CHAPTER IX – THE CHASE BEGINS – THURSDAY MORNING
THE four men were in the smoking-car, spinning along toward Milwaukee. Beveridge handed Dick a cigar. Then, after a little: —
“Say, Smiley, I’m doing a rather odd thing with you.”
“Are you?”
“Yes – in taking you off here instead of having you locked right up in Chicago.”
Dick waited.
“You see, I have thought this business over pretty carefully; I have thought you over pretty carefully – and I like you. Now I have been some time on this case, and I understand it, I think. I understand you, and McGlory, and Stenzenberger, and the lot of you. But there is one place where I’m still weak, – that is Spencer and his places up there in Lake Huron. That is the only thing we haven’t run down. I could get it of course in time, but it would take time, and that’s just what I don’t want to take now. I’m depending on you to set me right. Of course it’s your privilege, if you want, to shut your mouth up tight. But I don’t take you for that sort of a chap. I have a way of my own of going at these things. There are some of our men would bully you, but that isn’t my way – not with you. I ‘ll tell you right here, that any help you can give me will be a mighty good thing for you in the long run.”
“What do you expect me to tell you?”
“You will know at the proper time. All I want to find out now is whether you are going to stand by me and help me through with it or not.”
“Why, I will do what I can.”
“What does that mean exactly?”
“I will tell you all I know.”
“All right, sir. Now we understand each other. And I ‘ll do what I can to make it easy for you.”
“There’s one thing – ”
“What is it?”
“What are you going to do with us in Milwaukee?”
“If we have to stop over night, why, we ‘ll go to a hotel.”
“Not the jail, eh?”
“No,” – Beveridge gave his prisoner a keen glance, then shook his head, – “no, that won’t be necessary.”
The Foote was not at Milwaukee; apparently she was not at Sheboygan, Manitowoc, Sturgeon Bay, or Marinette. Throughout the night, while Dick and Harper were shut up with Wilson on the top floor of the hotel, Beveridge haunted the telegraph office downstairs. Simultaneous messages went out to Cedar River, Green Bay, Two Rivers, Kewaunee, – to every little town along the west shore, even back to Kenosha, Racine, and Waukegan. Then Beveridge thought of the east shore, and tried all the ports from Harbor Springs down to St. Joseph, but with no success. He dropped on the lounge in the hotel office for a cat nap now and then. And finally, at half-past five in the morning, he was called to the telephone and informed that the Foote had just been sighted heading in toward the breakwater.
Promptly he aroused his prisoners, who obligingly tumbled into their clothes; and the party drove down to the river and boarded a tug. A little time was to be saved by meeting the revenue cutter before she could get in between the piers. So out they went, past silent wharves and sleepy bridge keepers, out into the gold of the sunrise.
There was the Foote nearly in, her old-fashioned engine coughing hard, her side wheels beating the water to a foam, making her very best speed of nine miles an hour. She caught the signal from the tug, stopped, backed, and let down her companion ladder. Captain Sullivan, a grizzled veteran, bearing evidences of hasty dressing, was at the rail to meet them.
“Well,” said Beveridge, “I’m mighty glad to see you, Captain. I didn’t know whether you were on earth or not.”
“I got your message at Sturgeon Bay, and came right down.”
“Did you answer?”
“Of course,” somewhat testily. “You gave me no Milwaukee address. I sent it to Lakeville.”
“That so? They should have forwarded it. They must have gone to sleep down there.”
“I know nothing about that. All clear down there? All right, Mr. Ericsen!”
The tug backed away, the paddle-wheels revolved again, and the old steamer swung around in a wide circle.
“You haven’t told me where you want to go, Mr. Beveridge.” Captain Sullivan was taking in Smiley and Harper with an eye that knew no compromise.
“We ‘ll do that now, Cap’n. Mr. Smiley here is going to help us out a little if you will show us your chart of Lake Huron.”
“He is!” was the Captain’s reply. Then he turned abruptly and led the way up to the chart room.
The chart was spread out, and the three men bent over it.
“Now, Mr. Smiley,” said Beveridge, “can you put your finger on Spencer’s place?”
Dick did so.
“There’s a harbor there, you say?”
“What’s that nonsense,” broke in Captain Sullivan, “a harbor behind False Middle Island?”
“Yes,” Dick replied, “a good one.”
“You’d better tell that to the Hydrographic Office.”
“I don’t need to tell it to anybody. I’ve been in there with my schooner.”
“When was that, young man?”
“This month.”
The Captain turned away with a shrug, and joined his lieutenant on the bridge. “We ‘ll make for False Middle Island, Mr. Ericsen, just beyond Seventy Mile Point.”
“Very well, sir.”
