Chapter VII: On the Brink of Battle

“There’s a light across the river, in the shadow of the Palisades,” remarked the girl, when they had gone several more miles. “It is some boat, or ship, of course. Might not that be the yacht?”

Nick Carter smiled, without letting the girl see his face. This was not difficult, for his back was turned toward her. He knew that lights on the Hudson were common enough, and that it was a hundred chances to one against this particular light belonging to the yacht they were after.

He swung the boat diagonally across the river to see.

“It isn’t a yacht at all,” he remarked, in a low tone, to the girl. “Just a barge, loaded with broken stone--to ballast the railroad over here, I guess. We’ll have to go farther.”

As they were on that side of the river, in the shadow of the Palisades, Nick kept his launch parallel with the bank, taking note of all the lights he saw, but not finding any that belonged to the kind of steam yacht he wanted to find.

They got to the end of the fifteen miles of Palisades, and found themselves moving along opposite the irregular hills and bluffs one sees farther up the river.

Houses nestle among the hills at intervals, and many dusty ribbons of roadway may be discerned criss-crossed here and there, peeping out of thickets, twisting around the shoulder of a hill, or coming seemingly straight out of the ground. The scenery along the Hudson is generally diversified and always beautiful.

Suddenly a fair-sized house appeared to jump from the blackness of a wooded slope they were passing, with lights in some of the windows.

“That’s a pleasant-looking home,” observed Nick Carter, as he kept his wheel steady while glancing at the shore on his left. “Within easy motoring distance of New York, and yet out in the country entirely.”

The girl said something quietly in assent. Then she broke out, in a tense tone:

“Isn’t that the yacht we want? It looks different from the others we have seen, and it agrees with the description we got from Phillips so far as I can make out.”

“You’re right, I think,” returned Nick, in a low tone. “But don’t speak loud. If that is the yacht, we may be sure they are on the watch for attack. They will think the police may hear of their performance at Crownledge. That would naturally mean pursuit.”

He ran the launch silently toward shore, the maneuver bringing the outline of the yacht between him and the faint moonlight showing in the sky.

“I see a man in a chair on the roof of the cabin,” he whispered. “He is smoking.”

“You have good eyes, Mr. Carter,” remarked the girl. “I don’t see anything on the yacht at all.”

“The red light of his cigar appears now and again, as he shifts his position,” explained the detective. “Now I catch the odor of the cigar. The wind is blowing this way. Don’t you get the Havana fragrance? It is very faint, but it is there.”

But Claudia’s senses were not as keen as Nick Carter’s. She could neither see nor smell the cigar.

Nick ran the launch up to the bank, and found a small landing stage, with several iron rings.

Up the hill he could make out one of the lights in the house he had discerned from the middle of the river. This landing stage was placed here for the use of the occupants of the house, of course.

Once the launch had been secured, Nick looked about him for some means of getting to the yacht without being perceived by the man smoking on the cabin, or anybody else who might be on watch.

“I can’t take the launch,” he muttered. “The chugging of the engine will attract attention at once. I’ll have to drift in with the tide and paddle with that emergency oar to get there at all. But I cannot handle such a cumbersome craft as the launch in reconnoitering. I want to go right under their counter.”

It was true that Nick had shut off the engine of the launch when some distance from the yacht. He had also put out the one light they had carried.

His object was to make the people on the yacht suppose it was some gay party taking a ride on the river at night--a common-enough proceeding--and that the ceasing of the engine sound was due merely to the launch passing on its way.

The detective was accustomed to consider all contingencies when working on a case, and it was seldom, indeed, that any of his plans miscarried through carelessness or lack of foresight on his own part.

“I could swim out there,” he reflected. “But that would be stupid, if there is anything else. Let me investigate.”

Cautioning the girl to sit still in the launch, he went ashore and found his way to a well-equipped boathouse, with a padlock on the door.

The padlock was not fastened. It was hanging loose in the hasp, and there was a key in it.

“Somebody has been in this place lately,” thought Nick. “Or there may be a man or two in it at this moment. There is only one way to find out, and that is to go in.”

The door was slightly ajar, and the detective pulled it wide enough to permit the passage of his body.

He was in the deep shadow, for the door was at the side, while the lower end of the structure ran out over the water, so that boats could be slipped out of the house into the river down the greased runways without much exertion.

