Page:Frank Packard - The Adventures of Jimmie Dale.djvu/254

250 If he could reach it with a little lead to the good, there was a chance! It would take, say, six minutes, granting the boat a speed of ten miles an hour—and she could do that. The others could hardly overtake him in that time—they hadn't got started yet. He could hear them still shouting and talking at the wharf. And Mittel's "twice as fast" was undoubtedly an exaggeration, anyhow.

A minute more passed, another—and then, astern, Jimmie Dale caught the racket from the exhaust of a high-powered engine, and a white streak seemed to shoot out upon the surface of the water from where, obscured now, he placed the wharf. A quarter-mile lead, roughly four hundred yards; yes, he had as much as that—but that, too, was very little.

He bent over his engine, coaxing it, nursing it to its highest efficiency; his eyes strained now upon the point ahead, now upon his pursuers behind. He was running with the wind, thank Heaven! or the small boat would have had a further handicap—it was rolling up quite a sea.

The steering gear, he found, was corded along the side of the boat, permitting its manipulation from almost any position, and, abruptly now, Jimmie Dale left the engine to rummage through the little locker in the stern of the boat. But as he rummaged, his eyes held speculatively on the boat astern. She was gaining unquestionably, steadily, but not as fast as he had feared. He would still have a hundred yards' lead, at least, abreast the point—and, he was smiling grimly now, a hundred yards there meant life to the Gray Seal! The locker was full of a heterogeneous collection of odds and ends—a suit of oilskins, tools, tins, and cans of various sizes and descriptions. Jimmie Dale emptied the contents, some sort of powder, of a small, round tin box overboard, and from his pocket took out the banknotes, crammed them into the box, crammed his watch in on top of them, and screwed the cover on tightly. His fingers were flying now. A long strip torn from the trousers' leg of the oilskins was wrapped again and again around the box—and the box was stuffed into his pocket.

The flash of a revolver shot cut the blackness behind him,