Billy walked on, down the path, out between the willows and along the road toward the hotel. He heard a deep whistle as he turned the corner by the wharf, and saw a steamer landing at the pier. It was the night boat from Boston, bringing Aunt Mattie home. As he drew near a little group of people disembarked and his aunt came toward him looking very pale and bedraggled.
“It was good of you to get up so early, and come down to meet me, Billy,” she said faintly. “We had such a rough passage, and the stewardess was so inattentive. It has really been a terrible night!”
The on-shore wind, blowing the cloud of fog before it, was a better friend to the German fugitive than it was to his pursuers. The search was a long and blind one, and all of the boats that scattered to find him came back with only failure to report. Some of them had seen a big white yacht go by them in the mist, but as such vessels were so common along the coast at that season, little notice had been taken of her. One boat, indeed, had come close enough to ask whether she had seen any such craft as the catboat they were seeking, and had been directed to bear off to the southward, as the yacht had sighted just such a boat near Andrew’s Point. When the little catboat was finally found, however, floating idly with the tide, far to the north of Andrew’s Point and just where the yacht might easily have passed her, suspicions began to arise as to how the German had escaped. Inquiry was made all along the coast, but without bringing any news to light. The millionaire purchaser of an estate on Appledore Island seemed to have vanished completely.
Almost the first words that Captain Saulsby spoke were to ask what had become of that “son-of-a-gun of a friend of the Kaiser’s.” When he learned that in spite of all possible efforts the man had got clean away, he announced at first that he was too disgusted to try to get well; but altered his decision a little later.
“If the whole United States Navy can’t catch a man like that,” he said weakly to Billy, “I guess it’s Ned Saulsby’s duty to keep in the world a little longer, and try to be a match for the rascal.”
The doctor said that the old sailor’s recovery was miraculously quick; the Captain himself, that it was “slower than a wet week.” “That woman,” he would say, indicating the long-suffering nurse, “that woman that’s all rustles and starch and has no real heart, she keeps me down, when the only thing I need to get well is to walk out along the garden path and feel the good, warm sunshine on my back.”