“Now, then, come on,” he shouted, dashing toward the boat, “shove off, boys, and if Joe’s in the Upper Inlet we’ll find him.”

“Hurray,” cheered the others, much heartened by the prospect of any trace of the missing boy, however slight.

“Give way, boys,” bellowed the captain, who had insisted on coming along armed with a huge horse pistol of ancient pattern which he had strapped on himself in the morning when the news of Joe Digby’s disappearance reached him.  “This reminds me uv the time when I was A. B. on the Bonnie Bess and we smoked out a fine mess of pirates in the Caribees.”

“Regular pirates?” inquired Andy as Rob and Merritt bent to the oars.

“Reg’lar piratical pirates, my boy,” responded the old salt, “we decorated the trees with ’em and they looked a lot handsomer there than they did a-sailin’ the blue main.”

Further reminiscences of the captain’s were cut short by their arrival at the Flying Fish’s side.  They had hastily thrown two cases of gasoline into the dinghy before they shoved off so that all that remained to be done was to fill the fast craft’s tank and she was ready to be off.

“Hold on,” warned Rob, as Tubby Hopkins was about to secure the dinghy to the mooring buoy, “we’ll tow her along.  We may need her.  There’s lots of shoal water in that Upper Inlet.”

“Right yer are, my boy; there’s nothin’ like bein’ forehanded,” remarked the captain as Merritt bent over the flywheel and Rob threw in the spark and turned on the gasoline.  After a few revolutions an explosion resulted and the Flying Fish was off on the mission which might mean so much or so little to the anxious hearts on board her.

“Do you know the channel,” asked Merritt as Rob with his eyes glued on the coast sent the Flying Fish through the waves, or rather wavelets, for the sea was almost like a sheet of glass.

“I’ve been up here once or twice after duck,” rejoined Rob, “but it’s a tricky sort of a place to get through.  However, I guess we’ll make it.”

As they drew nearer the shores the boys made out an opening which Rob said was the Upper Inlet channel.

“Say, Tubby, get out the lead line and let’s see how much water we have,” directed Rob as the color of the ocean began to change from dark blue to a sort of greenish tinge, lightening in spots, where the shoals were near to the surface, to a sandy yellow.

The stout lad took a position in the bow and swinging the lead about his head cast it suddenly ahead of the Flying Fish’s bow.

“Slow down,” ordered Rob, and Merritt cut down the motor to not more than two hundred revolutions a minute.

The lead line, tagged with different colored bits of flannel at each fathom length, sang through the stout lad’s fingers.

“By-a-quarter-three,” he called out the next instant.

This meant that three fathoms and a quarter or eighteen feet three inches of water was under the keel of the little craft.