Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 62, No. 2, October 3, 1931

Radway Could Walk Home from the Ride — but It Was a Boat Ride, and He’d Have an Anchor Around His Neck

I

The man coming up the lonely beach behind Radway evidently preferred to stay behind. He had been walking swiftly along the hard sand close to the sluggish surf when Radway first glimpsed him, but at sight of the stranger his pace had lagged. A moment later, changing direction, he vanished among the dunes.

Radway was curious about him — professionally curious about everybody on that beach. A hundred yards above the point where he had come to the shore after his long, hot hike from the village five miles inland, he stopped to gather a handful of pebbles and shells and shy them over the dispirited breakers. A little further along, he stopped again for a long stare at the schooner that lay becalmed in the far northeast.

Then the rusty, listing shell of a wrecked freighter left high and dry by the retreating tide gave him another excuse to loiter. He unlimbered the kodak hanging from his shoulder and took his time getting a focus on the wreck. The camera took no picture when he clicked the shutter. It was unloaded — like the flannels he had changed into a couple of hours ago, just “scenery.”

The delay at the wreck accomplished his purpose. The man who had been playing hide-and-seek with him among the dunes came into view again, close by. He rounded a sandy rise and cut back to the beach. Passing Radway, he eyed him hard.

“Hot enough for you?” hailed Radway.

The man in the flapping ducks halted and turned. The question appeared to call for consideration. The beach walker’s sullen black eyes traveled slowly upward from Radway’s white canvas shoes to his jaunty panama. When the answer finally came it was a clipped monosyllable.

“Yep!”

The tone didn’t invite a further exchange, but Radway was not to be discouraged.

“Isn’t there a life-saving station somewhere along here?” he asked.

“Yep.”

“You belong there?”

“Yep. Ought to be there now.”

That had been meant to close the conversation, but as the beach patrolman started off, Radway fell into step with him.

“No objection to visitors, I hope,” he said diffidently. “At that, I bet you don’t get many. It’s certainly a tough drill over from Norport.”

“Stopping in Norport, are you, mister?” asked the other with a veiled side glance that found only blank innocence on Radway’s bronzed face. “Nope, we don’t see many summer people over on that part of the beach. They let us alone and we let them alone.”

Radway was cheerfully unconscious of the hint.

“Kind of funny, isn’t it? I should think you’d be overrun with company. A Coast Guard station ought to be a pretty interesting place. I’ve always wanted to have a look at one.”

“Yeah?” queried the Coast Guard without enthusiasm. He pointed with a tattooed hand toward a bank of leaden clouds massing behind the motionless schooner. “Well, you picked a bad day for the trip, mister. See that sky? That’s a rain squall making up. You’d better start back for Norport, if you don’t want them ice cream clothes spoiled for you.”

Radway thoughtfully inspected the muggy horizon.

“Guess you’re right.” he said. “But could I get to the village ahead of the rain? That white building up the beach — that’s your station, isn’t it? Maybe I’d better stick around there until the storm’s over.”

The beach patrolman shrugged a heavy shoulder and quickened his stride.

“It’s public property,” he grunted, his eyes fixed stonily before him. “Suit yourself.”

II

On the veranda of the Coast Guard station, an elderly man with a spare wiry figure and a square-cut spade of graying beard was looking seaward through binoculars. He lowered the glasses as Radway parted company with his taciturn companion and plowed through the broiling sand toward him.

“I’ll be dinged!” he ejaculated. “A visitor! Glad to see you. New faces are sights for sore eyes around Sandy Point nowadays. Come up and have a chair. Came all the way from Norport, did you?”

“Farther than that,” said Radway, mounting the veranda. “You’re Captain Docksee?”

“That’s my name.”

“Mine’s Radway, captain.” The visitor’s hand opened to reveal a small gold shield hidden in the palm. “I’m in the Government service, too — but mine’s another branch. May I have a private word with you? Suppose you go through the motions of showing me the apparatus. If your men get the impression that I’m just summer folks, that will be fine.”

Docksee tugged at his beard and stared.

“You’re here — official?”

Radway nodded.

“But keep it to yourself, please. I’d like to spend the night as your guest. Do you suppose that could be arranged without arousing too much curiosity?”

Before he replied, Docksee raised his binoculars again and trained them on the little schooner offshore.

“I reckon,” he said slowly. “There’s a storm cooking out there. It’ll probably blow great guns for a while by and by, and then rain all night. If I was to ask you to stay to dinner, it’d be my own business; and it would be natural enough for you to bunk in here if the rain was to catch you.”

