"You don't dare to keep me aboard here! Take warning by what they have
already done to you, Mayo! I'm sure of my backing."
"You'll have a chance to use it!" retorted the young man. He dodged out
and locked the stateroom door.
"Your passenger is not going back with you, sir," he called down over
the rail to the towboat captain.
"I take my orders from him."
"You are taking them from me now. Cast off!".
"Look here--"
"I mean what I say, sir. That man you brought out here is going to stay
till I can put him into the hands of the police."
"What has he done?"
"The less you know about the matter the better it will be for yourself
and your boat! You tell the man who chartered your tug--"
"You have him aboard, there!"
Mayo looked straight into the towboat man's eyes.
"You tell Mr. Fogg, who chartered your tug, that I have his man under
lock and key and that the more riot he starts over the matter the better
I will be satisfied. And don't bring any more passengers out here unless
they are police officers." Then he roared in his master-mariner tones:
"Cast off your lines, sir. You know what the admiralty law is!"
The captain nodded, closed his pilot-house window, and clanged his bell.
Mayo knew by his mystified air that he was not wholly in the confidence
of his passenger and his employer.
This bungling, barefaced attempt to destroy the steamer touched Mayo's
pride as deeply as it stirred his wrath. Fogg evidently viewed the
pretensions of the new ownership with contempt. He must have belief in
his own power to ruin and to escape consequences, pondered the young
man. He had put Mayo and his humble associates on the plane of the
ordinary piratical wreckers of the coast-men who grabbed without law or
right, who must be prepared to fight other pirates of the same ilk, and
whose affairs could have no standing in a court of law.
Even more disquieting were the statements that the avenues of credit
ashore had been closed. Malicious assertions could ruin the project more
effectually than could dynamite. But now that the Conomo had withstood
the battering of a gale and bulked large on the reef, a visible pledge
of value, it did seem that Captain Candage must be able to find somebody
who would back them.
For two days Mayo waited with much impatience, he and his men doing such
preliminary work as offered itself.