Part 134

“There ain't time. I guessed at the fuse--it may burn quicker than I reckoned.”

The young man drove his fist into the other's face and knocked him down. Then he jerked him upright again.

“Take me where you've planted that dynamite or we'll stay here and go up together. And now you know I mean what I say.”

The last blow had cowed his man; he raised his fist again.

The visitor leaped away from him and ran along the lower deck, Mayo at his heels. He led the way aft. In the gloom of betweendecks there gleamed a red spark. Mayo rushed to it, whipped off his cap, and snuffed the baleful glow. When he was sure that the fuse was dead he heard his man scrambling up the companion ladder. He pursued and caught the quarry as he gained the upper deck, and buffeted the man about the ears and forced him into a stateroom.

“This means state prison for you! You were guilty of barratry before, and you know it! How did you dare to try this last trick?”

“I had my orders.”

“Orders from what man?”

“No matter. You needn't ask. I won't tell.” The stranger was sullen, and had recovered some of his assurance, now that his fear of the dynamite was removed.

“You're a lunatic. You ought to have known you couldn't pull off a thing of this kind.”

“I don't know about that! It was working pretty slick. If she had split and gone off these ledges, you couldn't have proved anything special. I've got good backing. You better let me go.”

Mayo glared at him, deprived of speech by this effrontrery.

“You'd better come over with the big fellows,” advised the man. “I can tell you right now that every hole in Limeport has been plugged against you. You can't hire equipment there, or get a cent's credit. It has all been nicely attended to. You're here fooling with a dead duck. You'd be better off if that dynamite had been let alone to split her.”

The entire uselessness of words in a situation like this, the inadequacy of speech to meet such brazen boldness, checked Mayo's oath-peppered anathema. He pulled the key from the stateroom door and menaced the prisoner with his fist when the man started to follow him out.

“You don't dare to keep me aboard here! Take warning by what they have already done to you, Mayo! I'm sure of my backing.”

“You'll have a chance to use it!” retorted the young man. He dodged out and locked the stateroom door.

“Your passenger is not going back with you, sir,” he called down over the rail to the towboat captain.

“I take my orders from him.”

“You are taking them from me now. Cast off!”.

“Look here--”

“I mean what I say, sir. That man you brought out here is going to stay till I can put him into the hands of the police.”

“What has he done?”

“The less you know about the matter the better it will be for yourself and your boat! You tell the man who chartered your tug--”

“You have him aboard, there!”

Mayo looked straight into the towboat man's eyes.

“You tell Mr. Fogg, who chartered your tug, that I have his man under lock and key and that the more riot he starts over the matter the better I will be satisfied. And don't bring any more passengers out here unless they are police officers.” Then he roared in his master-mariner tones: “Cast off your lines, sir. You know what the admiralty law is!”

The captain nodded, closed his pilot-house window, and clanged his bell. Mayo knew by his mystified air that he was not wholly in the confidence of his passenger and his employer.

This bungling, barefaced attempt to destroy the steamer touched Mayo's pride as deeply as it stirred his wrath. Fogg evidently viewed the pretensions of the new ownership with contempt. He must have belief in his own power to ruin and to escape consequences, pondered the young man. He had put Mayo and his humble associates on the plane of the ordinary piratical wreckers of the coast-men who grabbed without law or right, who must be prepared to fight other pirates of the same ilk, and whose affairs could have no standing in a court of law.