Chapter X: Quiet Preparations

“He’s a tougher man in a scrap than I thought he was,” observed one of the yacht’s crew--Groton, in fact--as he ruefully patted a very sore place on his cheek bone that promised to develop into a glorious black eye. “I always knew he could fight, but this is the first time I ever came against him. Holy mackerel! How he can hit!”

Kennedy was sitting up, spitting sand from his mouth and looking around in a dazed fashion. He groaned as he put a hand to his head. He had come down with a terrific bump when Nick Carter had whirled him to the ground at the end of their argument.

“What the blazes hit me?” exclaimed Kennedy.

He got stiffly to his feet and staggered toward where Nick Carter still lay on the beach, ere he went on, in a confused way:

“That’s it, eh? Well, I’m willing to tackle anything human. But when it comes to stopping a whirlwind, I’ll duck every time.”

For a few moments he stood looking down at the detective, who did not make a move to indicate that he was conscious, although he was keeping close watch of everything from beneath his half-shut eyelids.

Kennedy was deeply impressed with the wonderful battle the detective had put up, and he looked over the splendidly built frame with the admiration that one strong man always vouchsafes to another--even though that other may be a foe.

Neither Kennedy nor the two sailors still on their feet had any idea that there was somebody else gazing at Nick Carter from behind the bushes, with anxious eyes and rapidly heaving bosom.

Yet so it was. More remarkable still, it was a woman!

The Baroness Latour, as she was called in the Hotel Amsterdam--although better known to Nick Carter and to many others in different parts of the world as the lovely Mademoiselle Valeria, the adventuress who always had kept out of the grip of the law, despite many illegitimate transactions--had known what was going to take place when the boat left the hotel, carrying the unconscious Lord Vinton.

She had not been so sound asleep in her room as might have been thought.

What she was doing now was quite in accord with her usual methods.

She liked to be sure that her directions were properly carried out, and one of the secrets of her hold over her men was that they never knew when she would appear before them.

In the present case there was no necessity for her to make herself known, she thought. So she contented herself with looking in silence.

There was a particular reason for her coming now to see what would be done about getting Drago from the place where he had been left in the woods to the yacht. That reason was that she had learned of the intention of Nick Carter to find Drago, somehow, and she knew the detective well enough to hear that he would stumble on the boat that was to put in at the edge of the woods to get the prisoner.

If Nick Carter happened to find out what was going on, she did not know what might be the end of it all.

Perhaps the strange power he exercised over her heart without desiring to do so may have had something to do with Mademoiselle Valeria’s anxiety.

Be that as it may, she was there.

Not a word or movement escaped her. She was content to let her men carry out their work in their own way.

Now that Nick Carter had been overcome, and his man, the porter, lay on the ground with a bullet through his thigh, she had no doubt that all would go as she had planned.

“I wish we had that man with us,” observed Kennedy musingly, as he gazed down at Nick. “He’s a great fighter! Wouldn’t he have been in his element as skipper of a windjammer in the old days, when the captain was expected to straighten out every row that came up in the fo’c’s’le. However, there is no time to lose. Let’s see how these boys of ours are.”

Three out of the seven were in bad shape. Two had been shot through the arm by Nick--for he had been careful not to plant his bullets where they would be fatal--and the third had been knocked out by the detective’s fist on the point of the chin.

A strong dose of whisky from Kennedy’s flask administered to each, together with some vigorous rubbing of the forehead of the man who had been laid low by the knock-out punch, brought them all around, and the first mate turned to Mike Corrigan.

Hastily bandaging his wounded leg, Kennedy told him to stay where he was for a while, and then to crawl out into the open, where some of the people going to the golf links would be sure to see him.

The three men who had been hurt managed to stagger into the boat. But it was evident that they would not be any particular use.

The two who had remained uninjured, besides one who had been left in charge of the boat and prisoners, and had not taken part in the fight, would have to row and steer, leaving Kennedy to take general charge.

“Now, boys,” directed Kennedy, when everything else had been arranged, “pick up this man who has given us all the trouble. We’ll take him along.”

Mademoiselle Valeria--to call her by her real name--smiled approvingly as two of the sailors stooped and picked up the seemingly helpless detective and lifted him into the boat.

“Shall we bend a rope around him?” asked Groton.

“Not necessary!” said Kennedy. “He can’t do any harm now. Let’s hurry back to the _Idaline_.”

The detective made no sign. He suffered his eyes to close a little more, and when he was lifted and placed in the bottom of the boat, he allowed himself to drop limply just as he was put.

Valeria saw the boat shoved off from the bank toward the middle of the bay, and then swing around in the direction of the yacht.

“I wonder what Colonel Pearson will say to me when I go aboard the _Idaline_ to-morrow,” she murmured, as she made her way back to the hotel.

She was still thinking this when she went to bed, and this time dropped into a sleep that lasted till morning.

