watah!" Tom gripped Nicky’s arm. "Come on!" he cried, "let’s get there so they won’t forget and leave us!" "No!" urged Nicky. "Wait—come on with me!" "What for?" demanded Cliff. "Where are you going?" "Come on!" Nicky demanded of his chums. "We don’t want to go." "Don’t want to go—" began Cliff. Then he followed Nicky.

The self-appointed leader went hastily down into the forecastle. His two comrades followed, wonderingly. "I don’t see—" began Cliff. "Look at it this way," begged Nicky. "If we go with them we are in their hands, aren’t we? When the cutter has come and gone, without finding anything but the wrecked boat, these men will want to make us tell them where the treasure is supposed to be. Then they’ll desert us!"

"That’s good common sense," agreed Cliff. "Yes, it is," Tom nodded. "Let them go in the tender," Nicky pursued his argument. "Then we can take possession of this boat, and when the cutter comes we can signal, and then—isn’t there some reward for claiming salvage on a boat, some way?" "You’re going to get a treasure out of this adventure somehow, aren’t you?" laughed Tom. "I never saw such a money-grabbing fellow!"

"Whether I do—we do—or not," Nicky defended, "we are safer here than with those hi-jackers. If the cutter doesn’t come, we have all the food and things—maybe the arsenal. We can stand them off and——"

"Instead of them making us toe the mark, we can make them do it!" Cliff cried, fired by Nicky’s eagerness. "That’s it!" Tom agreed. "Nicky has the right idea!"

The tender, which was used with muffled oars according to need, had by that time been lowered over the slanting side of the _Senorita_. "But suppose she sinks!" a new thought came to Cliff. "The channels can’t be very deep, even at the deepest, between these islands," Nicky asserted. "I think she has settled onto the rock now. If she starts down we can almost jump onto that island—and we won’t be as badly off as in the hands of hi-jackers!"

Gathering most of their weapons and some supplies and dropping them into the boat, the crew hurriedly rowed away on the course toward the distant mainland and the mouth of the Shark River where they could hide for a time. Tom, Cliff and Nicky assured that the ship was completely deserted except for themselves, came on deck and from the points of vantage watched the departure without disclosing themselves.

The cutter, in the meantime, had pursued to the best of her speed during most of the night, but when 

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