Docksee caught a look of warning from Radway, who lifted his voice to a higher pitch and asked a question about the station’s life-saving equipment. The man with the tattooed hand had just appeared at the end of the veranda. Puzzled for an instant, the Sandy Point skipper took Radway’s cue.

“No, mister,” he said, “we don’t use the beach-gun once in a blue moon. Ain’t had it in action since that old tramp down yonder came ashore two winters ago. But I’ll show it to you — sure!”

He hopped spryly over the railing and marched off toward an outbuilding a couple of hundred yards below the main house.

“Don’t look back,” Radway whispered, catching up with him. “But I’m sort of wondering about that fellow back there. What do you know about him?”

“The man you walked to the station with — Lazzaro? How do you mean?”

“Do you trust him?”

Docksee debated as he flung open a wide door to reveal a cradled lifeboat and the wheeled beach-gun with its caisson of coiled rope.

“Dunno as I do, dunno as I don’t,” he said judicially. “He ain’t been here long enough for me to form any special opinion of him. What makes you ask?”

Postponing answer, Radway asked another question.

“How many men have you got here all told?”

“There’s eight in the regular crew. But this is a slack season and four of them is off on leave. With Lazzaro and another summer fill-in, Karger, I’ve got six now.” He glanced back toward the big house. “Looks like that’s Karger that just came out on the porch — that big man talking to Lazzaro. They kind of chum together, being both new in the service.”

“How about the rest?”

“All old-timers. Been with me ten years and up — and I’ve been here going on twenty-four years myself.”

“Men you’d swear by, eh?”

“I’d stake everything I’ve got on them.”

“Good enough. We’ll need men we can count on before the night’s over.”

Docksee fingered his beard.

“You ain’t told me yet, mister,” he reminded Radway, “what all this is about.”

“It won’t take me long to tell you when I get started,” promised Radway. “You’ve got a man in your crew that’s taking money from smugglers — big money. If my information is straight, a very large proportion of the dope entering the country lately has been finding its way across this beach of yours.”

“The hell you say!”

“It’s fact.”

Docksee’s thin shoulders lifted and his beard jutted belligerently as his jaw squared.

“Name the man!” he challenged. “Point him out to me and watch me handle him!”

Radway shook his head.

“I know how you feel, skipper,” He said, “but this is a case where Uncle Sam will do the handling. The first job is to catch our man — get him dead to rights. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion right now that I know who he is. But that isn’t evidence by a long shot.”

“Lazzaro?”

“He’s the man I’m thinking of,” admitted Radway. “Does he have a trick of beach patrol duty again to-night?”

“Let’s see. Yes. Midnight to four.”

“The dog watch, eh? That pretty near clinches it, captain. It will most likely be some time between twelve and four when the stuff is landed. There’ll be a couple of tough boys — quick-on-the-trigger gunmen — aboard the boat that brings it in. Maybe we’ll have to do some shooting.”

“You won’t find my regulars running if there is,” Docksee remarked grimly. “You’re sure your information is on the level, though, mister?”

“Absolutely. It came from one of the best under-cover men in the service. He wasn’t able to learn the name of the Coast Guardsman who was fixed, but I’m expecting to meet an old acquaintance of mine in charge of the load. He’s a fellow I had the pleasure of sending to Atlanta a few years ago — ‘Dopey Moe’ Buxbaum. This time he’ll go away for a real stretch.”

A splatter of rain was falling as Docksee and Radway started back toward the station and a red sun was dipping back of the dunes. Off in the northeast, the small schooner still lay in the same position, her slatting sails dots of white on the oily sea. The clouds behind her were piling up blacker. Docksee threw an anxious glance toward them.

“The dudes on that yacht are going to have their hands full before they’re much older,” he predicted. “They were a bunch of dumb fools to take their women out, with the glass falling and not a practical sailor on the ship. If they had a grain of sense among ’em, they’d be getting their canvas in now and heaving to. When that squall smacks she’s going to smack hard, mister.”

III

Radway blessed the squall. It might have been made to order to suit his purpose. The rain was coming down faster before he and Docksee were halfway to the station, and they finished the trip running. Manifestly, it was no time for a summer tripper in “ice cream” clothes to be starting on a five-mile hike. It was perfectly natural that Docksee should invite the visitor to dinner and equally natural that Radway should accept.