Meanwhile, the two unwounded sailors took the oars and rowed hard toward the yacht, while the two other men, who were not shot--including the one who had been knocked out by Nick Carter, but who had now practically recovered--were ready to relieve their shipmates when they should grow tired.

Kennedy sat in the stern, steering, and apparently in a reverie. He was thinking what a good stroke of work he had accomplished that night.

Not only had he got the two prisoners made by the beautiful mistress of the yacht, and was taking them to the vessel, where they could be held in safety until the demanded ransom was paid, but he had actually got into his power the one man feared by Valeria and her crew of desperadoes who had made the _Idaline_ the most annoying craft known to the police of a dozen countries.

If the yacht had not been so carefully changed in its appearance, by altering her rigging, shortening her smokestack by an ingenious telescoping device that was the invention of its fair owner, and giving a different look to her in several other ways, Nick Carter would have recognized her at once.

As it was, he had thought he knew it, although he could not reconcile the salient points of difference between the _Idaline_, as he remembered her, and this graceful pleasure steamer riding so calmly at anchor in the bay.

Now that he had found out who the Baroness Latour really was, and had actually been in conversation with her--following this up by running against Kennedy, whom he also had met before--he did not need to hear the first mate mention the name of the _Idaline_ to be sure of her identity.

It was all clear to Nick now. He was to be taken aboard the yacht, with Harvey L. Drago and Lord Vinton, and they would put out to sea until the friends of the prisoners had consented to pay the enormous sums which would be demanded through carefully veiled newspaper advertisements.

As to what would be done with him, he could not quite satisfy himself. He knew that Mademoiselle Valeria had shown him, in various subtle ways, that she would have been his friend if he had let her, and he did not think she would go to the extreme of killing him.

“I wouldn’t trust her,” he thought. “She could easily give orders to some of those rascals on the yacht to shoot me in my sleep, to poison me, or even to suffocate me with some of that charming gas she used on Lord Vinton--and, doubtless, on Mrs. van Dietrich, too. But--I don’t mean to let them do it. That is where I have something to say.”

The two men at the oars were laboring hard, for it was not easy to move such a heavy boatload by two pairs of arms, and Kennedy was sorry the boat had not been rigged so that four men could row, one to each oar.

Nick could not see how near they were to the yacht, but he figured that they would reach it in not many minutes.

“Hello! How are you by this time?” whispered a voice in his ear. “Coming around?”

“It was Harvey L. Drago speaking, and Nick turned his head enough to find that Drago was lying almost by his side, his feet extended opposite to those of the detective.

“Keep quiet,” was Carter’s response, in the lowest of murmurs. “You’ve got your gag out, I see.”

“Of course I have,” was the reply. “Those clumsy bunglers couldn’t tie it on so that it would stay. They may know how to knot a rope, but a handkerchief is out of their line. Got a knife?”

“Yes. Keep quiet,” returned the detective.

Nick Carter was pleased with Harvey L. Drago. He liked a man who was not easily discouraged, and it was evident that Drago was as full of fight as if he had never been beaten.

Nick drew his jackknife from his pocket, and severed Drago’s bonds with a series of quick slashes.

In the darkness his movements were not noticed by the sailors.

The prisoners were in the fore part of the boat, for one thing, so that the rowers’ backs were toward them.

Kennedy and the other men were in the stern, and it would not have been easy for them to discern the doings of the prisoners, even in daylight. Now, with the moon gone, and only stars to light up the wide bay and boat, there was hardly any possibility.

“Say! I heard those fellows speak of you as Nick Carter,” whispered Drago. “Is that right? Are you the famous----”

“My name is Nick Carter,” interrupted the detective. “I am the detective. Are you game for a fight to get out of this?”

“Am I?” returned Drago, so emphatically that Nick warned him not to speak above a low whisper. “You’ll see.”

“All right! But be careful. If it were not for the splashing of the water and the little noise the oars make, you would have been overheard already. I’ll give you the signal for action.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Wait till the boat gets up to the yacht. Then, before they can make fast, knock as many of them overboard as you can and jump for the ladder. Get that?”

“Sure! I wish there was another one to help.”

“There is,” put in a low voice, behind the detective. “I’m not clear in my mind. But I believe I could do something in a pinch.”

Lord Vinton, slowly recovering from the effects of Valeria’s poisonous gas, and helped back to reason and strength by the invigorating sea air, had heard what Nick Carter and Drago had been saying, and was anxious to take a hand.

The detective welcomed him with quiet enthusiasm.

“If you can lay out only one of the men with a boat stretcher,” he whispered, “you’ll be doing a great deal. Here is the stretcher right here!”

The detective had found a loose piece of wood, some three feet long, lying near him, and he had known it for one of the braces against which oarsmen place their feet to help their pull on the oars.

It would make a most effective weapon, even in the rather weak grasp of the half-poisoned Lord Vinton.

“Think you can fix one of them with this?” asked Carter.

“I’ll give him a rap that he’ll remember,” promised Vinton.