Deliberately, very deliberately, the Foote coughed and rumbled northward, and Milwaukee fell away astern. She could not hope to catch the Merry Anne if the southerly breeze should hold. The schooner was running light, and even though she might have made but eighty or ninety miles during the night, she was by this time more than abreast of Milwaukee, and on the east side of the Lake, where she had the advantage in the run for the Straits of Mackinac.
“Do you think,” asked Beveridge, when the Captain had gone to the bridge, “that we can overhaul her in the Straits?”
Dick shook his head. “Hardly. She has had a pretty steady breeze all night.”
“But it isn’t very strong.”
“It doesn’t need to be. There is nothing she likes better than running before just such a breeze. And when the sun is well up, it will blow harder.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“This here is sort of an old tub, too.”
Dick sniffed. “You have to watch the bubbles to see which way she’s going.”
Beveridge studied the chart. “See here,” he said, “where’s the Canadian hangout?” Dick laid his finger on the indentation that represented Burnt Cove.
“Beyond the – what’s this – Duck Island?”
“Just beyond the Duck Islands.”
“Which place do you think he will make for?”
“Well – I can only tell you what I think.”
“Go ahead.”
“What McGlory will do will be to head for Spencer and take off the old man.”
“And then run over to Burnt Cove?”
“That’s what I think. Burnt Cove is in Canada, you see.”
“Yes, I see it is. The boundary line runs down west and south of Manitoulin Island.”
“If you want to stop him very bad, you’d better have Captain Sullivan go over to the boundary, close to Outer Duck Island, and then head for Spencer. In that way we shall be approaching Spencer along the line that McGlory must take if he tries to make the cove; and if it is not night, we ought to stand a good chance of sighting him. I figure that we ought to get up there just about in time.”
“Of course, he doesn’t know that we’re so hot on his trail,” mused Beveridge.
Dick sniffed again. “If you call this hot.”
The Captain returned from the bridge, and Beveridge repeated Dick’s suggestion.
“How are we to know this schooner?”
“She’s sky-blue with a white line.”
“Is she fast?”
“She don’t need paddle-wheels to beat this.” This remark did not please Captain Sullivan. He turned away.
“I don’t know how you feel, Smiley,” said
Beveridge, “but I didn’t get much sleep last night. Did you?”
“Precious little.”
Within a few moments, while the colors of the dawn were fading, while the Foote was pounding heavily along northwest by north, the special agents and their two prisoners were sleeping like children.
At two o’clock Thursday morning the Foote lay, with motionless engines and lights extinguished, to the southward of Jennie Graham Shoal, near Outer Duck Island. Smiley and Harper, with Wilson close at hand, stood leaning on the rail, watching a launch that the crew were lowering to the water.
“Well,” said Dick, in a low voice, “it looks as if we might get them.”
“Shouldn’t wonder,” Wilson replied. He, too, was subdued by the strain.
“Pretty dark, though.”
“That isn’t all on their side.”
“No, perhaps it isn’t. Going to put out both launches, eh?”
“It looks that way.”
Cautiously and swiftly the sailors worked. One launch, and then the other, was lowered into the water.
“Pretty neat, ain’t it?” whispered Pink. “Why, with this wind they’ve got to run in right by one or other of the boats to get to Burnt Cove. Would they let us sail the Anne around, think, if they get her back?”
Dick shook his head.
Farther aft Beveridge was talking to Captain Sullivan. “It’s the only thing to do, Captain. With him along, we can’t miss her.”
“I’ve nothing more to say. I don’t like it; but he’s your man.”
“One thing more, Captain. It won’t hardly be necessary to send an officer with me.”
“But – ”
“You see Wilson and myself, and about four husky sailors, a couple of
‘em to run the launch, will be enough, Why not just leave it that way?
You might tell your men they’re to take my orders.”
His meaning was obvious to the Captain; but he hesitated. This man Beveridge was young and bumptious. Irregular things had sometimes to be done, but it were best that they should be done by a seasoned officer. Still, it was Beveridge’s case. They walked together toward the prisoners.
“Smiley,” said Beveridge, “I’m going to take you along. I guess there isn’t much doubt you could tell your schooner in the dark?”
“Tell her in the dark!” exclaimed Pink. “Why, he knows the squeak of every block!”
So Dick went. The Captain added a fifth sailor for safety, and took time to give him a few quiet instructions before he joined the launch. Then they pushed off and slipped away into the night. For four hours after that, the only sound heard aboard the Foote, where Pink, sleepless, hung over the rail, guarded by a deep-chested sailor, was the occasional puff-puff of one of the launches as it changed its post. A dozen pairs of eyes were searching the dark, looking for any craft that might be coming from Michigan.
