“if you scream or call the others to your assistance,” she heard the pirate say into her ear, as he leaped from one vessel to the other with her in his arms, “you will only succeed in having them shot, so be silent.”
so she did not scream. even in that instant of horror, when she felt that the pirate was stealing her away for some terrible fate, she knew not what, she possessed the courage to remain silent, and so, as she believed, to save her sister and the others who were with her from instant death.
a hoarse murmur went up from the crew of the yacht when they witnessed this high-handed proceeding on the part of the pirate, for they loved bessie harlan. but they were powerless to help her then; and besides, the rifles of the pirate crew were aimed at their hearts. there was nothing that they could do save to stand quietly by and witness the abduction of bessie harlan.
again the men of the shadow worked as if every act of their master’s had been foreseen before they boarded the yacht.
as they left the deck of the goalong they also cast loose the grapplings, and even as the last one stepped upon the deck of the pirate cruiser, the chief, with bessie in his arms, disappeared through the turret into the hold of the vessel, and as if that were a signal to the engineer,[131] the shadow at the same instant shot ahead like a thing of life, starting away at almost full speed. and so swiftly did she move that, in the gathering gloom—and it was now almost dark—she soon disappeared entirely from view.
for a moment after her departure the crew of the goalong to a man remained where they were standing, as if the unheard-of proceeding of which they had just been witnesses had paralyzed their energies.
then in a body they rushed aft toward the cabin.
but the practised ear and the trained intelligence of the skipper had already told him that the pirate vessel had taken her departure, and he was on the point of coming out on the deck, followed by kane and his companions, when the crew called to him. at first the reality of the horror that had actually occurred did not impress itself upon any of them. not one of them realized the truth of what was told to them—that is, that bessie had actually been taken away.
but when mrs. harlan, the mother, did realize that her younger daughter was gone indeed, and was now at the mercy of the pirate chief, she promptly fainted.
kane, himself, turned white and cold. in all his conjectures concerning the pirate—and he had had many while he was a prisoner below in his own cabin—he had never once thought of this.
true, he had wondered for a moment that bessie was not sent to the cabin with them, but he really did not give the matter any particular thought; he had certainly[132] not dreamed of such an answer to the question as the one he now received.
his wife did not faint. she reeled against the bulkhead, white and haggard, and with her face all pinched into lines of terror, which rendered her almost unrecognizable; and for a time she could only moan her sorrow.
“poor bessie!” she murmured. “poor bessie! rather had we all been murdered in cold blood by that pirate fiend than that this should have happened.”
presently she started, for a hand had fallen on her shoulder. the maids had come on deck and taken charge of her mother, and in her agony she had utterly forgotten her husband.
“you, max?” she asked, without turning.
“yes.”
“it is awful!” she murmured, with a shudder. “what shall we do, dear?”
“bessie had my revolver in her hand,” said max, irrelevantly.
“god grant that she will have the courage to use it!” moaned her sister.
“she will, cora, against him or—herself, if it comes to that.”
mrs. kane shivered. then she flung her arms around her husband’s neck and sobbed as if her heart would indeed break; but after awhile she became quieter, and presently she repeated her former question.
“what shall we do, max?” she asked.
“i don’t know,” he replied vaguely.
[133]
“there is nick carter,” she sobbed. “you know how quickly he accomplished something before.”
“yes; of course, i shall go to him at once. that goes without saying, cora. but how will even carter be able to pursue and catch this brute of a pirate? we have no trace of him. he leaves no track behind him on the pathless ocean. even now he is far out of sight, and we have no idea in which direction he has gone. and besides, cora, if we do the very best we can we cannot hope to arrive in new york in less than forty-eight hours from now. two whole days, that is; and probably that damned vil—pardon me, dear—probably that infernal scoundrel is going faster than we are, in the opposite direction. you see, don’t you, cora, that if we knew exactly where to find the pirate we could not hope to overtake him in much less than two weeks, could we?”
“do you mean, max, that we cannot—cannot hope to—to save bessie?” sobbed his wife.
