"They all go th' same way," mumbled Hogan, staring at the anchor and wetting his dry lips. "Oi'm thinkin' it'll be our toime nixt."

"Piffle," derided the American half-heartedly.

"It makes no difference what happens," put in Caradoc, "we'll see the thing through."

For some reason the men thought better of Smith since the fight and his crisp announcement cheered them somewhat.

"She's got plenty o' coal," volunteered Galton.

"'Er engines look all right," contributed Mulcher, "though I know bloomin' little about hengines."

"I weesh I knew what happened to the men," worried Deschaillon in his filed-down accent.

"My quistion ixactly, Frinchy," nodded Hogan emphatically. "Misther Madden says 'Piffle,' but Oi say where are they piffled to? Did they go over in a storm, or die of fever, or run crazy with heat?"

"They didn't starve," declared Mulcher, "for some of th' fellows are in th' cook's galley now eatin'."

Madden lifted his hand for attention, "There's no use speculating on what has happened. It's our job to get dock and tug to the nearest port."

"But suppose—suppose——"

"Suppose what?"

"Suppose th' thing gits arfter us, sir?"

Madden stared, "Thing—what thing?"

The cockney frowned, looked glumly across deck. Galton answered,

"W'y, sir, th' thing that run th' crew hoff the Minnie B an' hoff th' Vulcan. Crews don't 'op hoff in th' hocean for amoosement, sir. Some'n' done hit an' that's sure."

"Do you mean you object to sailing this tug on account of some imaginary thing?" demanded Madden in utter surprise.

"Imaginary, sir!" protested Mulcher, "If you please, us lads on th' dock, the night th' Minnie B sunk, saw something swim off to th' south wrapped hall over in fire, sir. Imaginary thing! It bit a 'ole in th' Minnie B an' sunk 'er, sir!"

This recalled to Leonard's mind the peculiar phenomenon he had witnessed at the sinking of the Minnie B.

"What do you think the thing is?" he temporized.

"A—A sea sorpint, sir," stammered a cockney embarrassed.

"Sea serpent! Sea serpent!" scouted the American. "There is no such thing as a sea serpent!"

"That's w'ot th' hofficers always say," growled Mulcher.

"But it is a scientific fact—there's no such thing."

The well-fed Gaskin, who formed one of the group, made a bob. "That may well be, sor," he said in solemn deference, "but w'ether there is or isn't such a thing, sor, it's 'orrible to see, either way."

From the banding of the men against him, Madden became aware that they had decided on the real cause of the mystery behind his back, and he would have hard work to argue them out of the sea serpent idea.

"You boys saw a shark or porpoise swimming away from that schooner," he began patiently. "I saw it myself. You recall, on that night anything that moved in the water burned like fire. The ship was brilliant, the oars of the dinghy shone. The thing you saw had nothing to do with the schooner."

"Then w'ot sunk 'er, sor?"

"Aye, an' w'ot come of 'er men, sor?"

"Aye, an w'ot come of th' Vulcan's crew?"

"Could a sea serpent put out a sea anchor?" retorted Leonard.

The men stared doggedly at their chief. "We don't know, sor."

"You do know that it is impossible!"

"If there ain't no such thing, sor, 'ow do we know w'ot it can do?" questioned Gaskin.

"Then do you want to go back and stay on the dock and starve?" cried Madden at the end of his patience.

There was a silence at the anger in his tone, then Gaskin began very placatingly, "Hi'm not wishin' to chafe ye, sor, but th' dock is so big th' lads 'ave decided the sorpint is afraid o' th' dock."

At Leonard's impatient gesture he added hastily, "Not that Hi believe in such things, sor, but Hi carn't 'elp but notice that hever'body on th' dock is alive, an' hever'body on th' other two wessels is dead an' gone, sor."

Madden turned sharply on his heel. "Anybody who knows anything about marine engines, follow me," he snapped. "We must study out a way to start the Vulcan's machinery. We're going!"

As he moved down to the doorway amidship that led below, he heard Galton mumble: "Yes, we'll be going, Hi think, down some sea sorpint's scaly throat, but th' tug an' th' dock'll stay 'ere."

If a view of the Minnie B's auxiliary engines had put hopeful notions in Madden's head of puzzling out their control by mere inspection, a single glance at the huge machinery of the Vulcan filled him with despair.

The tug's hull was practically filled with a maze of machinery. Her engines arose in a tower of bracings, wheels, gearing, pistons, steam pipes, steam valves, with a multitude of the eccentrics and trip gearings used on quadruple expansion engines.

Although he had seen hundreds of steam engines, never before had Madden realized their complication until he faced the problem of running this difficult fabric. His proposed task made him realize that the engineer's apprentice, who serves four years amid oil and iron black, learning all the details of these mechanical monsters, is probably just as well educated, just as capable of exact and sustained thought, as the lad who spends four years in college construing dead tongues.

Madden could construe dead tongues, or at least could when he left college a few months back, but now his life, the life of his crew, the salving of the dock, and the winning of a possible fortune, depended upon his answering the riddle of this Twentieth Century Sphinx. It was like attempting to understand all mathematics, from addition to celestial mechanics, at a glance.

Nevertheless, Madden's training as a civil engineer gave him a certain aptitude for his formidable undertaking and he set about it with rat-like patience.

He picked out the main steam pipe, larger than his body, covered with painted white canvas, and followed this till he discovered the throttle, a steel wheel with hand grips with which he could choke the breath out of the monster engines. Beside this were control levers. On the steam chest lay a half-smoked cigarette, as if the engineer had been called suddenly away from his post.

Madden turned the throttle, pushed the levers back and forth, and listened to clicking sounds high up in the complexity of the engines. He knew that every lever threw long systems of vents and valves in and out of play. A wrong combination would easily wreck all this powerful machinery. He was tackling a delicate job—like juggling a car-load of dynamite.

An oil can sat under the throttle. The amateur engineer picked up this and a handful of greasy tow. Engines require constant oiling. Madden had never watched an engineer ten minutes but that he went about poking a long crooked-necked oil can into all sorts of hidden inaccessible places.