As Captain Sullivan suspected, Beveridge’s launch was over the Canadian boundary half an hour after she lost sight of the ship. Then Beveridge drew Dick back near the boiler. “Tell me this, Smiley. Do you think those fellows could possibly have got through before now?”
“I haven’t much doubt of it.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Because of the wind. It has never let down a minute since they started. If they lost no time at Spencer’s, they could have done it easily.”
“That’s what I thought. Will you take the wheel and pilot us into Burnt Cove?”
“Sure, if you want me to.”
Dick took the wheel. The fifth sailor spoke up. “You can’t do that, sir.”
“Can’t do what?” said Beveridge.
“Take the wheel, sir. Powers is to keep the wheel. That’s the orders.”
“There’s nobody but me giving orders here.”
“Sorry, sir; but Powers has got to keep the wheel.”
“We won’t have any talk about this, young man. I’m a special agent of the United States Treasury Department, and I’m running this business. Powers can sit down.”
The sailor’s orders evidently did not warrant him to resist further.
Dick looked about for his bearings. Dimly he could make out the islands to the left. “What does she draw?” he asked.
“Two feet.”
With only two feet of draft he could take chances. He was directly on the course that the Merry Anne had taken in leaving the cove, and he felt as certain, with the compass before him, as if he had made the trip by night a hundred times. There was very little sea, and the launch made good progress. “You might tell the engineer to crowd her all he can,” he said to Beveridge. “It’s quite a run.”
Once Dick glanced back; and he winced. There sat Wilson, on his left hand and not a yard away, with a rifle across his knees. At this moment Beveridge returned from a whispered consultation with the engineer, and scowled at his assistant. “That isn’t necessary, Bert,” said he. “Put it up.”
The overzealous young man laid the rifle on the seat behind him; and Beveridge, after a moment of hard thinking, his eyes fixed on Dick’s muscular back, came up beside the wheel and leaned on the coamings. Dick’s gaze left the compass only for the darkness ahead, where the outline of something that he knew to be a coast line was, to his trained eye, taking shape.
“Say, Smiley,” – the special agent’s voice was lowered; his tone was friendly, – “don’t let that bother you. Nobody is holding a gun on you here. That isn’t my way – with you.”
Dick’s eyes were fixed painfully on the compass.
“I just want you to know that it was a mistake. These guns aren’t for you.”
Beveridge, having said enough, was now silent. Apparently too boyish for his work, often careless in his talk, he was handling Smiley right, and so well did he know it that he was willing to lounge there at his prisoner’s elbow and watch the course in silence. If Beveridge was ambitious, greedy for success and promotion, frequently unscrupulous as to the means to be employed, – as now, when he was deliberately going into English territory, an almost unheard-of and certainly unlawful performance, – hard, even merciless, so long as he regarded only his “case”; he was also impulsive and sometimes warm hearted when appealed to on the personal side. He had, before now, gone intuitively to the heart of problems that stronger minds than his, relying on reasoning alone, had been unable to solve.
Much as a bank teller detects instantly a counterfeit bill or coin, he picked his man. He was quick to feel the difference between a right-minded man who has fallen into wrong ways and the really wrong-minded man. His course tonight was a triumph. He had given his prisoner the means to lead his little party to destruction, but he knew perfectly that nothing of the sort would be done. More, the only man aboard who could prove in court that he had gone over that vague thing, the boundary line, was this same prisoner, who should, by all sensible thinking, be the last man to trust with such information; and yet he felt perfectly comfortable as he leaned out a little way and watched the foam slipping away from the bow.
The launch went on toward the increasing shadows, plunged through the surf, and glided into the cove.
“See anything?” whispered Beveridge.
“Not a thing,” Smiley replied.
“She isn’t here, eh?”
“No, neither of them.”
“Neither of what?”
“Neither the Anne nor the Estelle, Spencer’s schooner. Shall we go back outside?”
“Yes.”
“You speak to the engineer, then. This bell makes too much noise.”
They backed cautiously around and returned through the surf to deep water.
“Lie up a little way off the shore here,” said Beveridge; “we ‘ll cut them off if they try to get in.”
For a moment nothing was said; then this from Smiley, “Do you mind my saying a word?”
“No. What?”
“It has just struck me – we are wasting time here.”
“You think so?”
“I know so.”
“Why?”
“It stands to reason that McGlory would expect to be chased, don’t it?”
“Of course.”
“Well, then, he is not going to put right over here after he has taken off old Spencer, is he? It’s almost like running back on his course – amounts to the same thing.”
“But he is likely to come here, isn’t he?”
“I should think so.”
“Well,” impatiently, “how else could he do it?”
