“The rocket cattle from her. I’m sure of it. She must have mistaken the lights of that marine raceabout for our signals.” “Let’s try an answering rocket,” suggested Tom. “Won’t do any harm. Jupe, quit shivering like a jellyfish and get the rockets out. Two will be enough. Tom, you rig the tube.” The firing apparatus, a cylinder of galvanized iron, was speedily rigged in place, and by that time Jupe, whose face was an ashen gray tinge, reappeared with the rockets, two powerful signaling instruments, two feet or more in length. “All right, Tom, touch them off,” came from Jack, as the younger lad proclaimed that all was ready. There was the sputter of a match, a burst of yellow flame and then, almost instantly, a roar and a shriek as the first of the signals shot aloft, trailing a long tail of golden fire. At two hundred feet it exploded in a shower of blue stars. Almost simultaneously, it seemed, another cluster of red stars were spattered over the sky. “Hurray! That’s the _Sea King_, sure enough!” cried Jack; “see, they’ve answered us. Crowd her as much as you can, Tom, it’s a race for all we’re worth now.” “I can get a bit more speed, but it means overheating the engines,” warned Tom. “Never mind that. Put us alongside the _Sea King_ ahead of that other chap, and I don’t care if you blow the engines up,” was the curt rejoinder. Tom shrugged his shoulders as he went below, but a few seconds later the dial hand of the patent log crept up a notch. “Fourteen knots!” exclaimed Jack, with a note of satisfaction, “we’ll beat her out yet.” All at once, from out of the obscurity, a grim possibility materialized. Rushing straight for the _Vagrant_ came a sharp bow, with a wave of white phosphorescent foam curling away from it on each side as it cleaved the swells. “Great guns! They’re trying to ram us!” gasped out Jack as he sensed the meaning of this new peril. He seized up the speaking tube and bellowed down to Tom with all the force of his lungs. “Back! Back her for our lives!” Round spun the spokes of the wheel fast as a revolving squirrel’s cage. The _Vagrant’s_ forward way was checked, but not wholly. To Jack’s horror it seemed impossible that the other vessel could fail in her evident object of ramming the smaller craft. Less than a few score of feet separated them now. He could hear the hiss of the other craft’s cutwater as it rushed down on them. “Golly to goodness, Marse Jack, dey sink us fo’ sho’,” wailed Jupe, dropping to his knees in terror on the bridge.