Madden thought if he tried to oil the engine, he might learn something about it. He glanced around for the usual myriad little shining brass oil cups stuck, one on each bearing. To his surprise, he saw none. The machinery of the Vulcan was lubricated by a circulatory compression system, which used the same oil over and over. Madden did not know this, so it threw him off the track at his first step.

No one had followed the boy into the engine room, so now he was about to go on deck and commandeer a squad, when, to his surprise, Galton appeared at the top of the circular stairs, whistling a rather cheerful tune. He leaned over the rail and called down heartily:

"Do you want me, Mr. Madden?"

"Yes, come along. I wish you knew something about machinery."

Galton laughed buoyantly. "I'm not such a chump at hit, sor," he recommended.

"You know something about it?" inquired Madden in surprise.

"A bit, a bit, Mr. Madden. My brother Charley is chief engineer on the Rajah in the P & O, sor."

"Ever work under him?" asked the American hopefully.

"Two years, only two years, sor. Never did finish my term an' get my papers. Often's the time 'e's begged me to do it, Mr. Madden. 'E'd say, ''Enry, me boy, w'y don't ye finish your term and git a screw o' sixteen pun' per, but I was allus a——"

"That's all right!" cried Leonard delightedly. "I don't care whether you're a full-fledged engineer or not. You're hired for this job. Understand? You'll get full wages, and then some. I'll——"

"Oh! I can 'andle a little hengine like this, sor. That's th' inspirator, sor," he pointed. "That's th' steam chist. In th' other end is th' condensing chamber. That little hegg-shaped thing is——"

"That's all right; I'm no examining board. Just so you can run it and keep it running. Now I'll get a gang at the furnace, if the boys have got over their sea-serpent scare by this time."

"They're jolly well over that, sor. Me and Mulcher 'ave decided as 'ow we're goin' to kill that sea sorpint, if it comes a-bitin' into our tug, sor."

Madden looked at his willing helper curiously. "Kill it—how are you going to kill it?"

"Dead, sor, yes, kill it dead, sor." Galton nodded solemnly, "My brother Charley, cap'n o' th' Cambria, sir, in th' 'Amburg-American Line, 'e learned me to kill sea sorpints, w'en I was jest a l-little bit of a—a piker, sor. An' I n-never forgot 'ow 'e told me to do it. You climb up th' mainmast, sor, w'ere you can git at their 'eads, cross your fingers for luck, an' blow tobacco smoke in their eyes. They 'ate tobacco smoke an——"

Leonard stared at the fellow, with a sinking heart. He was drunk. As to whether he knew anything about marine engines or not, there was no way to find out.

The effect of the long strain of heat, hunger and anxiety now told on Madden in a wave of unreasonable exasperation.

"You boozy fool!" snapped the officer, "you haven't sense enough to run a go-cart. Go down and start a fire in the furnace—can you do that?"

"Shertainly," nodded Galton gravely, "Mr. Madden, I can do anything. Go bring me th' furnace, and I'll put a fire in it that quick. I'll start it now."

Here he stooped unsteadily, picked up a piece of oily tow, and before Madden knew what he was about, drew out a match and set fire to the greasy mass.

Leonard made a jump, planted a cracking blow between Galton's eyes. The fellow went down like a tenpin and lay still. The American stamped out the blazing tow before the fire spread on the oily floor.

Just then he heard a yelling from the upper deck. Hardly knowing what to expect, he dived for the circular stairway and rushed up three steps at a jump.



CHAPTER XIII

THE SEA SERPENT

When a new crew is shipped on an old vessel, the mate's first duty is to search the sailors' dunnage for whiskey; when an old crew is shipped on a new vessel, that officer would do well to search the vessel for rum.

Madden had neglected this. While the American was in the engine room, the cockneys in the cook's galley had found intoxicants, had poured raw whiskey into their empty stomachs and the result was the quickest and most complete intoxication. When Madden regained the deck he found his crew singing, laughing, fighting, quarreling in an absurd medley.

Deschaillon roared out a French song. Two cockneys quarreled bitterly over what words he was saying. Mike Hogan jigged to the Frenchman's tune, but shouted as he danced that he was spoiling for a fight. The smell of spirits reeked over the tug as if someone had sprinkled her deck with liquor.

Madden looked with anxious eyes for Caradoc, but did not see him. Smith was probably stuck away in some hole, senseless with poison, his effort at sobriety frustrated, his moral courage shattered, his weeks of painful reform smashed.

Whatever humor there might have been in the ill-starred situation was destroyed for Madden by his friend's moral relapse. It was much as if some invalid, nursing a broken leg, should fall and break it over again.

Gaskin was the first man who came in reach of the wrathful American. Madden caught his arm, whirled him about.

"You ladle rum out to these hogs?" he blazed.

Gaskin revolved with dignity and considered his accuser. "You wouldn't think Hi'd do such a thing, sor!"

"Then how did they get it?" Leonard shook the fat arm sharply.

"In spite o' me, sor! In spite o' me!" defended the cook, shaking his fat jowls earnestly. "Hi rebooked 'em, sor. Says Hi, 'Gents, this is lootin', it is piratin', it is——'"

"You should have refused them a drop!"

"Refuse—Hi did refuse, sor! Hi did more. Hi blocked 'em! Hi—Hi fought hout, like a demon, sor! There were too many! Hoverpowered me, sor, they did! I was fightin' and blockin', fightin' and blockin', like a d-demon, sor, b-but—b-but——"

Here Gaskin's utterance grew thicker, his fat head bobbed, then he slithered down by the rail in the hot sunshine; his face stared skyward and stewed sweat in the terrific heat. Madden gave a grunt of disgust. Gaskin was fast asleep.

There was nothing to be done. The men were drunk and he would have to wait till they became sober before making an attempt to run the Vulcan. He stood a moment, staring disgustedly at his useless crew, then finally stooped and dragged Gaskin to the shady side of the superstructure. As he passed with his burden some of the men made clumsy tangle-footed efforts to salute.