At table, the old-timers of the Sandy Point crew were easy to pick out. They were a grizzled and weather-beaten quartet, none exactly loquacious, but all friendly enough. Silent among them, Lazzaro bolted his food. He pushed back his chair before the others had risen and went clumping up the stairs to the attic dormitory. The other new man, Karger, bull-necked, heavy jowled and moody, followed in Lazzaro’s wake a moment later.

Docksee walked to the ascending stairway and carefully closed the door at its foot. He called back two of his four dependables as they were starting out in oilskins, one for the lookout tower and the other on beach patrol. Re-introducing Radway to them and to the other pair under his own name, he informed them in a hurried whisper of their guest’s real errand.

Black night had fallen then, and the first gust of the rising squall was tearing at the heavy shutters.

“Keep an eye to the nor’east for signs of trouble,” was Docksee’s last admonition to the departing guards. “There ain’t nothing but a crowd of rocking chair sailors on that schooner out there.”

The squall struck full force as he spoke. Its impact shook the sturdy building, and Docksee had to put his back to the seaward door to close it after his men. A vivid flare of lightning ripped across the sky, whitening the windows, and the station shook again to a mighty thunderclap. When Docksee turned on the radio, the program he got was mostly static.

Under cover of the racket, Radway crept up the stairs that led to the dormitory. Lazzaro and Karger hadn’t turned in. He could hear them talking, but their voices were so low that he could make out their words.

“Maybe,” he said to Docksee, returning, “you’ve got two crooks in your outfit instead of one. Anyhow, I don’t like Karger’s looks any more than I liked Lazzaro’s. Where are you going to bunk me? I’m dog tired after that long haul up from New York. If I could snatch a couple of hours sleep now I’d be that much wider awake at midnight.”

There was a cot in Docksee’s little office. Radway parked on it, but his nap didn’t last until midnight. It was only a little after eleven when he was awakened. Through the open door he could see a dripping figure in oilskins. It was the coast guardsman who had been on duty in the watch tower. He was making an excited report to Docksee, interrupting the rummy game that had started when Radway lay down.

“The yacht weathered the squall all right, cap, but she’s in distress now, for sure. They’re shootin’ rockets out there.”

The three card players were on their feet as Radway joined them.

“Here’s a howdy-do, mister!” exclaimed Docksee. “Them dude sailors have messed up the deck for you for fair. I know that tub they’re in. She’s no boat for heavy weather. She’s probably leaking like a sieve after the pounding she got. Nothing for me to do but go out to her.”

“Of course, you’ve got to go,” agreed Radway.

“But that’ll leave you in a fix, mister. If there’s a chance of saving the schooner, I’ll have to put a crew aboard her. That means I’ll need all hands.”

Radway glanced at the clock.

“Eleven twenty,” he said. “How soon could you be back?”

“No telling! We’ll go in the power dory that’s moored back in the inlet, and she’s good for thirty miles an hour. But if the people on the schooner have used up all their rockets, we may have a time finding ’em. It’s as black out as the inside of an undertaker’s hat. We’ll have to trust to lightning flashes to show the yacht to us.”

“You’ve got to take the whole crew?”

“My four regular men, anyhow. Karger and Lazzaro don’t count so much in a pinch like this, being all the same as landlubbers. I’d as soon leave ’em on the beach.”

Radway’s relief showed in his smile.

“That’s all right, then,” he said, patting the little bulge under his left arm where a police positive hung in a shoulder belt. “If the weather hasn’t caused any change of plans, I’ll probably have more company for you when you get back.”

IV

The wind was down and the rain had settled to a steady drizzle as Docksee, yellow slickered, started with his three experienced hands toward the speed dory riding in the inlet. They were to pick up the fourth man of the regular Sandy Point crew on their way along the beach.

Routed out ahead of their time, Lazzaro and Karger pulled on oilskins and sea boots and came clumping down from the dormitory directly afterward. They walked together in the direction of the lookout tower. Looking after them from the veranda, Radway saw an arching streak of red drawn across the inky sky as another rocket went up far at sea. Then a lightning flare showed him the storm-beaten schooner yacht under bare poles, hull down on the horizon.

Thanks to the yellow oilskins they wore, he could make out the pair who had been left behind as they stood talking down by the tower. When they separated it was easy enough for him to stalk the blob of yellow moving along the beach.

About midway between the station and the inlet his quarry came to a halt and stood looking out to sea. Not fifty yards away, hidden back of a dune, Radway plopped down in the wet sand to wait developments. In the distance, he heard the coughing of the Coast Guard dory’s powerful motor as the rescue party tuned it up. The coughing resolved into a steady hum, and then he saw the green of the dory’s starboard running light as it streaked out of the inlet and went bouncing over the bar.

