But, while doing so, he had been seized by both the boat handlers and dragged aboard. There he became mixed in a fight with two others who, from their descriptions, must have been Rexford and Ellis. When the fight stopped Francis Delavan was under the hood, his hands tied behind him. He remembered that, later on, the small port boat had been overturned and set adrift, and that his own hat and coat had been taken from him and cast into the water.
“Later, that forenoon,” continued Mr. Delavan, “I saw my own ‘Rocket’ following us. By stealth I had succeeded in freeing my hands. Now, I made a dash for freedom, intending to leap overboard and try to swim to you. But I was caught and held, just at the edge of the hood. I found chance only to snatch my wallet from an inner vest pocket and hurl it out into the water. I was in hopes you’d see it, pick it up, and understand.”
Mr. Delavan went on to explain how, after the throwing of the wallet, he had been more carefully bound, hand and foot, and gagged. When taken ashore at Cookson’s Inlet he had also been blindfolded, his removal from the boat not taking place until a carriage had been brought.
Then the story of the final chase was told, even how Hank Butts had done so much to carry the day aboard the schooner by his artless trick of dropping the hitching weight where it would do the most harm to the enemy.
“Say, Hank,” put in Joe Dawson, who had taken little part in the talk, “wherever did you learn the easy way that you drop that weight?”
“A feller from New York taught us that last summer,” Butts replied. “Some of us fellows over in East Hampton practiced it until we couldn’t miss.”
“But how did you learn to land it on another fellow’s foot so easily that it looks almost like an accident?”
“I’ve been telling you,” Hank insisted. “We kept on dropping weights on each other’s toes until we got the trick down fine.”
“What?” ejaculated Dawson, opening his eyes wider. “You practised by dropping iron weights on each other’s feet? You fellows must be wonders, if you could stand that!”
“Oh, no,” Hank confessed. “We practised with small sandbags.”
IT was Saturday morning when the “Rocket’s” crew boarded the schooner out on the high seas. Late Sunday evening the motor boat moved in through the Narrows of lower New York Bay. The cruise had been at racing speed, without a single hitch after Engineer Joe had fitted that new valve.