“Yes, she’s dead as the day I lost the two thousand at Sheepshead.  She’s never gone back on me yet.  And unless I can make some little arrangement with those fellows,” he added, tossing his head at the smoke, “you and I will put up to-night in some barn of a jail.  I’ve never been in jail but once,” said Mr. Cooke, “and it isn’t so damned pleasant, I assure you.”  I saw that he believed every word of it; in fact, that it was his religion.  I might as well have tried to argue the Sultan out of Mohammedanism.

The pipe belonged to a tug, that was certain.  Farrar said so after a look over his shoulder, disdaining glasses, and he knew the lake better than many who made their living by it.  It was then that I made note of a curious anomaly in the betting character; for thus far Mr. Cooke, like a great many of his friends, was a skeptic.  He never ceased to hope until the stake had found its way into the other man’s pocket.  And it was for hope that he now applied to Farrar.  But even Farrar did not attempt to account for the tug’s appearance that near the land.

“She’s in some detestable hurry to get up this way, that’s flat,” he said; “where she is, the channel out of the harbor is not forty feet wide.”

By this time the rest of the party were gathered behind us on the high side of the boat, in different stages of excitement, scrutinizing the smoke.  Mr. Cooke had the glasses glued to his eyes again, his feet braced apart, and every line of his body bespeaking the tension of his mind.  I imagined him standing thus, the stump of his cigar tightly clutched between his teeth, following the fortunes of some favorite on the far side of the Belmont track.

We waited without comment while the smoke crept by degrees towards the little white spindle on the tip of the point, now and again catching a gleam of the sun’s rays from off the glass of the lantern.  And presently, against the white lather of the lake, I thought I caught sight of a black nose pushed out beyond the land.  Another moment, and the tug itself was bobbing in the open.  Barely had she reached the deep water beyond the sands when her length began to shorten, and the dense cloud of smoke that rose made it plain that she was firing.  At the sight I reflected that I had been a fool indeed.  A scant flue miles of water lay between us and her, and if they really meant business back there, and they gave every sign of it, we had about an hour and a half to get rid of the Celebrity.  The Maria was a good boat, but she had not been built to try conclusions with a Far Harbor tug.

My client, in spite of the ominous condition of his opal, was not slow to make his intentions exceedingly clear.  For Mr. Cooke was first and last, and always, a gentleman.  After that you might call him anything you pleased.  Meditatively he screwed up his glasses and buckled them into the case, and then he descended to the cockpit.  It was the Celebrity he singled out of the party.