Time dragged after the sound of the engine had been lost back of the crashing surf. The radium-tipped minute hand made a complete circuit of the dial on Radway’s wrist watch and was well along on another when a light showed at sea — not a steady light, but one that blinked on and off in half a dozen quick flashes.

Evidently that was a signal to the watcher farther down the beach. He answered with a pocket flash whose strong white beam sparkled intermittently across the surf as he moved toward the inlet.

Keeping in the shelter of the dunes, Radway followed — unaware of a shadow flitting stealthily along his own trail. When a keel grated the inlet shore well in the lee of the point, he drew his pistol and quickened his pace, his steps muffled in the sand. He recognized Lazzaro’s voice ahead of him.

“Okay, Buxie! Everything’s jake. How did ya like the breeze?”

The voice that replied — a rasping one — was another that Radway had heard before.

“You always pick a soft spot for yourself, Tony. If you’d been out in that cyclone you’d have come closer to earning your cut.”

“I’m taking plenty of risks, don’t worry,” growled Lazzaro. “There’s a snooper on the beach to-night that’s got me worried.”

“Yeah? Well, if he snoops around here he gets taken for a boat ride. What’s the matter with you, Tony — turning yellow? Beginning to think everybody you see has got a ticket for you?”

“I know when a guy looks like the law.”

Radway, invisible in the long coat of black rubber he had borrowed from Docksee, was close enough then to see two other figures behind “Dopey Moe” Buxbaum in the beached speed boat. A voice sharp with alarm came from one of them.

“Is it on the square, Tony? Hell! Let’s put the stuff ashore and get away fast. I don’t want to see the inside of Atlanta again.”

That provided Radway with a dramatic entrance cue. Pistol up, he advanced into the dim circle of radiance thrown by the light in the speed boat’s bow.

“Hands up, everybody!” he commanded. “You’re all Atlanta bound!” He moved farther into the light and invited: “Take a good look at the snooper, Buxbaum! Remember—”

Right there he chopped off. Close behind him a voice husky with menace snarled:

“Drop that gun!”

Wheeling, Radway found himself looking into the barrel of a revolver in the hands of the bull-necked Karger.

“I came pretty near doing this when I seen you start after Tony,” Lazzaro’s running mate grunted. “Thought I’d have to be looking out to sea just because I was up in the watch tower, did you?”

Radway’s decision to shoot it out against odds came an instant too late. As he recovered from his paralysis of surprise, Lazzaro leaped upon him and wrenched the pistol from his grip.

“Atlanta bound, are we?” he grated. “Well, you’re going farther — and faster!”

Buxbaum jumped forward as the gun lifted.

“Hold it, you dumb-bell!” he shrilled. “Do you want to bring the whole gang down from the house?”

“Nobody home. They’re all out in the boat. Who does that make the dumb-bell?” growled Lazzaro.

Buxbaum, open mouthed, was staring at Radway. He stepped closer to him and his overbright eyes flared with exultation.

“This guy is all mine, Tony!” he cried. “I saw him first. Believe it or not, it’s the dick that nailed me in Baltimore. I spent twenty solid months wishing that I’d meet up with him again — and here he is. Ain’t it a small world?”

“You bet it’s small, Buxbaum!” snapped Radway. “A man doesn’t realize how small it’s become until he tries hiding away from a murder rap. Just get it into your head that I’m not here by accident. Plenty of people know where I am to-night — and know I expected to run into you. It would be your tough luck if anything happened to me.”

“Oh, yeah?” jeered the dope runner. “But a lot depends on where it happens, don’t it? Think I’d leave you on the beach when we’ve got plenty of room in the boat for you?” He turned from Radway with a jarring laugh and began to spout orders. “Keep the gumshoe covered, Tony. Let him have it if he makes a move. Get that stuff ashore, the rest of you. We’ll bury it right here in the sand and pick it up later. Sure! We’ll let Johnny Law see right where we hide it. It’d be kind of neat to bury him alongside it, but he can come back and haunt the beach, anyway.”

Helpless before the threatening gun, Radway followed the course of a distant dot of light that represented life itself slipping away from him. The light, already miles away, was growing steadily dimmer. It was no longer green, but red, telling him that the Coast Guard dory had changed her course toward the east. The red light was on her port side; he was familiar enough with boats to know that.

Equally well, he knew that Moe Buxbaum, drug mad, couldn’t be reasoned out of his deadly purpose. In the underworld, he had had for years the reputation of a cold-blooded murderer.

