Forward Tom and Cliff watched with straining eyes, as did the Don. Another vivid, but distant flash was followed by a dull report and there came a faint “plash-thunk!” in the water far ahead.
At the same moment a sailor loped forward.
Don Ortiga turned, lifted a hand. Tom, his eye cocked aloft, saw that their masthead light disappeared instantly. He turned to see if Cliff had noticed it, and then saw what Nicky, at the stern, had already guessed.
Nelse’s boat was a decoy. His stout pole once firmly stepped his ty-line was dropped off the cruiser’s stem, and as the masthead light winked out he, in some fashion—it was too dark for Nicky to see how—completed an electrical circuit to a small, similar light on his pole, so that, if the cutter missed the light for an instant she would pick it up again and yet it would be the decoy and not the real ship she would thereafter pursue.
“But what will happen to Nelse?” Nicky wondered when he rejoined his friends and gave them his information.
“He will row into some little inlet, unship his pole, maybe pull his boat up on shore and hide.”
“But haven’t they seen us?” demanded Nicky.
“We are low and gray and hard to see. It remains to be learned,” the captain replied. He watched for an interval while their boat with only her propeller thrash to carry a message of her direction, held on swiftly.
The ruse had failed. They could see the cutter holding a course slantwise to their own! They must have been seen in spite of the camouflaging color.
“There’s a chance—in the channel to port!” he grunted.
Then began the most breathless and thrilling half hour or more that the chums had ever been through.
Swinging sharply on her heel, so to speak, their lithe greyhound doubled back into a narrow lip between two clumps of cocoanut or mangrove, it was too dark to see which they were; it seemed as though she were running smash into the land but there was a way that opened thinly before her scudding bow.
Once the keel groaned and rasped on coral, and once a bough was snapped on a tree leaning far over the water by the short mast.
Then they were in open water. Would the cutter know where they went? Would she follow?
They squared away and ran, full speed, down the Sound, and with keel almost aground, shoved—literally grated their way—over a bar and into the outer waters again.