"Looks as though I had another guess coming," he remarked finally, lowering the binoculars with a puzzled air. "Someone aboard her now. Seems to be jiggering the wheel. Can't be a pirate stunt, can it? Wouldn't be possible to drop a petrol engine into her, block up the hole and get off to the Islands on the quiet? But of course not. That's a drydock job--'count of the propeller and shaft."
At a quarter of a mile he raised his glasses again. "Chap at the wheel's the only man in sight," he reported. "He don't seem to have spotted us yet. Must be deaf, not to hear the explosions of our exhaust. Ah, perhaps that accounts for it! He's an old cove--big shock of white hair. 'Bout time he was getting his helmet on, though, with this sun beginning to bore into the back of his neck. Ahoy, there!..."
But there was no reply. The lone white-haired figure was still jiggering at the wheel when the launch, nosing in cautiously in the up-boil of reversed propellers, slid past the _Cora's_ stern and the loom of her counter cut it off from our view.
A moss-shiny Jacob's Ladder hung over the starboard side amidships, where a section of the "nigger-wire" had been cut away, doubtless when the labour-recruits were disembarked. Butler climbed up first, then the _Herald_ man (who had come off on the Doctor's invitation to see the ship made famous by the great exploit of the Hon. Hartley Allen), and then myself. Butler lingered at the ladder for a few moments, giving orders to his men about bringing the disinfecting paraphernalia aboard; so it was given to the newspaper man to be the first to go aft and discover that the moving, gibbering white-haired wretch lashed to the wheel of the schooner represented the sum total of the mental and physical remnants of the man whose doings he had been detailed to chronicle.
The horrified reporter uttered no sound--simply froze and stood rooted to the deck in amazed consternation. It was as though the basilisk stare of the maniac's eyes had turned the flesh and blood of his rangy frame to stone. When he stirred finally, it was to tip-toe softly back two or three paces to where I, in turn, had frozen in my tracks. It was his hand on my shoulder and his white face thrust close to mine that broke my own trance. Then the both of us must have retreated another step or two, until we bumped into Butler, similarly petrified with horror.