In the shade Leonard found a deck chair, perched himself on its arm so as not to touch its hot canvas, and sat brooding glumly. He banished the drunken uproar from his brain and began totting up his prospects for escape from this foully beautiful sea. His mind jumped from topic to topic in an exhausted fashion. He wondered whether or not Galton really knew anything of marine engines? If the dock would be discovered by a passing ship? If the tug's crew had really gone demented and leaped overboard? If there were any connection between the fate of the Minnie B and the Vulcan?

It seemed to Madden that he had been in the heat and brilliant garishness of the Sargasso for centuries. He wondered if the men would become so starved that they would draw lots to see who should be killed and eaten.

Anything, everything, was possible in this isolated sea. Its normal happenings were unreasonable. It was a place of madness. He recalled the words of the navvy on the London dock, "Everything is unreasonable at sea." Certainly that was true of the vast stewing labyrinth of the Sargasso. He had lived abnormally so long that it seemed strange to him now to think that there were comfortable, well-ordered places on the face of the earth. Just as one cannot imagine snow and ice in the depth of summer, so Madden could not imagine the simple comforts of life. It seemed to him the whole world shriveled under a furnace heat.

Such heat, such congestion, he thought, might well breed sea-monsters. After all, why should there not be a sea monster? Who could be sure that the old megalosauri, and megalichthys were extinct? Those monsters existed once upon a time, certainly. He was half persuaded that they still existed.

A sea serpent!

He wondered what a sea serpent would look like? One might well drive a man insane, cause him to leap overboard in utter horror.

His feverish brooding was interrupted by a wild flood of abuse from the starboard deck. It was Galton's voice bellowing:

"Were is 'e? Were is that bloody Hamerican? 'E 'it me! 'It me in th' eye for trying to 'elp 'im! You lads goin' to see me murdered for nothin'?"

Came a medley of drunken questions:

"W'ot's th' matter? Who bloodied your bloomin' eyes? W'ot 'appened?"

"That Hamerican chap!" bawled Galton savagely. "'E 'it me for 'elpin' 'im make a fire! Goin' to see me run over an' killed?"

"Faith Oi didn't see nawthin'," panted Malone, fresh from his dance

"Won't you stan' by a Hinglishman?" shouted the battered one.

"Sure we will!"

"We're Hinglish!"

"Le's 'lect 'nother hofficer an' court martial 'im!" bawled the sailor venomously.

"Sure, make 'im walk a plank!"

"Son of a shark!"

"Man-killin' crimp!"

The whole crew came lurching around toward Madden, filled with the wordy anger of intoxicated men.

The American arose to his feet with little emotion save a return of his old disgust. He knew he could defend himself from any assault the crew might make in that condition. But they made none. They stopped a little way from him, some drunkenly grave, others winking or leering, some abusive and threatening.

"Go'n' tuh 'lect 'nother captain," announced Mulcher thickly. "You no reg'lar hofficer!"

"You 'it a man for 'elpin' you, and 'urt 'is eye!"

"Make 'im walk a plank!" flared out Galton, shaking a big fist at Leonard. "Make 'im walk a plank!" Leonard observed that the fellow's nose and forehead were badly bruised, and dark circles had settled under his eyes. He started for Madden, when Hogan caught him under the arms.

"Phwat you talkin' about, old scout? Walk a plank—you have to court martial him first."

"I don't b'lieve 'e can walk a plank," surmised a cockney gravely. "'E's too drunk; 'e'd fall hoff."

"Where's Farnol Greer, Mulcher?" snapped Madden disgustedly. "Is he drunk, too?"

"D-drunk—you don't think we're drunk, sor?"

"We 'ave been drinkin' a little, sor, but we're not drunk."

"Oi am," nodded Hogan, resting his chin on Galton's shoulder as if from deep affection.

"Oi don't a—ack loike it, you—hic—you couldn't tell it on me, b-but Oi—Oi—Oi'm drunk, aw roight."

"I theenk Greer ees in the cook's galley," smiled Deschaillon, who appeared to be rational; then he added coolly: "Eef there ees any fighting, I weel help you, Meester Madden."

"Cook's galley!" sputtered Mulcher. "'E's drinkin' hit ever' drop, lads; come on!"

"An' th' grub, too!" added Hogan.

This news completely disorganized the court martial and election committee. Galton himself forgot his revenge in his thirst. They started aft pellmell in confused haste to help Greer finish the rum.

Leonard made no objection. They were already drunk. They might as well dispose of the liquor once for all, and then it would trouble discipline no more.

When the men and their turmoil had disappeared, Madden remained on deck, filled with a dull, heavy feeling of lassitude and bitterness. It was one of those moments when a man's hope is swamped in present difficulties.

The sun swung slowly down into the western sea, and its reflections made long blinding streaks in the Sargasso. Its yellow light transformed the great red dock into an orange structure that rested on the sea as lightly as the pavilions of the evening clouds.

The perpetual bizarre beauty of the scene was tiring to the youth. For some reason he thought again of the sea serpent. It occurred to Madden that an enormous scaly thing, in vivid spangling colors, embossed with sword-like spines, with a long convoluted tail, huge red-fanged mouth, would be in keeping with the scene before him, would indeed produce a gorgeously decorative effect, such as he had seen in Chinese pictures.

His thoughts took all sorts of queer turns. He wondered what he would do if he should see such a creature? He walked over and stood by the rail, staring intently into the colorful west, half expecting to see some wild dragon of his imagination. If it should come, he wished for a camera—a moving picture camera. A moving picture of a dragon attacking a ship!

Just then he caught a strange noise that seemed to emanate from the air above his head. He stood quite still, hands on rail, listening. It was repeated. It was a human noise. It seemed to come from the vacant bronze-colored sky above his head. He wondered if he were going insane? Just then he caught sight of Caradoc's torso thrust out from a barrel up in the shrouding of the foremast. The crew of the Vulcan had run up the barrel like a whaler's lookout to post a watch. Into this barrel Caradoc had climbed.

