Not only had he got the two prisoners made by the beautiful mistress of the yacht, and was taking them to the vessel, where they could be held in safety until the demanded ransom was paid, but he had actually got into his power the one man feared by Valeria and her crew of desperadoes who had made the _Idaline_ the most annoying craft known to the police of a dozen countries. If the yacht had not been so carefully changed in its appearance, by altering her rigging, shortening her smokestack by an ingenious telescoping device that was the invention of its fair owner, and giving a different look to her in several other ways, Nick Carter would have recognized her at once. As it was, he had thought he knew it, although he could not reconcile the salient points of difference between the _Idaline_, as he remembered her, and this graceful pleasure steamer riding so calmly at anchor in the bay. Now that he had found out who the Baroness Latour really was, and had actually been in conversation with her--following this up by running against Kennedy, whom he also had met before--he did not need to hear the first mate mention the name of the _Idaline_ to be sure of her identity. It was all clear to Nick now. He was to be taken aboard the yacht, with Harvey L. Drago and Lord Vinton, and they would put out to sea until the friends of the prisoners had consented to pay the enormous sums which would be demanded through carefully veiled newspaper advertisements. As to what would be done with him, he could not quite satisfy himself. He knew that Mademoiselle Valeria had shown him, in various subtle ways, that she would have been his friend if he had let her, and he did not think she would go to the extreme of killing him. “I wouldn’t trust her,” he thought. “She could easily give orders to some of those rascals on the yacht to shoot me in my sleep, to poison me, or even to suffocate me with some of that charming gas she used on Lord Vinton--and, doubtless, on Mrs. van Dietrich, too. But--I don’t mean to let them do it. That is where I have something to say.” The two men at the oars were laboring hard, for it was not easy to move such a heavy boatload by two pairs of arms, and Kennedy was sorry the boat had not been rigged so that four men could row, one to each oar. Nick could not see how near they were to the yacht, but he figured that they would reach it in not many minutes. “Hello! How are you by this time?” whispered a voice in his ear. “Coming around?” “It was Harvey L. Drago speaking, and Nick turned his head enough to find that Drago was lying almost by his side, his feet extended opposite to those of the detective. “Keep quiet,” was Carter’s response, in the lowest of murmurs. “You’ve got your gag out, I see.” “Of course I have,” was the reply. “Those clumsy bunglers couldn’t tie it on so that it would stay. They may know how to knot a rope, but a handkerchief is out of their line. Got a knife?” “Yes. Keep quiet,” returned the detective.