“A ship can get to us if it tries hard enough. The weed can be cut through, though with difficulty. A sort of steam-saw projecting over the bow will do the work. The propeller will have to be screened to prevent fouling. Perhaps a paddle-wheel steamer would get along best. When it is once in, it should skirt the edge of the wreckage till it finds us. The latitude and longitude I have given you are only approximate. I have no proper instruments.” “Who shall I notify?” “Notify Colonel Fairfax, first of all. This Forbes may keep his threat and marry Miss Fairfax by force, or he may not. He shall not if I can help it. But I’m a prisoner and helpless just at present, though I have made at least one friend and hope for some others. Anyway, Colonel Fairfax will want to rescue his daughter. Then notify the government; there must be ships at Guantanamo now that could start for here very soon. Then notify the newspapers; if no one else will help us, they will. Notify anybody and everybody you like. Stop! Somebody’s coming. Keep out till I call you again.” It was only the Irishman who came to take away the tray. He must have heard the rumbling of the wireless, for only a deaf man could have failed to do so, but he asked no questions about it, though he looked sharply at the instruments that Howard had thrust aside. Howard in fact gave him little chance, plying him with questions as to Forbes’s probable course of action. After he had gone, Howard talked with Guantanamo until late in the night. The next morning the man came again. “Can you foight, sor?” he demanded. “Fighting is my trade, Joyce. Why?” “Well, sor, the captain’s going to marry the young lady at four o’clock the day, unless somebody stops him. And the only way to stop him is to foight him. It’s a big man an’ a bad man he is, sor. Are ye game for it?” Howard smiled. “Oh! yes. I’m game,” he declared. “Then I’ll get ye out in good time. Tare and ’oun’s, but it’ll be a grand foight entoirely.” XI IN accepting Captain Forbes’s invitation to supper Dorothy had taken it for granted that the other two survivors of the Queen were included, and was somewhat startled to find that they were not. “Gallegher insisted on your friends eating with him,” explained Forbes, with a smile. “He declared that I might have the best, but that I shouldn’t hog everything, and I had to give in.”