The face of Smith wore a strained, desperate look. Madden stared at him for several seconds, quite taken aback by finding him in such an unexpected place. One thing, however, filled the American with deep gratification. The man was not drunk.

"What you doing up there?" called Madden in surprise.

Caradoc's broad shoulders sagged drearily. "I don't know," he said dully. "I fancy I might as well jump overboard and be done with it."

Madden became instantly alert. "Jump overboard! What for?" A sudden thought hit him. Maybe this was the way they all went? Then another fear entered his heart.

"Say, have you seen anything up there, Smith?... A dragon, or... sea serpent, or..." Madden stared dumbfounded at his friend, marveling what manner of sight had put suicidal thoughts into Smith's head.

"Heavens, yes... dragons, dragons, dragons!"

A weak, watery feeling went through Madden's legs. He felt doddery. "Many dragons!" All idea of beauty was lost in grisly horror.

"W-wait a m-minute!" he chattered. "D-don't j-jump—I'm coming up th-there!"



CHAPTER XIV

CARADOC WINS HIS FIGHT

Trembling all over, Madden gained the barrel and stepped through a niche in its side. He stared through the brilliant, hot colors, but no rushing horde of monsters met his eyes.

"Which way?" he asked breathlessly.

Caradoc looked around at him in uncomprehending misery. There was just room for the two in the barrel. Smith seemed to put his mind to Madden's question with an effort.

"Which—what did you say?"

"Which way?"

"What do you mean?"

"The dragons, man, the dragons!"

"Dragons—right here!" Smith beat his broad chest, then waved his long arms about. "Everywhere—don't you smell it?"

The idea of smelling dragons confused the American. "Smell what?"

"The whiskey!" shivered Caradoc. "I came up here to get away from it."

"Oh—so you didn't see—I understand!"

"It's tantalizing—horrible!" he shivered again, as if the superheated air chilled him.

The American's own foolish fancies vanished in the face of his friend's real trouble. Caradoc had met a dragon more terrible than the Sargasso could conjure up, and its fangs were in his heart. His flight to the crow's nest had been an effort to escape its fury, but it had followed him there. Leonard put a hand on his friend's shoulder. He was at a loss what to say. Indeed there was nothing to say.

"Habit—queer thing, Leonard—I thought I was all right."

"Yes?"

"You see, in college I used to take an alcohol rub-down after my bouts, and a drink. And now, after my fight at noon—smelling this—you don't know how it brings it back, appetite, recollections, everything——" he waved his hands hopelessly again.

"Don't think of it. Put your mind on something else."

Caradoc gave a short mirthless laugh. "Stand in a fire—and consider the lilies?"

"We've got to consider how we'll ever get out of here, if we can't run this tug's engines..."

"We're stuck! We're stuck!" declared the Englishman miserably. "I don't see why I don't go down and be a hog again... we'll finally starve... Somehow I had a mind to die sober... God knows why I ever came on such a junket."

"Starve nothing. We'll get out somehow. We can fish and eat seaweed and distill our own water. I can make a still. And you'll get over that appetite. Bound to—can't last always."

Smith relapsed into silence, staring over the dying colors of the sea. Madden tried to think of simple remedies to abate a drunkard's appetite for alcohol. He had heard of apples, lemon juice, but both were as unobtainable as the gold cure itself.

"How long have you been like this?" he asked at last.

"Been bad two or three years. Drank some all my life. My governor taught it to me when I was a baby. Then when I got older if I went too far he kicked. Naturally I intended to stop in time, till I slipped in deep."

Leonard nodded understandingly. "It always gets a nervous high-strung fellow. The better stuff you are the harder it hits you."

Caradoc stared moodily seaward as he continued his recollections.

"The governor kept warning me. I don't believe he'd ever have kicked me out, but he died. Then they cashiered me—took my commission—and my family let me go, too... Well, I can't blame 'em."

"Your commission—in the army?"

"Navy."

"What were you?"

"Second lieutenant."

Madden looked at his friend curiously. Here was a queer pass for an English naval officer. This revelation explained a good deal about Smith, his autocratic manner, his many-sided education, his emotion at leaving England. It even explained why he had expected Malone to place him in charge of the dock.

"Is there any hope of getting back in?" asked Leonard sympathetically.

"Instauration! Never knew of such a thing in our navy. If I ever get out of here I'll go in trade somewhere."

"In South America?"

"I had British Honduras in mind, or Canada. I'd like to keep in the Empire."

A noise below interrupted the conversation. The two youths looked down. The deck plan of the tug lay flat and empty save for the inert form of Gaskin. The noise came from inside the cabin and arose to a shouting. It was a drunken ribald sound. A suspicion flashed on Leonard's mind.

"Those pigs below are wasting the stores," he declared.

"They ought to be stopped."

"I couldn't stop them without a fight. They were about to court martial me when they happened to think of something else."

Caradoc stared down in the direction of the noise, "I might talk them into sense if Greer isn't drunk and wanting to fight again."

"He said he never drank—I don't know."

Caradoc nodded, "I'll go down and send them forward," he asserted with conviction, and started to climb out of the barrel.

Madden looked at the Englishman with a certain apprehension, "Caradoc, if you go down there where they are drinking, won't you——"

"No, I'm not going to drink."

"It will be a temptation."

"I have myself in hand now. This talk has done me good. No, I'm all right." He swung out of the barrel and started down the ratlines.

Leonard watched him anxiously, not at all sure of the outcome of his mission, not at all sure that the hot smell of rum in the galley would not again overcome his resistance.

The sun was just dipping into the sea and its last light spread out of the west to the zenith like a huge red-gold fan. Purplish shadows had already begun to dim the tug and dock and ocean.

Fifteen or twenty degrees above the sunset shone a pale crescent moon in the burnished sky. The sight of the moon somehow cheered Madden. He recalled a childish superstition that it was good luck to see the new moon clear. At any rate, as the sky darkened, the clear new moon brought Leonard comfort and renewed hope.

With a grateful feeling of the providence of an Almighty that hung out moon and stars, the youth glanced around the darkening horizon and presently observed a tiny light far to the south. He stared at it quite surprised, and then he chanced to see a star just above it. It was the reflection of Sirius in Canis Major.

