"Will I go back to the house? Indade I will not. Will I make another try for the cave? Not so long as I have me right mind. Will I go back to Red Jacket?--and meet them as would ax me what had I done with Mister Peril? Not on your life. Where is Mister Peril at this blessed minute, anyhow? At sea on board the smuggler, or I miss me guess. How will I get to him? By taking a boat, of course. Where will I find one? At Laughing Fish Cove, to be sure. That's the very place, bedad! and the sooner I'm getting there the better."
The tug _Broncho_ had reached Laughing Fish about an hour before Mike Connell arrived at this decision. She had come in search of the party of log-wreckers that she had brought to that place more than a week earlier, and now those on board were greatly troubled at not finding a trace of the missing men save their deserted camp. Nor could they obtain any information concerning them from the fisher folk of the cove.
On board the tug was Major Arkell, who had been led by curiosity to take the trip. He was curious to know what had become of the young man whom he had sent into that region to pick up wrecked logs, and he was also curious to ascertain what had become of a large number of those same logs that still remained unaccounted for. At the same time he would like to investigate certain reports that had reached him of the reopening of some old mine-workings in that neighborhood. He had hoped that his researches might not take him beyond Laughing Fish, where he anticipated finding Richard Peveril prepared to answer all his questions. Failing to discover the young man, or any trace of him, the problems that he had set out to solve became more interesting than before, and he ordered Captain Spillins to start at daybreak on a cruise still farther up the coast.
Early on the following morning, therefore, everything was in readiness on board the tug, and its crew were getting up the anchor when their attention was arrested by the shouts and gesticulations of a man on the beach.
"Send a boat in and see what he wants," said the manager; and ten minutes later Mike Connell was on board, telling his story to a highly interested group of listeners.
Within an hour after receiving her new passenger, the _Broncho_, under full head of steam, was several miles to the northward of Laughing Fish, and well out to sea, in hot pursuit of a small schooner. The latter was slipping easily along before the fresh morning breeze that had recently set in after a night of calm. The water rippled merrily past her flashing sides, and she was making some six miles an hour. At the same time the _Broncho_, pouring forth great clouds of soft-coal smoke and heaping the smooth water into double white-crested billows as she rushed through it, was doing two miles to her one, and would soon overtake her.