Like most Cornishmen, Blueskin Bone was a powerful swimmer, and an expert diver. It was mere child’s-play to him to swim to the yacht’s stern, partly fill the bucket to make it float upright, and then to dive with the free end of the flexible wire in his grasp. Blueskin had seen the _Kestrel_ high and dry so often that he was well acquainted with the way in which her rudder fastenings were fixed. In the darkness the task he had in hand presented no difficulty. Quickly he passed the end of the wire between the rudder and the stern-post just above the lower pintle, and came to the surface with the steel rope still in his hand. His next act was to bend the end of the wire to the handle of the bucket, so that both extremities were secured close together. The bucket was now firmly attached to the _Kestrel’s_ rudder by the doubled parts of the wire. “That’ll ’old till the crows come ’ome,” he muttered, as he tugged at the last hitch of the rope. Tilting the bucket, Blueskin allowed it to fill and sink. It was now suspended at the end of a few feet of steel wire immediately under the yacht’s stern-post. Having accomplished what he had set out to do, Carlo Bone swam back to the _Lumberjack_, swarmed up her side, removed and wrung out his trousers, and crept back to his bunk. “Reckon I ain’t cried quits wi’ ’em yet,” he muttered, recalling with mingled feelings of humiliation and anger the incident when he was knocked out by a mere youth. “’Tany rate, I’ve done summat t’wards gettin’ my own back. Like as not them’ll have a leadin’ wind outer ’ere when them starts. An’ a fair tide. But when it comes tu goin’ about like in the Range, that there bucket’ll make ’em miss stays. They’ll be fair on the rocks afore they knows where they be.” There was deep cunning in Carlo Bone’s plan. He counted upon the _Kestrel_ getting under way with a fair wind and a fair tide. The crew would not be likely to notice that they were towing a bucket under the stern, although the drag would be considerable. But in the Narrows, at the entrance to the harbour, the baffling wind and the set of the tidal current would compel the _Kestrel_ to attempt at least one tack. Then the impediment caused by the bucket would be more than sufficient to make her “miss stays,” and in that hopeless state she would be driven upon the saw-edged rocks to lee’ard almost before her crew realised their danger. Chuckling sardonically, Blueskin lay awake in his bunk until nearly dawn—the dawn of a day on which, if his plans went aright, the _Kestrel_ would ignominiously end her career upon the rock-strewn coast of Devon. CHAPTER XI How it Failed “All clear for’ard?” shouted Patrol Leader Brandon. “Stand by to let go!”