The beam of a star must lead any thoughtful soul into endless reveries. Beneath its calm and infinite light, all human troubles fade to the brief complaining of a child in the night. Death becomes a small, unfeared thing, and life itself, the trail of a finger writing an unknown message upon water.

Filled with such musings, the American noted with surprise that the light on the sea which he had fancied to be the reflection of Sirius was moving. It was not the reflection of a star.

It was a light moving in the gathering darkness.

What sort of light could it be? A Will o' the Wisp? A Jack o' Lantern, some phosphoric phenomenon rising in the exhalations of rotting seaweed?

Ten minutes before, his excited imagination would have conjured up hydras and dragons; now he scrutinized the mysterious illumination unexcitedly. It winked out occasionally, then presently reappeared. But it did not move in an aimless fashion, after the manner of gaseous or electrical phenomena. It pursued a straight line toward the Vulcan. That was why Madden had not observed its movement sooner.

Although it had crept only a little way down from the horizon, the wondering boy could discern its progress plainly among the dark masses of seaweed that blotched the graying water. The light was moving toward the Vulcan and at a high rate of speed.

As he watched it, the enigmatical light suddenly disappeared. The youth blinked his eyes, looked again. It was gone. Then he became a little uncertain whether or not he had ever observed any such phenomenon. He glanced down on the dark deck and could faintly discern the form of the cook.

"Gaskin!" he called sharply, "Gaskin!"

To his surprise the drunken fellow stirred and made some mumbling reply.

"Get up. I want to know whether or not you can see anything."

Came a sluggish stirring from below, and then Gaskin's voice, in which deference struggled with a bad headache, "Yes, sor, I can see hever'thing as usual, sor."

"I thought I saw a light to the south. Just take a look in that quarter, will you?"

The dopy cook scuffled to his feet and stumbled over to the rail, hung there, peering intently southward. At that moment, there burst out of the sea a brilliant illumination that fairly blinded Madden. Shocked into spasmodic action, the American jumped from barrel to ratlines.

He hardly knew how he got down, as much of a fall as a climb. Strange fearsome thoughts chased through his head. The men were right about something attacking the Minnie B. Now the same thing had attacked the Vulcan. The Vulcan would be sunk. He must rush the men out of the galley into the small boat. He must race back to the dock. The dock apparently was safe. What the startling apparition was, he had no time to speculate. When he touched the deck he sprinted for the cabin.

As he passed Gaskin the light vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared, and left the tug in inky darkness.

Madden heard the cook give a deferential cough and then say, "Yes, sor, Hi saw it, Mr. Madden, saw it quite plainly, sor."

A moment before Leonard reached the cabin door, someone flung the shutter open violently and shouted his name in the utmost alarm.

"Mister Madden! Mister Madden! Come quick, sir!"

The American lunged through the dark aperture straight into the fellow's arms. In the darkness he could not make out who it was.

"Don't be afraid! Did you see it? Where are the rest of the men?"

"In the galley, sir, with him!" stammered the sailor,

"Are they in a funk?" gasped Madden, feeling that he himself was in one.

"Oh, they are that, sir."

"Why don't they come on out? We must get 'em out!"

"They're with him, sir, 'fraid to touch 'im!"

"With who?"

"Mr. Caradoc, sir."

"Afraid to touch him—why, what's the matter?"

"'E's dead, sir."

A feeling as if ice water had been dashed over his body shivered through Leonard. The black cabin seemed to swing under his feet. His arms dropped down and he stood perfectly still staring into the blackness from whence came the sailor's voice.

"You—you don't mean he's dead?" he asked in a shocking whisper.

"That I do, sir, dead as a lump o' seaweed."

Madden turned and walked with a queer light feeling toward the galley. He was in no hurry now. If that strange light sank them, drowned them, it made little difference. An idea came into his mind.

"Did—did you fellows kill him—murder, him?" he asked in a hard undertone.

The tenseness of his voice seemed to scare the sailor, "No, sir, no, sir, no, sir!" repeated the cockney over and over.

"For I'll shoot the man down like a dog! I'll hang him! I'll—I'll——"

"We—we didn't touch 'im!" cried the sailor in hoarse alarm. "'E done it 'isself, sir. Went clean crazy, kilt hisself—'orrible!" As the sailor gasped out "horrible" they entered the cook's galley where a dim light burned and a group of silent, sobering men stood in a knot over some object.

Madden shoved through to where two men stooped over a long body, dimly seen on the decking. The two men were Hogan and Deschaillon.

With his strange feeling still strong upon him, Madden knelt between the two. Caradoc lay limp and motionless, with a dark stain slowly spreading on the boards under his head.

"Tell me about this," commanded Leonard, thrusting a hand under the prostrate man's shirt and feeling for his heart. The request set loose a babble.

"'E did it 'isself, sor!" "Split hopen 'is own 'ead, right enough!" "W'ack, 'e took 'isself, w'ack!" "Aye, that 'e did, sor!" "It sounds queer, an' it looked queerer, but 'e did, sor!"

Madden made a sharp angry gesture for silence, "One at a time. Mulcher, what happened?"

"'E comes in, Mr. Madden," began the cockney more composedly, "an' says, 'Forward, men, lively now,' an' Galton 'e turns an' says, 'Ye may take that, ye—'"

Again came the irrepressible chorus, "Aye, that 'e did, sor!"

"If a man speaks before I address him, I'll brain him!" shouted Madden. "Hogan, what happened?"

"If you plaze, Misther Madden, Misther Smith came in and asked iv'rybody to stip forward and quit atin' up th' grub. Galton was mad innyway, an' had a glass o' whiskey in his hand. 'Quit atin'!' yills Galton. 'A officer niver wants nobody to ate but himself.' Then, 'Take thot!' he yills, and flings his whiskey straight into Smith's face.

