. The jib was swiftly brought over to fill and, together with the mainsail, was trimmed and drawing in no time. Whatever else you could say about Jones, Sandy thought, the man sure knew how to handle a boat!
The new tack set by Jones was followed by their sailor-guards. With a creak of tackle and rigging and a shifting of weight to the opposite side, the little sloop came about. Still at his lookout post at the forward port, Sandy saw the head of the boat swing about. As it did so, he caught sight of their destination.
“Jerry! Look!” he whispered, motioning his friend to join him at the other porthole. There, high in the water, perhaps a mile away, was the dark shape of the freighter. Wisps of gray-white smoke curled from its stack and drifted off in the breeze. It was an ordinary-looking freight cargo ship, such as you would see in any port of the world. It had a black hull, a white deckhouse and a black stack marked with green stripes. All perfectly ordinary, perhaps, but to Sandy and Jerry it looked sinister and piratical. They stared at it for a few minutes, trying to judge their rate of progress from the lessening distance between themselves and the black-hulled ship. Then Sandy tore himself away from the porthole and grabbed Jerry’s arm.
“Jerry, we’ve got to start acting fast,” he said. “There’s hardly any time left!”
“Act how?” Jerry said. “What can we do but sit here and wait like a couple of chickens in a crate being taken to market? If you can think of anything to do, I’m game, but I haven’t got an idea in my head.”
“I don’t think there’s anything we can do about the situation now,” Sandy said, “but I have an idea that might work later on. It may not be worth much, but anything’s worth trying.” He cast his eyes about the small cabin.
“Did you by any chance come across a first-aid kit while you were searching?” he asked.
“Yes, I did,” Jerry answered. “It’s in that locker next to the money. But what do you want it for?”
“Bring it over and I’ll show you,” Sandy answered.
While Jerry went for the first-aid kit, Sandy took the brass flare pistol from its bracket above the bunk. Then he sat down on the bunk and rolled up his pants leg. “Here,” he said. “Give me some tape. I’m going to strap this bulky thing to my leg if we have enough.”
“What for?” Jerry asked in surprise. “It’s not a real gun, you know. All it does is fire a flare. Besides, there’s only one flare in here, and I don’t know if that can do us very much good.”
“I don’t care about the flares,” Sandy answered. “It’s the gun itself that I’m interested in. It fooled me when I saw it and it just might possibly fool someone else who might not be familiar with these things. I’m hoping that if we get a chance to pull it on someone after dark, we can fool him long enough to get hold of a real gun that will help us escape!”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Jerry admitted. “That is, if we’re still alive by dark!”
“That’s about all I’m hoping for now,” Sandy answered. “I don’t know whether we can do any good with this flare gun or not, but it’s pretty clear that we can’t escape from this boat. So I’m doing what I can to let us be able to take advantage of any chance we get on board the freighter. If we’re lucky enough to get a chance.”
As he spoke, Sandy was fastening the bulky flare pistol to the inside of his calf, making it as secure as he could with the tape from the first-aid kit. Finished at last, he stood up as well as he could in the low-ceilinged cabin, and tried to walk around.
“Does it show too much?” he asked Jerry, shaking his leg a little.
“It shows,” Jerry said, without much encouragement. “But maybe if you move around carefully, and if they don’t take a sudden interest in your legs, you might get away with it. Anyway, what can we lose by trying?”
Sandy looked down at the bulge which so obviously distorted the leg of his blue jeans. He was afraid that he would never get away with it. He remembered the bell-bottom pants that the Navy enlisted men wear and that all sailors once wore, and he wondered if their original purpose had been to carry concealed weapons. Whatever they were for, he sure wished he were wearing a pair now!
“I guess this is about as good as we can get it,” Sandy said. “If one of us only had a jacket on, we could probably hide the gun under an arm, but these sweat shirts just don’t leave enough room.”
“No, I think the leg is a better place anyway,” Jerry said. “If they search us for weapons, they’re apt to miss your leg, but they’d never miss patting you under the arm. Anyway, we don’t have a jacket, and as far as I can see there’s no place else to hide the thing.”
The boys took a last look around the cabin to see if there was anything else to help them, but there was not even a small kitchen knife or a can opener in the little galley. It seemed that Mr. Jones kept only counterfeit money in that area. As they were carefully exploring every possible nook and cranny in the cabin, they felt the sloop heel to the other side as it once more came about to go on a new tack.
From the vantage point of the two forward ports they saw the reason for this latest maneuver. They were coming up to the wind alongside the freighter, preparing to stop. The high sides of the big ship loomed above them like the walls of a fortress, but chipped and scarred with streaks of rust. As the sloop swung completely into the wind, losing headway, they caught sight of Jones making a line fast to the bow of Sandy’s boat. Then, with a rattle of slides and a clumping of heavy steps on the cabin roof overhead, the counterfeiters’ craft came to a halt and was made fast alongside the freighter.
Whatever was to happen, it would happen now!
CHAPTER TEN
Aboard the Floating Prison
Moving away from the forward portholes, Sandy and Jerry sat on the edges of the bunks and waited for their captors to come and get them. Both boys made themselves look as if they were completely dejected—as if they had already given up any hopes they might have had of escaping or of being rescued.
In a few minutes the footsteps on the deck and cabin top stopped and the little craft lay bobbing and wallowing in the sea swell that rose and fell alongside the freighter.
