“I can’t make them out,” he said, all at once.

“Then you believe they’re after us?”

“I changed the course a point or two, just to try them.”

“And—­”

“And they changed theirs.”

“Who could have informed?”

“Drew, of course,” I said; “who else?”

He laughed.

“Drew doesn’t know anything about Allen,” said he; “and, besides, he’s no more of a detective than I am.”

“But Drew was told there was a criminal on the island.”

“Who told him?”

I repeated the conversation between Drew and Mr. Trevor which I had overheard.  Farrar whistled.

“But you did not speak of that this morning,” said he.

“No,” I replied, feeling anything but comfortable.  At times when he was facetious as he had been this morning I was wont to lose sight of the fact that with Farrar the manner was not the man, and to forget the warmth of his friendship.  I was again to be reminded of this.

“Well, Crocker,” he said briefly, “I would willingly give up this year’s state contract to have known it.”

CHAPTER XVIII

It was, accurately as I can remember, half after noon when Mr. Cooke first caught the smoke over the point, for the sun was very high:  at two our fate had been decided.  I have already tried to describe a part of what took place in that hour and a half, although even now I cannot get it all straight in my mind.  Races, when a great deal is at stake, are more or less chaotic:  a close four miles in a college eight is a succession of blurs with lucid but irrelevant intervals.  The weary months of hard work are forgotten, and you are quite as apt to think of your first velocipede, or of the pie that is awaiting you in the boathouse, as of victory and defeat.  And a yacht race, with a pair of rivals on your beam, is very much the same.

As I sat with my feet dangling over the washboard, I reflected, once or twice, that we were engaged in a race.  All I had to do was to twist my head in order to make sure of it.  I also reflected, I believe, that I was in the position of a man who has bet all he owns, with large odds on losing either way.  But on the whole I was occupied with more trivial matters a letter I had forgotten to write about a month’s rent, a client whose summer address I had mislaid.  The sun was burning my neck behind when a whistle aroused me to the realization that the tug was no longer a toy boat dancing in the distance, but a stern fact but two miles away.  There could be no mistake now, for I saw the white steam of the signal against the smoke.

I slid down and went into the cabin.  The Celebrity was in the corner by the companionway, with his head on the cushions and a book in his hand.  And forward, under the low deck beams beyond the skylight, I beheld the crouching figure of my client.  He had stripped off his coat and was busy at some task on the floor.