"Av cour-rse, we ixpected to see him smash Galton to smithereens, him being dhrunk—Galton, I mane—but he stood still as a post, sir, and tur-rned white as a sheet. I filt sorry for th' gintilmin—him putting up sich a good foight this avening—so Oi thought if he didn't want to fight, I'd help him pass it off aisy. I had a glass o' liquor in me own hand. I offers it to him. Says I, 'Pay no attention to th' spalpeen at all, Misther Smith,' says I; 'he's a fool to be throwin' away good liquor loike that; and have this dhrink on me, and if he does it again Oi'll pitch him out o' the port.' With that I handed him me glass.

"Well, sir, he took it, an' I belave there was niver another face on earth loike his, whin he hild up that glass to th' lamp. His hand shook so some of the sthuff shpilled. His face was loike a corpse. He shtarted to dhrink. Put it to his lips. Thin of a suddint, loike it had shtung him, he yills out, 'God 'a' mercy!' flings down th' glass, which smashes all over th' floor, lowers his head an' plunges loike a football tackle, head fir-rst, roight into th' sharp edge o' that locker there where ye see th' blood an' hairs stickin'. Down he wint, loike he's hit wid an axe, wid his skull broke in siv'ral pieces no doubt. Mad as a hatter, sir, fr-rom th' hate. Though it's sich an onrasonable tale, sir, I won't raysint it if ye call me a liar to me teeth."

Madden had found the Englishman's heart still beating. He pressed his fingers in the long bloody wound on his head and the skull appeared sound enough under the long gash.

"Get him out on deck," he ordered sharply, in an effort to keep his voice from choking in his throat.

"Out on deck! He's not dead! Get him in fresh air!"

Hogan, Deschaillon, and two navvies caught him by the legs and arms. Madden lifted the bleeding head from which the blood still ran in a steady trickle. The crowd gave back and the five men with their grewsome burden passed through the galley's door into the dark passage.

Just then a sudden vibration went through the whole ship, as if the Vulcan had been struck by some enormous force. The men carrying Smith staggered. There burst out a blare of confusion, amazed cries, shouts of terror. There was a stampede in the narrow passage. Flying men bumped into the bearers of the sick man. They were shrieking, "We're struck! We're foundering! Th' sea sorpint's got us!"

"Launch the small boat and stand by till we get there!" bellowed Madden.

All the carriers dropped Smith's body and bolted in the panic. Madden braced himself against the rush of the crew and held up the senseless man lest he be trampled on in the blackness. The uproar in the passage was terrific as the men tried to squeeze through all together. Every moment Madden expected a rush of sea water down the passageway. Just then, he felt someone else lift at Caradoc.

"Go on," said Farnol Greer's voice. "Let's get him out, sir."



CHAPTER XV

TOWED!

When the American pushed outside with his burden, a breeze swept the deck of the Vulcan with an unexpected coolness. The vibrations had almost ceased, but there was a slight hissing of water from somewhere, and a feeling of movement. The men were in a hubbub on the port side where the small boat lay tied.

Filled with the idea that the ship was about to founder, Madden stared about. To his vast astonishment, he discovered the tug was not sinking, but moving. The Vulcan was under way. The noise he heard was the swift displacement of water. For some unaccountable reason, the vessel glided southward at a speed of eight or ten knots.

In the uproar forward, Madden heard the cries: "Th' dinghy's swamped!" "We carn't reach 'er!" "Cut 'er loose and jump!" "We couldn't right 'er in th' water!" "Cut 'er and jump! Quick! 'Eaven knows w'ot's got us!"

"Steady! Steady, men!" bawled Madden, laying Caradoc down on the deck and hurrying across to his panicky crew. "What's moving us?"

"We don't know, sir! Th' sea sorpint! Grabbed our cable and made off!"

"Can you see it?"

"Just make it out, sir, ahead!"

"Cut th' cable!" cried another voice; "that'll get us loose!"

"Yes, get an axe—Quick!"

A dim figure came running aft past Madden for the axe. The American shouted at him: "Come back! Don't touch that towing line! Let things alone!"

"Yes, but this'll drag us to the bottom!" chattered one of the men forward.

"We'll get in the dinghy when the ship goes down!"

"We might row to the dock from here!"

The men stood in a string along the rail, below them in the hissing water the dinghy tossing topsy turvy.

"What's towing us? I don't see it?" cried Madden.

Several arms pointed forward. Leonard peered through the gloom. The crescent moon and the stars filtered down a tinsel light. The faint shine merely made the darkness more evident Madden seemed to catch a glimmer of a bulk at the end of the anchor line some hundred yards distant. He listened but heard only the gurgle of the Vulcan's wake and the creak of her plates.

When the sheer panic of surprise had worn away somewhat, the weirdness of the uncanny voyage came upon the crew with tenfold force. They stood gripping the rail, staring ahead with the feeling of condemned prisoners on their way to the gallows.

"We're 'eaded for the 'ole in th' sea!" muttered Mulcher.

"We'll go down tug an' hall," mumbled Galton unsteadily. "Fish bait, that's w'ot we are!"

"I've heard sea serpents can sting a man and numb him so he won't live or die," shivered Hogan, "like a spider stings a fly."

They spoke in half whispers under the influence of the unknown terror.

"If anything happens, I shall keel myself," declared Deschaillon, with nervous intensity, "but I shall see it first."

"That's w'ot went with the other two crews—killed theirselves," chattered Mulcher.

Another silence fell. The cool breeze came as a sort of mockery of their unknown peril. For the first time since the storm every man was thoroughly comfortable physically.

"Boys," planned Hogan, "whin th' thing comes aboard, we'll put up th' best foight we can!"

"It don't come aboard—it bites a 'ole in th' 'ull."

"Aye, like th' Minnie B."

Just then a figure approached the men unsteadily, and Madden saw that Caradoc had recovered consciousness and was able to walk. As the tall, gaunt figure approached, the crew eyed him as if he were some new danger, then he asked.

"What is this? Are we moving?"

"Yes we're off," replied Madden.

"Under our own power?" he inquired, turning around and staring at the smokeless funnel.

"No, we're being towed."

"Towed! Towed!" exclaimed Smith in a weak voice. "What's towing us?"