In five minutes, a deep hole had been scooped in the beach, the cargo of narcotics cached in it and covered with sand.

“All aboard!” called Buxbaum from the bow of the speed boat. “Bring the passenger, Tony. Better come along yourself, you and Karger. Might be healthier for you.”

“No use sticking around now, anyway,” grunted Lazzaro. “Trade over this beach is all washed up.”

Radway conquered an impulse to grab for the gun as Lazzaro jabbed it against his back. That would have been suicide, and while he lived he could still hope.

The lights of the Coast Guard dory had been lost in the distance, but it was out there somewhere; however slim the possibility, it represented a chance that that the dope runners might be intercepted. If that didn’t happen, an opportunity might come when the speed boat was out of the inlet and the vigilance of his captors relaxed. At least, he could jump overboard — lake a desperate gamble on eluding the bullets that would come after him, and perhaps beat the treacherous currents in a hard pull for shore.

“All right, Moe, I’m with you,” he sang out, climbing into the boat ahead of Lazzaro. “Hope you’ve got a good navigator with you.”

A cackle of crazy laughter answered that.

“You should worry!”

V

With Karger shoving at her nose, the speed boat slid off into deep water. The starter whirred.

Karger, jumping onto the deck as the engine purred into action, switched off the bow lights. Radway was grateful to him for that. Immediately, he untied a shoe lace and loosened it. With Lazzaro beside him on the thwart he had to work cautiously, but before the dope runner was fairly out of the inlet he had slipped off his shoes. But the time for the jump wasn’ yet; Lazzaro still held the pistol to his ribs.

When the point had been rounded, Radway’s heart gave a leap. Above the pounding of the surf, above the thrum of the speed boat’s engine, he could hear another motor and he knew that Docksee’s dory must be on the way back. A moment later he could make out her running lights. Both the red and the green were visible, and that clinched it. The Coast Guardsmen were returning.

Lazzaro saw the lights at the same instant.

“We just got away in time!” he ejaculated. “That’s the Sandy Point dory comin’ in, and they just got a new rum-chaser engine in her. She’s good for thirty miles an hour.”

Out of the darkness of the open cockpit came Dopey Moe Buxbaum’s raspy voice, jeering again.

“What’s thirty? We do close to forty.”

“We better,” said Lazzaro. “The dory mounts a gun.”

“They’ve got a swell chance of hitting anything to-night. Don’t they have to see us first?”

Buxbaum had come forward. Radway could make out his thin stooping figure alongside the box that housed the engine.

“Where’s the snoop?” he demanded.

“Right here next to me — sittin’ at the wrong end of his own gat.”

“Pretty near time to get rid of him, hey?”

“Bum time to risk a shot.”

“Who said anything about shooting?”

“Then what?”

Buxbaum came closer, chuckling crazily, and Radway surmised he had been getting fresh inspiration from the needle. When he spoke again that was a certainty.

“We get rid of him pirate style, see? When we get out a little farther, we tie the spare anchor to him and he walks the plank.”

“Get sensible!” snapped Lazzaro. “That’s the coke talking. Hey, Burke! Shut off that engine before them birds in the dory hear it.”

Somebody aft obeyed him. A switch snapped and the engine died. But Dopey Moe Buxbaum wasn’t giving up his fantastic idea.

“I know my stuff,” he insisted. “Got the old plank right ready here. It’ll be the first official plank-walking since Captain Kidd went to live on a farm. Then he can walk on home if he wants — and if he can!”

He was down on his hands and knees then, pulling at a loose floor board. As it came up, heavy fumes billowed out of the bilge and started Radway coughing. Some one on the other side of the cockpit struck a match and held it under cupped hands to a cigarette.

“Douse that light, Karger!” barked Lazzaro. “Want a pound of lead landing on your neck?”

It seemed to Radway miraculous that the tiny flame, no sooner kindled than extinguished, should have been visible across a couple of miles of water. But evidently those in the dory had seen it, for at once a searchlight flashed into action and swept the sea with an exploring white finger that finally found and hovered on the speed boat.

For a moment Radway had a clear view of the grim, tense group surrounding him; then the engine roared and the dope-runner leaped forward out of the searchlight’s beam. The light swung in a new arc and again located the fugitive craft. Far astern, there was a thump like the pounding of a base drum and a warning shot went skipping across the speed boat’s bow.

