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This information was brought home to me as, day after day, and with favorable gales, the Sea Spell winged her way southward. She was a fairly fast sailing ship and Captain Adoniram Tugg evidently took pride in her. But her crew was all that he had given me reason to believe. A dirtier, more ungovernable gang of penny cut-throats I doubt never sailed on any honest ship!
The waterway was really a series of quiet salt pools. The shores were wild and rugged. I had never seen a more forbidding coast. When the night dropped down upon us as it did suddenly, and a starless sky o'er-head I wondered how Pedro could smell his way through. I heard Tugg roaring something in Spanish about "the beacon" and then a spark of fire flared out in the darkness far ahead.
A little later we had furled all but the topsails and were sailing due north into an inlet masked by many dangerous looking reefs. The mate of the Sea Spell, Pedro, seemed to know the channel well, however, and although Adoniram Tugg remained on deck he did not seem to be worried at all about the schooner's safety. "We'll drop anchor before morning," he told me.
He likewise broke up lengths of slow-matches that Chinese punk that is usually used when fireworks are set off. And it was fireworks he was giving me half a dozen good-sized rockets! "What shall we do with these?" I demanded. "Why, Captain Tugg! you don't mean to illuminate the schooner? Those savages will pin us with their spears if we light up here."
I told myself that as long as there was a possibility that the mysterious Professor might be my lost father, I should take up with this offer of Captain Tugg. I might never be able to find this man of mystery if I did not sail on the Sea Spell when she slipped away from Buenos Ayres. "It's my chance!" I thought. "I can go home if there proves to be nothing in the venture. Why!
And his name had been Carver or so the Unknown had said. This Captain Tugg had been partners with the man he called the Professor for twelve years. Long enough to know his peculiarities and to recognize in my build, and in the tones of my voice, things that reminded him strongly of his partner.
I heard Tugg whispering to himself about them as he watched the half-naked paddlers urging them toward the schooner: "Ugly mugs. From up river. Come three or four hundred miles in them canoes, mebbe. Wisht I knew what has happened the Professor. They sartainly have cleaned our headquarters, or they wouldn't have displaced that beacon lantern." Then he turned to urge Pedro.
My cousin had played me a scurvy trick; but I was not made helpless by it. I could get home after a fashion if I wanted to. And that was my problem! Did I want to go home? Until I had talked with this Captain Tugg I thought I had had my fill of adventure and sea-roving.
"And these are the natives you told me were perfectly harmless?" "Not my boys," said Tugg. "There are wild tribes about, as I told you. This bilin' of trouble-makers are from up country. I'm dreadful afraid they've attacked the camp first and put the Professor and my boys out of the way. They must have been on the lookout for the Sea Spell. Had sentinels posted along shore. They want to loot her."
Otherwise the idea that my father was roaming about the world instead of being peacefully asleep somewhere at the bottom of the sea off Bolderhead, would never have gained such a strong hold upon me. And my impulsiveness urged me to accept the story of this Professor Vose as related by Captain Tugg as something of vital importance to myself.
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