"We don't know, sor," replied a cockney.

There was a silence in which Caradoc stood tall and cadaverous as a ghost. "Am I dreaming this, Madden?" he muttered finally. "Did you say we were being towed?"

"That's right."

"What's towing us—not—not the dry dock—don't say the dry dock's towing us!"

"We don't know, sor," repeated the cockney.

"Where are we going?"

"To be killed, sor."

Caradoc moved slowly over to the rail and sat against it near Madden.

"A cool breeze," he murmured gratefully.

The American was lost amid the wildest speculations as to the mysterious agent that had the Vulcan in tow. He was trying to think logically, but found it hard in that atmosphere of terror. The utter weirdness of the whole affair defied analysis. The towing of the Vulcan by an unknown power was the very climax of the fantastic. No hypothesis he could form even remotely approached an explanation.

It could not be some sea monster surging steadily at the tow line of the Vulcan. That theory was untenable. A monster might attack; it would never tow.

But any other, attempt to account for the strange predicament fell equally as flat. What human agency would operate so mysteriously in this hot, stagnant sea? Why should any group of men entrap the helpless crew of the Vulcan with such a display of mystery and power? It was useless. It was ridiculous. It was shooting a mosquito with a field gun.

All his thoughts ended in utter absurdity. He felt that he had run up against some vast power. The schooner Minnie B, the tug Vulcan, were but trifling units in the enigma of this deserted, weed-clogged sea. It must be some power whose operations were ocean-wide.

Why such a spot should be chosen?—Why a power that sank one ship out of hand and towed another mile after mile?—Why it operated only at night?—What lay at the heart of this brooding fabric of terror—he could not form the slightest conception. Outlawry, piracy, smugglery, were all goals too small for such operations.

His thoughts seemed to be physical things trying to clamber up the smooth polished side of an enormous steel plate. They made not the slightest progress. The more he thought, the more unaccountable all phases of the question became.

In absolute perplexity, he turned to the Englishman at his side. He could just make out the blur of Caradoc's face.

"Have you a theory about this, Smith?" he asked in a low voice.

The Englishman nodded in silence.

"What is it?"

"I—I got my head hurt awhile ago. I believe I'm delirious—dreaming."

Leonard thought this over without any feeling of amusement. "That doesn't explain why I see it too," he objected gravely. "Nothing wrong with my head—that I know of." He tried the time honored experiment of pinching himself.

"I shall assume that I am awake," he decided after he had felt his pinch. "I may not be, but I'm going to act as if I were."

Madden had an impression that Caradoc was smiling in the darkness. Just then Gaskin began laughing shrilly in a queer metallic voice.

"Quit that!" snapped half a dozen thick voices at once, as if his laughter had violently shocked their tense nerves.

Gaskin pointed a stumpy arm off the starboard bow, "Look! Look!" he gasped. "It's that rotten whiskey! Whiskey done it! Whiskey made me see that! Look w'ot whiskey done!"

Leonard had no idea that anything could be added to the nightmarish quality of the adventure, but there off the starboard arose a great bulk, blotting out the stars. It was not a ship; it was not a barge; there was not a light on it, but it seemed somehow dimly illuminated. It was as shapeless as death.

"The Flyin' Dutchman!" shuddered Galton.

"It burns a blue light!" corrected Hogan with chattering teeth.

"Th' ship o' the dead!" shivered Mulcher.

A sudden explanation flashed into Madden's head. "You fools are afraid of our own dry dock," he whispered briefly. "We've traveled in a circle and reached the dock again."

"Oh, no, sor, it ain't that! Tain't th' dry-dock, sor!" aspirated several fear-struck voices.

The crew held their breaths as if the apparition might vanish as suddenly as it appeared.

By this time the moon lay flat on the sea, throwing a faint shining streak across the dark Sargasso. This vague light was enough to show Madden, when he took a close look, that it was not the dock.

The thing he saw was an enormous mass without the severe angular shape of the great dock. Its outline rose crude and shapeless, as well as he could trace it among the canopy of stars, and gave not the slightest intimation as to what use it could be.

As they stared, the speed of the Vulcan slackened sensibly. The faint rippling of water under the prow ceased. The breeze fell away into a dead blanket of heat. It was as if a sweatbox had been cooped over the crew.

"The thing's cut loose from us," said a weary voice.

Hogan laughed shortly: "Everybody out—fifteen minutes for refrishmints."

"Yonder goes that thing!" cried Galton. "Hi can see it!"

Indeed, by peering carefully, Madden could follow the slender outline of the mysterious craft that had towed the Vulcan to this uncanny spot. It had now left the tug and was gliding away to the great misshapen fabric that sprawled on the sea.

Every eye strained to see the outcome of this strange maneuver, when suddenly from the gliding vessel there shot a dazzling light that spread over the bulky mass. Under the beating illumination every detail of the huge vessel stood out garishly. She was immense, with a broad flat prow like a railway ferryboat. She stood high in the water and seemed to have three promenade decks around her.

There was no mast, no rigging, no outside gearing. One squat funnel amidship told that she used steam for some purpose, and out of this funnel black masses of smoke rose slowly in the motionless air. She resembled no craft Madden had ever seen.

Notwithstanding her enormous size, everything about the vessel impressed Madden that she was built for secrecy. She was squat, considering her length and breadth. It was as if her designer were trying to make a craft invisible at sea. As near as Madden could determine in the strange light, she was painted a pale sky-blue. During the day, no doubt, she melted into the sky like a chameleon.

As the smaller craft approached its huge mate, its circle of light contracted until it finally concentrated into a dazzling white spot centered on the prow of the monster. This spot diminished to an intense point, like an electric arc between carbons. A sharp reflection of this point streaked the water between the tug and the mysterious vessels.

Then, under the unbelieving eyes of the crew, the little vessel ran completely into the larger one and was gone. The light vanished instantly. Utter blackness fell over the dazzled eyes of the watchers.

