cook and Don Ortiga and his first mate, Tew, there were four deck hands who also rowed the boat with muffled oars and padded oarlocks, and who helped to load and unload what they carried; also there was the engineer and Nelse. The latter, they found out later, was only aboard for a certain purpose, not one of the crew.

While they noted the precision machinery for driving the boat, and saw the novel way in which the exhaust was deadened by being run through a large pipe through a sheathed channel in the hull, into a specially devised muffler which completely broke up the explosive force of the spent gases and silenced their noise, the chums marveled at the pains that had been taken to make a once innocent pleasure yacht into a craft suited for breaking its country’s laws.

Nicky reiterated his wish that they could do something to bring the lawbreakers to justice, but Tom, again cautious, urged him not even to think of it just then.

Mr. Neale, their chief in the beginning of the expedition, had overhauled Sam’s sloop with the aid of the revenue cutter’s men, had learned Sam’s side of the story, found Sam contrite but afraid to return, had discovered that the United States men could take no action against the Jamaican, and let Sam go his way rejoicing. The revenue cutter then returned toward the keys in order to land Mr. Neale at a base from which he could carry on his search for the missing boys.

But the cutter did not get there that night.

Nicky, Tom and Cliff stood on the foredeck of the hi-jackers’ ship as the anchor was quietly drawn up and the engines began turning over, their twin-four cylinders thudding with little outward noise.

“Here we go!” Nicky whispered. “Off on our first piratical cruise.”

“Off to be shot,” Cliff corrected, “if that revenue cutter they spoke about ever see us.”

“They wouldn’t shoot us,” Nicky protested.

“They wouldn’t mean to,” Tom agreed. “But they will chase—and this boat will run. That means a shot across the bows and more if we don’t ‘heave to’—which this crew won’t do if they can see a chance to escape.”

“What are they ‘advertising’ for, then?” demanded Cliff. His comrades stared at him; for the answer to their unspoken question, he pointed upward.

Looking toward the tip of the short spar 

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