“i mean this, cora—and we might as well look the matter squarely in the face, now that it has confronted us, don’t you think so?”
“well? go on, max.”
“what i was going to say was this: bessie has got a lot of sand and pluck. you know that.”
“yes.”
“well, if anybody saves bess it will be bess herself who accomplishes it, and it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if she should find a way to do it. there is one thing dead sure, and that is that we can’t do anything—not a blessed thing—now. we’ve got to wait till we can get[134] the right sort of a start. we can’t hope to overtake bess, and be on hand to do her any sort of good, inside of two or three weeks, and it may be as many months. the atlantic ocean is a whopping big place, and there are several other oceans to take into account, too; and so, here is the face of the thing, as i wanted you to look at it a moment ago: if bessie is not in immediate danger, she is just about as safe three months from now as she would be three days from now. if that pirate means any devil’s work, he’ll get about it before he is very much older; and if it happens that there is enough of the gentleman left in him to make him keep his hands off and respect her, why, then no actual harm will come to her. don’t you see that?”
“yes, and it makes me hope. because i do think——”
“what?”
“i think that perhaps the count is still a gentleman, outwardly, at least; don’t you?”
“no, i don’t. but i do think he is in love with bess. and if he is, that is the only one thing in the world that will save her.”
“why, max, that very fact—if it is a fact——”
“there, there, now! that very fact is what i’m talking about. if he is really in love with bess, she’ll be as safe from harm when we find her as if she had been aboard the goalong all the time.”
“but, max! have you thought——”
“thought what?”
“of the name of it.”
“oh, confound the name of it. it’s the game, and not[135] the name, with which we are concerned just now. bess has got a gun; don’t forget that—and she knows how to use it, too. and cadillac is in love with her, up to his ears, if i am any judge of human nature. when he was our guest it was as plain as the nose on your face.”
“yes; i thought so, too.”
“well, as i said a minute ago, bess knows how to use a gun all right, but if there is one thing which she knows how to make use of better than any other, it is a man who is in love with her. she can twist one of ’em around her fingers like straws, and i’ll bet a million that she’ll be doing the act for the modern red rover, as he calls himself, before he’s had her a prisoner an hour. she’ll be boss of the whole shooting match before she has been a day aboard the shadow.”
“perhaps she is dead, even now, while we are talking about her,” said cora, shuddering.
“she is either in no immediate danger, or somebody is dead; you can bet on that, girl!”
“if only she did not faint away,” murmured kane’s wife; and he looked at her strangely for a moment and then shrugged his shoulders as he replied:
“bess isn’t one of the fainting kind, cora. and now, don’t you think you had better go to your mother?”
“yes, dear, but what shall i tell her?”
“tell her! there isn’t anything to tell her, is there? tell her what we have been talking about. tell her every idea that has occurred to us about the matter. tell her that we are legging it back for new york and nick carter just as fast as this blessed old tub will carry us.[136] tell her that when we get there i’ll pull down stars out of the sky and dig up mountains with my two hands to save bess. tell her—she already knows it, but you can remind her of it, just the same—tell her that your chump husband is worth a number of millions of dollars, and that he’ll spend every last dollar he’s got to find bess and save her, and to hunt down the fellow that stole her, no matter what has happened; and tell her if she can think of anything else that she would like done, it shall be done if there are men in the world to do it. and tell her not to cry. crying won’t help the matter any, and it interferes with good, clear eyesight. i’d like to swear, but swearing doesn’t assist the judgment any, as i have discovered, so you see i don’t do it. brace up, cora, girl! bite on the bullet. it hurts, i know. it hurts me just as much as it does you. but let me tell you this much before we part—and it means a good deal, too.”
“what, max?”
“nick carter thinks a lot of bessie, if anybody should ask you. he won’t require any seven-league boots behind him to spur him on in this matter; and if there is a man on top of earth who can figure this thing out about the way it really is, that man is nick carter. he will see through it like a glass, and blow me if i don’t somehow feel as if he would know at once just about where to look for bessie and the pirate.”