“Easily enough. He could go right on east from Spencer’s place and make for Owen Channel, up near the head of Georgian Bay. That’s at the other end of this island.”
“Manitoulin Island? Is it as big as that?”
“Yes, it lies all across this end of Lake Huron. If he went through Owen Channel, he could get around into the North Channel, and then down into Bayfield Sound and Lake Wolsey. Bayfield Sound, you see, pretty nearly cuts the island in halves. It is right opposite here, only a few miles overland. That would be a long way around, but it is the safe way. You see, I’ve been thinking – ”
“Well – what?”
“Why, he would be likely to think just like I did, that when you had got up here you wouldn’t be able to resist coming on across the line.”
“You seem to know these routes pretty well for a man who has been to Spencer’s only once.”
“I saw it on the chart the other day. A man couldn’t help figuring that out.”
“What would you suggest doing?”
“Putting for Spencer’s, just as tight as your old stationary wash-tub can make it.”
“But hold on, now. If you think they have got away from there long ago – ”
“I think that, but I’m not sure. Supposing they have – then you’ve lost them anyhow. Don’t you see? But suppose there was a delay in getting away there, – it’s more than likely McGlory and Spencer wouldn’t agree. McGlory isn’t the agreeing kind, and I don’t think Spencer is either. It will be daylight before so very long, and with this wind they can’t get here, if they’re coming here at all, without our sighting them on the way over. And there is just a fighting chance of catching them there before they make for Georgian Bay, or some other place we don’t know of.” Beveridge thought a moment. “There is something in that. We ‘ll do it.”
At mid-morning the Foote stopped her engines abreast of False Middle Island, and Captain Sullivan sent for Beveridge.
“You tell me there is a harbor in there?”
“That’s what I understand. But it won’t be necessary to take the steamer in.”
The Captain’s expression showed that he had not the slightest notion of taking her in.
“I think,” Beveridge went on, “that you had better put me ashore with a few men in there north of the island. I ‘ll go around behind the sand-dunes and come on the place from the woods. Then if they should be there, and if they should try to run out, you can stop them. I ‘ll have Smiley guide me.”
“You’re going to take him ashore with you?
“That’s what I’m going to do.”
“I don’t believe in this!”
Beveridge said nothing.
“Oh, very well. I ‘ll have a boat ready.” Smiley was called, and Beveridge drew him aside and outlined his plan. Shortly Wilson joined them, and a half-dozen sailors were picked from the crew. Then, all but Smiley armed with rifles and revolvers, they descended to the small boat and were brought rapidly to the shore.
“Which way?” asked Beveridge, sticking close at Smiley’s elbow.
“I ‘ll show you; come along.” He led the way back among the pines and made a circuit, bringing up squarely on the landward side of the settlement.
“Where is it now, Smiley?”
“Right there.”
Beveridge peered out through the trees, then beckoned his men together. “Come in close, boys, and pick your trees. Keep out of sight – and quiet. Take my rifle, one of you.”
“Shall we go in?” asked Wilson.
“You stay here, Bert.”
“Hadn’t you better take your rifle?”
“No, I don’t want it. Quiet now.”
The men spread out, taking places where they could command the outbuildings.
“Smiley?”
“Yes.”
“Which is Spencer’s house – where he lives himself?”
“The biggest one. You can see the roof over that shed there.”
“All right. Much obliged.”
Beveridge walked rapidly out into the clearing and disappeared around the shed. They heard him mount Spencer’s front steps and knock.
“He’s plucky enough,” muttered Dick.
“Oh, don’t you worry about Bill Beveridge,” said Wilson. “Why, I’ve seen him – ”
But Beveridge was calling for them to join him.
“Nobody here?” asked Wilson.
“Not a soul. I took a look around the house. They left in a hurry. See there.”
He nodded toward the harbor. There lay the Merry Anne at the wharf. The smaller schooner was not to be seen.
“Too late, eh?” said Wilson.
“Too late.”
“Suppose they’ve gone overland?”
“Not a bit of it. They left Smiley’s schooner here and went off in Spencer’s.”
“Oh, he had one too?”
“Certainly he did.”
Dick had made headlong for the schooner. Now they saw him standing on the after deckhouse, reading a paper which he had found nailed to the mast.
“What have you there?” called Beveridge.
“Come and see.”
The special agent joined him and took the paper. “It’s hard enough to read. Whoever wrote this was in a big hurry. What’s this? ‘Left again. You’d better foot it home. Whiskey Jim.’ Whiskey Jim, eh? He’s stealing your thunder, Smiley.”
“Will you let me see it again?” said Dick. He sat down on the edge of the deck-house and read it over, gazing at it with fascinated eyes. The other men watched him curiously.