Nick Carter was used to boathouses and boats. He had a boathouse of his own at a country home he owned, but which he seldom occupied for more than three or four weeks each year.

It did not take him long to decide that the house was empty. This was what he had hoped, for he wanted to help himself to a skiff.

The opening into the river, at the end of the runways, was guarded by double doors, bolted inside, but not locked.

Nick selected his skiff--a small, but substantial craft, rather broader in the beam than might have been desired if he had meant to make high speed.

Soon he had it on the runway, ready to shoot down into the water when released.

He opened one of the doors, took his place in the skiff, and let slip the catch.

The boat slid easily down, struck the water with the slightest sound of a splash, and lay gently rocking while Nick Carter got out the light oars to take him out to where the yacht lay at anchor.

It was too dark for him to see the launch. But there was no sound from that direction, and he was satisfied that Claudia Solado was sitting where he had left her, obeying his instructions to make absolutely no noise while he was gone.

He muffled his oars with a handkerchief and one of his kid gloves, so that there was no sound as he stole up to the yacht and paused in the shadow of her rather broad stern.

He was so close that he could steady himself by one of the rudder chains as he listened.

Nothing seemed to be going on in the yacht, and if he had not seen the man on the cabin roof, still enjoying his cigar, he might have thought everybody on board was asleep, watch and all.

“What the dickens they want to stay on the yacht at all for if they belong to that house is more than I can explain,” muttered Nick. “At least, until I have looked into the matter a little more.”

He deliberately threw his painter rope around the rudder chain, and secured the skiff in that way.

So long as the yacht was at anchor--as he had seen she was, swinging to the tide with her bow pointing upstream--there was no danger of harm to the skiff.

Of course, if the yacht were to start, a different story might be told.

Nick could climb anywhere that a man might expect to be able to go, and soon he went nimbly up the stern of the yacht, taking advantage of every ledge and protection on the way, until he was safely on deck.

He lay down flat behind the log cabin.

It was a handsome vessel, this yacht. Polished brass, white paint, silken curtains at the windows, and every equipment perfect of its kind, told the detective that no expense had been spared to make the vessel a fine one.

Nick Carter was a yachtsman, and he could appreciate every point of excellence--many of which might have escaped the eye of a person who knew less than himself about such things.

Cautiously he crept to the side of the cabin on the landward side. Here he was in deep shadow, for the slowly rising moon, partly obscured by clouds, was on the opposite side of the river.

“That fellow either has a very large cigar, or he smokes it very slowly,” muttered Nick Carter. “I wish he’d get through and go below. Then there might be a chance for me to find out whether Prince Marcos is aboard.”

He pulled himself to his feet, so that, when he stepped upon a block, his eyes were above the level of the cabin roof.

Here he had a good view of the smoker’s feet, only a few yards away, and could see that the man was leaning back comfortably in a deck chair, apparently quite content with the way things were going.

“I wish I could see that chap’s face,” reflected Nick. “His general shape is like that of the bigger of the two men I had the argument with at the Supremacy. Still, there are thousands of men in New York of about his build, so that proves nothing.”

This did not satisfy Nick Carter, however.

Putting two and two together, and considering that this was almost certainly the yacht in which the abductors of Marcos had carried him away from Crownledge, it was quite reasonable to suppose that this big man in the chair on the cabin roof was really Miguel--as Claudia Solado had given his name.

Prince Miguel was calmly smoking throughout these surmises of the detective--for it may as well be admitted that the big man really was Miguel--and Nick tried to determine what should be his next move.

“I might get up there and tackle him unawares,” he muttered. “Then, if we did not make noise enough to attract the attention of the crew or others on the yacht, I might squeeze a confession out of him. All I want is this Marcos. Then I don’t care what is done.”

He turned this over in his mind for a few minutes. Then he decided it would not do.

There could hardly fail to be a great deal of racket if he were to scuffle with Prince Miguel. The latter was a powerfully built fellow, and would make a desperate resistance, no matter how the combat might come out in the end.

As it happened, Nick Carter was not called upon to decide the question for himself.

While he stood on his block, peering under the railing around the roof at the man in the chair, another man came carefully up the steep iron steps to the roof and stood statuelike behind the unsuspecting Miguel.

The attitude of the newcomer was that of one who had deliberately chosen the best way to make a sudden onslaught.

Nick Carter caught his breath in stern enjoyment of the contest he felt he was about to witness.