No, Fyfe had not come back yet.

“Go up to the mouth of Tumbling Creek,” Stella ordered.

Barlow swung the Waterbug about, cleared the point, and stood up along the shore.  Stella sat on a cushioned seat at the back of the pilot house, hard-eyed, struggling against that dead weight that seemed, to grow and grow in her breast.  That elemental fury raging in the woods made her shrink.  Her own hand had helped to loose it, but her hands were powerless to stay it; she could only sit and watch and wait, eaten up with misery of her own making.  She was horribly afraid, with a fear she would not name to herself.

Behind that density of atmosphere, the sun had gone to rest.  The first shadows of dusk were closing in, betokened by a thickening of the smoke-fog into which the Waterbug slowly plowed.  To port a dimming shore line; to starboard, aft, and dead ahead, water and air merged in two boat lengths.  Barlow leaned through the pilot-house window, one hand on the wheel, straining his eyes on their course.  Suddenly he threw out the clutch, shut down his throttle control with one hand, and yanked with the other at the cord which loosed the Waterbug’s shrill whistle.

Dead ahead, almost upon them, came an answering toot.

“I thought I heard a gas-boat,” Barlow exclaimed.  “Sufferin’ Jerusalem!  Hi, there!”

He threw his weight on the wheel, sending it hard over.  The cruiser still had way on; the momentum of her ten-ton weight scarcely had slackened, and she answered the helm.  Out of the deceptive thickness ahead loomed the sharp, flaring bow of another forty-footer, sheering quickly, as her pilot sighted them.  She was upon them, and abreast, and gone, with a watery purl of her bow wave, a subdued mutter of exhaust, passing so near than an active man could have leaped the space between.

“Sufferin’ Jerusalem!” Barlow repeated, turning to Stella.  “Did you see that, Mrs. Jack?  They got him.”

Stella nodded.  She too had seen Monohan seated on the after deck, his head sunk on his breast, irons on his wrists.  A glimpse, no more.

“That’ll help some,” Barlow grunted.  “Quick work.  But they come blame near cuttin’ us down, beltin’ along at ten knots when you can’t see forty feet ahead.”

An empty beach greeted them at Tumbling Creek.  Reluctantly Stella bade Barlow turn back.  It would soon be dark, and Barlow said he would be taking chances of piling on the shore before he could see it, or getting lost in the profound black that would shut down on the water with daylight’s end.

Less than a mile from Cougar Bay, the Waterbug’s engine gave a few premonitory gasps and died.  Barlow descended to the engine room, hooked up the trouble lamp, and sought for the cause.  He could not find it.  Stella could hear him muttering profanity, turning the flywheel over, getting an occasional explosion.