The dory had changed her course. Her searchlight bounced on the quartering seas as she squared away to the stern chase. The dope-runner was traveling wide open in a lather of spray. Radway had ridden in racing automobiles, but the speed boat seemed to be faster than any of them. She had a heartbreaking edge on the dory. That was evident within a couple of minutes. Another shot came from the Coast Guard gun and flopped astern; already the dory had been left out of range.

Radway figured then that his moment had come to take the long chance. He unbuttoned the rubber coat and started to inch forward along the thwart. Instantly the muzzle of the police positive poked him again.

“Don’t jump now,” snarled Lazzaro. “We’ll tell you when.”

“It won’t be long,” said Buxbaum.

He had the floor board up and was laying it across the narrow deck, wedging one end under the heavy hinged cover of the engine box.

“Where are you, Burke?” he called. “Bring me that folding anchor and a coil of rope. I’m ready to drop the pilot.”

Radway had managed to wriggle one arm out of the borrowed waterproof. Choked by the vapor from the gasoline floating thickly on the splashing water in the open bilge, he cast despairing eyes astern.

Something had gone wrong with the dory’s searchlight. It had blinked out, and when it failed to come on again it was as if his last friend had passed from the world. It only increased his horror to observe that the dory kept plunging on a straight course, while the dope-runner’s helmsman had taken swift advantage of the situation by swerving sharply to the westward.

That cooked Radway’s goose; he had no illusions to the contrary. Inwardly he cursed the light that had failed — and Fate responded to the cursing with a final gibe. As the dory raced blindly out to sea, the speed boat’s engine sputtered and died. A foot came down on the electric starter while the smuggling craft was losing way, but the dead motor refused to start.

The man who had started forward at Buxbaum’s command ripped out an oath. Profanely he announced the discovery that some blistering half-wit had opened a valve in the fuel line, and Radway dully realized then how all that gasoline had got into the bilge.

His eyes still strained after the running lights of the dory. It seemed that those aboard her already suspected the dope-runner’s trick. He saw first her green light on the starboard thwart, and then the red light to port as she circled aimlessly in a futile effort to pick up the lost trail.

If he only had a rocket, like those makeshift sailors on the schooner yacht! If he had even a little flash lamp like Lazzaro’s to show Docksee and his deep-water men where he was!

Then Radway’s hand, in the pocket of his suit coat, closed on a wooden box of safety matches. Suddenly he was thinking of Karger — of that miracle of a scant quarter-hour ago. Could it possibly be repeated? Would another flame so small — the mere flicker of a burning match — be seen for a second time across that black expanse dividing him from salvation?

Was it worth trying? Well, what could he lose?

His hand came out of the pocket, bringing the matches. He opened the box, drew out a fragile stick, held it poised against the striking surface. Then, hesitant, his nostrils assailed again by the stifling fumes of that deadly free gasoline, he heard himself bursting out in laughter as wild as Dopey Moe Buxbaum’s.

What a rocket he had there under his hand — what a rocket!

A startled yell escaped Lazzaro.

“The guy’s gone nuts on us!”

There didn’t appear to be any doubt of that. Radway was shouting:

“Can you fellows swim? Then get ready to jump! Here goes!”

He leaned forward. The match-head scraped the side of the box. Flaring brightly, the tindery stick dropped in a descending arc into the exposed bilge.

Radway, overboard before his neighbor with the gun knew what was happening, had just struck the water as the loose gasoline ignited. A vivid pillar of flame leaped skyward. It showed him the dope-crew diving in all directions out of the blazing cockpit.

In a twinkling the fire had reached the reserve fuel tank. It let go with a terrific explosion. The speed boat jumped clear of the roller she was riding. In mid-air she went into a thousand pieces, which fell back in a flaming tangle of wreckage that lighted the sea for miles around.

Radway, never too certain of himself in the water at best, had made sure of having a support. He had in fact carried his own improvised life-preserver overside with him; and paddling behind it, he lost no time in getting clear both of the spreading gasoline fire and his recent shipmates.

By the light of the blazing oil he could see the five heads bobbing closer in to the wreck — could see the Coast Guard dory rushing toward them. Presently he saw them picked up one by one: Buxbaum, Lazzaro, Karger, the engineer Burke and finally the speed boat’s swarthy helmsman.

Before the threat of his heavy service revolver, Docksee was herding them all into the bow when eventually Radway came splashing to the dory. He was still clinging to the support that had served him so well during the wait for Docksee’s arrival, and front the water he hailed Buxbaum.

“Thanks, Moe!” he called. “It was a great little idea of yours — digging up this plank for me to ride. You know. I’ve never been much of a swimmer!”