Rope bumpers, large braided lengths of thick cordage, were lashed to the sides of the sloop to keep it from being damaged by rubbing and banging against the steel side of the big ship.
Although they were listening as closely as possible to everything that went on, they could not make out the words they heard shouted from the freighter’s deck far above. Nevertheless, the sense of them was made clear by the answer that Turk bellowed back.
“Yeah! we got the stuff this time, all right! And we got a couple of other pieces of cargo with us, too! Wait and we’ll show you!”
This was the moment, Sandy thought. He would have to be careful, he warned himself, not to lose his temper as he had done last time, even if he was roughed up and shoved around again. And above all, he must be careful about the way he moved. One false step would surely outline the telltale shape of the flare gun taped to his leg—and that would be the end of the only “weapon” that he and Jerry had! Not only that, but it might well be the end of the only chance they would have to get away with whole skins!
A bolt grated in its slide on the companionway door and the hatch slid open to reveal Turk, pistol in hand, grinning nastily at them.
“Okay, gents,” he said. “The first-class passage on the local ferry is over. Just step up on deck, and we’ll transfer to the next vessel.”
As Sandy reached the companionway steps, Turk reached down and grabbed him by the neck of his shirt. With a swift heave, he sent Sandy sprawling on the cockpit deck. Keeping a tight control on his temper, Sandy confined his thoughts to worrying about getting his leg tucked under him in such a position that the flare pistol wouldn’t show.
But he need not have worried, for Turk was too busy enjoying himself giving the same treatment to Jerry, who came flying out of the cabin to land heavily on the deck alongside Sandy.
“These boys sure play a lot of rough games,” he murmured. “And I’m afraid that this is only the beginning of a whole world’s series!”
“Take it easy,” Sandy whispered to his friend. “Let’s just go along with them quietly. Maybe we can keep in one piece until we have a chance to figure a way out.”
At Turk’s orders, they rose to their feet. Looking up to the freighter’s deck high above them, they saw the other sailor, Bull, already on board, at the top of a long rope ladder. He too had his pistol held ready, and the expression on his face gave every indication that he would be only too glad to use it if he were given even half an excuse to do so.
“Get up that ladder,” Turk ordered, “and don’t try nothing funny. We’ll have you covered all the way.” He waved his pistol at Jerry to indicate that he wanted him to go up the ladder first.
Sandy’s heart seemed to sink in his chest. The order of climbing was all wrong—it couldn’t be wronger! Jerry first, himself next, and Turk last! Surely Turk, if he was below him looking up as he climbed, couldn’t fail to notice the flare pistol taped to Sandy’s leg!
Acting as if he misunderstood Turk’s wordless command, Sandy stepped forward and grabbed the rope ladder, but the sailor’s big hand gripped him by the shoulder hard and firmly pulled him back.
“You sure are eager, ain’t ya, kid? And you’re tricky, too. Now why did you want to go up that ladder first? That ain’t no picnic or party up there!” He screwed his big face into a frown of deep thought. Apparently unable to reach a decision, he undid his thinking expression and snarled at Sandy. “Just stop thinkin’ up tricks, see! You let me do the thinkin’ here! Now, you go on first, the way I told ya!” He pushed Jerry toward the ladder.
Resigned to having his flare gun discovered, and almost resigned to whatever would happen next, Sandy moved to the ladder to take his turn, when once more the big hand of Turk pulled him back. “I told you I’d do the thinkin’!” Turk said. “I don’t know what you got up your sleeve, but whatever it is, you’d better forget it. I’m goin’ up next!”
At last, here was a turn of luck! Sandy could hardly keep from grinning as Turk started to mount the rope ladder. The big sailor swung up easily, keeping his eyes always turned downward to Sandy. Halfway up, he stopped.
“Come on, now,” he said. “You won’t be able to play no tricks this way. You’re too far back for any leg grabbing, and I got this gun aimed right at the top of your head. Now come on up, and come slow!”
Sandy stepped from the deck of the sloop to the lower rungs of the rope ladder and did as he was told, moving his “gun leg” as carefully as he could without running the risk of attracting any attention to it. At least, he thought with some satisfaction, he had gotten over the first hurdle!
On the deck of the freighter, the boys were met by Jones, Bull, and a mean-looking crew of some of the dirtiest men they had ever seen. The freighter itself was none too clean, with paint scaling from the decks and splotches of grease covering the cargo-handling winches and other deck machinery. The white deckhouse, seen from close quarters, was a dingy and spotted gray, and the portholes were streaked with dirt and dried salt.
In the midst of a rat’s nest of coiled ropes, fraying cables and other ship’s debris, Jones sat on an overturned crate as if it were an easy chair. He seemed perfectly at ease and completely out of place at the same time, his smart sports clothes and yachting cap making an odd contrast to the mixed clothing of the freighter’s crew.
Despite his air of being a gentleman of leisure, Jones had his rifle still with him, lying across his knees, and his long fingers played restlessly with the safety catch and the trigger.
“Gentlemen,” he smiled. “Welcome aboard. I hope you will find our modest accommodations suitable for your long journey. The Captain will arrive in a moment, and I am sure that he will do whatever is in his power to see to it that you are treated—appropriately.” Still smiling, he turned to Bull and said, “Bull, see to it that our passengers aren’t carrying any unnecessary luggage.”