“Oh yes, let me tell you.  Last night, Marjorie and I arrived from Bar Harbor on my yacht, for the launching.  It’s anchored off the yard now.  Well, early this morning, while it was still gray and misty, I was up.  I’ll confess I’m worried over to-morrow.  I hadn’t been able to forget that cruiser.  I was out on the deck, peering into the mist, when I’m sure I saw her.  I was just giving a signal to the boat we have patrolling, when a shot whistled past me and the bullet buried itself in the woodwork of the main saloon back of me.  I dug it out of the wood with my knife—­so you see I got it almost unflattened.  That’s all I have got, too.  The cruiser made a getaway, clean.”

“I’m sure it was aimed at him,” Marjorie exclaimed.  “I don’t think it was chance.  Don’t you see?  They’ve tried everything else.  Now if they could get my father, the head of the company, that would be a blow that would cripple the trust.”

Marlowe patted his daughter’s hand reassuringly and smiled again, as though not to magnify the incident.

“Marjorie was so alarmed,” he confessed, “that nothing would satisfy her but that I should come ashore and stay here at the Belleclaire, where we always put up when we are in town.”

The telephone rang and Marjorie answered it.  “I hope you’ll pardon me,” she excused, hanging up the receiver.  “They want me very much down-stairs.”  Then appealing, she added:  “I’ll have to leave you with father.  But, please, you must catch that crank who is threatening him.”

“I shall do my level best,” promised Kennedy.  “You may depend on that.”

“You see,” explained the captain as she left us, “I’ve invited quite a large party to attend the launching, for one reason or another.  Marjorie must play hostess.  They’re mostly here at the hotel.  Perhaps you saw some of them as you came in.”

Craig was still scanning the bullet.  “It looks almost as if some one had dum-dummed it,” he remarked, finally.  “It’s curiously done, too.  Just look at those grooves.”

Both the captain and I looked.  It had a hard jacket of cupro-nickel, like the army bullet, covering a core of softer metal.  Some one had notched or scored the jacket as if with a sharp knife, though not completely through it.  Had it been done for the purpose of inflicting a more frightful wound if it struck the captain?

“There’ve been other shots, too,” went on Marlowe.  “One of my watchmen was wounded the night before.  It didn’t took like a serious wound, in the leg.  Yet the poor fellow seems to be in a bad way, they tell me.”

“How is that?” asked Craig, glancing up quickly from studying the bullet.

“The wound seems to be all puffed up, and very painful.  It won’t heal, and he seems to be weak and feverish.  Why, I’m afraid the man will die.”

“I’d like to see that case,” remarked Kennedy, thoughtfully.

“Very well.  I’ll have you driven to the hospital where we have had to take him.”