Free Aground by Charles Williams; Franklin W. Dixon Page B

business.”

6
    In a moment he was able to sit up, wincing with the pain in his head. Rae Osborne had pushed to a sitting position with her feet on the cockpit cushions. She had an inflamed red spot on the side of her face, and there were tears of frustration and rage in her eyes. “You’re not much help,” she said.
    He mopped at the blood on his face with a handkerchief, but succeeded only in smearing it. He threw the handkerchief overboard. A vagrant breath of air riffled the water astern and a gull wheeled and cried out above them in the brassy sunlight. This was about as helpless as you could get, he thought; he’d lasted less than three seconds.
    Morrison spoke to Ruiz. “As soon as the Champ’s able to row that raft, we get started. Go down and begin taking the lashings off those cases.”
    Ruiz went down the ladder. “How much will we have to unload?” Morrison asked.
    Ingram stared coldly. “How would I know?”
    “You’re the expert.”
    “I don’t even know what you’ve got aboard. Or where the tide was when you piled up here.”
    “I don’t know about the tide, but I can tell you what’s aboard. Six hundred rifles, thirty machine guns, fifty BAR’s, a half dozen mortars—”
    “I don’t need an inventory. I mean tonnage. Have you got any idea what it weighs?”
    Morrison thought for a moment. “The ammo’d be the heaviest. We’ve got over a hundred thousand rounds of thirty-caliber stuff in those two staterooms. I’d guess it all at six to eight tons.”
    Ingram made a rough calculation based on a water-line length of fifty-five feet and a beam amidships of sixteen. Call it thirty-five cubic feet displacement per inch of draft at normal water line. Each ton would put her down nearly another full inch. No wonder she’d looked low in the water.
    “You’ve got her overloaded at least six inches. If you’d hit any weather she could have foundered or broken her back.”
    “Never mind that jazz. How much do we take off?”
    “Probably all of it. How long have you been on here?”
    “Since Saturday night.”
    “And this is Wednesday. She’s never moved at all?”
    “No,” Morrison said.
    “Has the tide ever come any higher than it is now?”
    “How would I know?” Morrison asked. “You think we got anything to measure it with?”
    “Use your head. Has the deck ever been any nearer level than it is right now?”
    “No. This is about it.”
    “Then congratulations. Apparently you plowed on here at full speed on the highest tide of the month.”
    “So what do we do, sit here and cry? Let’s get going.”
    “If you were bound for the Caribbean, why were you on a northerly heading when you hit?”
    Morrison gestured impatiently. “We were trying to turn to get out of here. It was night, like I said, and we couldn’t see anything. And all of a sudden we heard something that sounded like a beach.”
    “You turned the wrong way. But I don’t get what you were doing in here over the Bank in the first place. You should have been at least ten miles to the westward.”
    “I wouldn’t know about that. I’m no navigator. It looks like we could have used one. I tried to get Hollister to proposition you—”
    “Wait a minute. You mean you know me?”
    “Sure. I thought I recognized you when you came aboard, and when the pilot called you Ingram I had you made.”
    “Where did you see me before?”
    “In the lobby of the Eden Roc when you went to see Hollister the first time.”
    Rae Osborne broke in. “Why did this man Hollister want somebody else to inspect the Dragoon instead of going himself?”
    Morrison shrugged. “He said the watchman might remember him. He was an old boy friend of the owner, and he’d been aboard before.”
    She said nothing, and turned to stare out across the water to the northward. Well, at least her question was answered, Ingram thought. “Whose idea was it, stealing the boat?” he asked.
    “Hollister’s. Or whatever you said his name