Page:Cruise of the Dry Dock.djvu/156

 may take us some time to reach port——” Both men fell into a musing silence as Greer nibbled the boat forward with the single oar.

“The thing's worth over a million pounds,” appraised Caradoc.

Suddenly Madden straightened with an idea. “How about hitching that schooner to the dock and towing her?”

“What an American idea!” Caradoc lifted his voice slightly.

“Would we—make any—headway, sir, with the schooner's—light machinery?” asked Greer, his sentence punctuated by shoves at his oar.

“We would have to try and see. Besides, we would have to do little else than help the current we are in. The Atlantic eddy sweeps through the Caribbean close to the South American coast. If we could control our direction slightly, we would perhaps make La Guayra or the Port of Spain.”

“With a seven or eight mile current that would take us months—years… What is the distance to La Guayra?” this from Smith.

“Something around fifteen hundred miles.