There were gasps, explosive curses of bewilderment, amazement. The little boat had disappeared into the larger. Impossible! Gaskin began his shrill laughter again. Then he gurgled in the darkness as if somebody's fingers had clamped his windpipe.

Madden's mind attacked more violently than ever the incomprehensible motives behind this inscrutable mystery. What was the key to this incredible affair? In the midst of his mental struggle, he felt a hand on his arm, Caradoc said in his ear,

"What do you say we get in the small boat and pay them a visit?"

"It's a big risk. I daresay we'll get our heads blown off."

"I had thought of that," agreed Caradoc.

"Come on," said the American, and the two moved across the deck to see if they could still use the dinghy, which had been trailing along all this time.

Nearly an hour later, the two boys in the dinghy approached the puzzling craft with muffled oars. As Madden and Caradoc drew near, the vast size of the strange ship grew more striking. The faint impression of light which they had first received grew stronger and Madden saw that the decks were illuminated by long bands of diffused light, although he could not guess its origin.

On the lowest deck, the American made out the small figure of a man marching back and forth with a gun.

At this sight, both boys stopped rowing, lifted the oars from tholes and began paddling noiselessly, canoe-fashion.

"That must be the accommodation ladder," whispered Madden, "where the guard is."

"Who are they afraid will board them?" queried Caradoc. "Mermaids?"

"It is a strange precaution to take in the Sargasso," agreed the American. "It is going to make our entrance difficult."

They ceased paddling now and drifted silently toward the monster.

"I wonder if they aren't smugglers," hazarded Caradoc,

"Must be up-to-date, to use submarines—a submarine would defy detection, wouldn't it?"

"And rich—nobody but millionaire smugglers could get together all this paraphernalia."

"I'll venture insurance is at the bottom of this fraud, Caradoc," hazarded Madden. "These swindlers insure a cargo, bring it to this place, reship it, sink the vessel, or repaint and rebuild it, then collect the insurance money—do you remember the log of the Minnie B?"

"No, I didn't read it."

"It stated her cargo had been reshipped—reshipped from the Sargasso. The entry may have been for the benefit of Davy Jones. Anyway, they are methodical scoundrels."

The lads fell silent as the hugeness of this nefarious business gradually dawned on them. For insurance swindlers and smugglers to work on such a large scale, very probably the organization branched over the whole civilized world. This vast shapeless vessel was a spider at the center of a great network of criminality.

"Say, the Camorras are mere infants in crime compared to these men," shuddered Leonard. "I suppose they murder the crews—drown 'em."

"They would have to get 'em out of the way somehow."

"Then Malone and all the tug's crew are..."

There was an expressive silence.

After a while Caradoc whispered, "Well, shall we try to get aboard?"

"Wouldn't do any good."

"It won't do any good to stay here."

"No, we can't hide on the tug always, and we can't run her engines. You don't know anything about marine engines, do you, Caradoc?"

"Very little. I couldn't run one."

For several minutes, the two adventurers sat in silence, watching the small erect figure of the guard pace and repace his short path. Presently Madden said:

"I've thought of one chance, Caradoc, to escape being starved or murdered."

"Yes, what's that?"

"It—it's almost too wild to propose, but it's all I can think of. As far as I know it's absolutely our last chance."

"Go on, go on," urged the Englishman impatiently. "I don't know of any way out whatever."

"If we could slip aboard there and—and—well, kidnap somebody who knows how to run our engines, bring him back to the tug, fire up and make a race to South America—but there's no sense to a scheme like that. Captain Kidd himself wouldn't be up to it."

A long silence followed this ultimatum, then Caradoc said, "Oh, it's possible, I suppose. The mathematical formula of possibility would work out about ten million chances to one that we lose."

"Yes, I know it's risky."

"And how do you hope to get in past that guard?"

"We'll have to climb up the ladder right under him, hang there until he is on his up-deck walk, then swing inside and when he turns around we could be simply strolling up the deck toward him. There must be a lot of fellows on such a big ship. Maybe he doesn't know them all."

"Why do you want to stroll toward him?"

"Because if he saw us walking off in the other direction, he would know we had not passed him, and so we must have come up the ladder."

Caradoc shook his head in the darkness. "I'm going to try to jump on that guard when he turns his back, and down him."

"He'd give an alarm sure. We mustn't disturb him till we get ready to leave, then let him yell."

"What you are planning, Madden, is simply impossible. I like to be as conservative as possible."

"We can turn around and row back to the Vulcan—and starve."

"Go ahead to the accommodation ladder. However, it's impossible."

As the two moved silently nearer a murmur of machinery in the vast fabric came to them. As their tiny boat swung in beside the high hull, they could hear this noise quite plainly, and they trusted to this rumble to screen their operations somewhat. They ceased paddling and allowed the dinghy to drift against the iron side of the vessel. They could no longer see the deck and the guard, owing to the swell in the high metal wall. But presently they came to the rope ladder which they anticipated hung below the guard's station.

Madden caught this and tied the dinghy to it with the crawly feeling of a man who expects to have a gun fired at him the next moment.

Caradoc came up and the two adventurers stood in the boat's prow, both holding to the ladder.

"I'll bet that scoundrel shoots down," whispered Leonard, "before we get halfway up."

"Don't talk so loud—are you ready to try it?"

"What are you going to do—jump on him?" breathed Leonard.

"No, your plan. If you see he is going to shoot you before you get inside, jump backwards and dive."

"And remember to go far enough out not to hit the dinghy."

"Good."

Madden stared up into the mysterious vessel, caught the ladder and swung himself silently onto the rungs. Caradoc mounted close behind him. They had mounted only two or three steps, when a sudden terrific report thundered above their heads.

It was so unexpected, so violent, that the two boys almost tumbled into the sea. The next instant they found themselves wrapped in an atmosphere of hot, stifling steam. They clung to the rungs in a veritable steam-bath that roared and plunged around them. When Madden collected his senses, he realized that it was merely a safety discharge from the boilers. The main steam pressure did not strike them, but they swung in the hot wet fringe of the exhaust. Had they been ten feet farther aft, they would surely have been boiled to death. As it was they were immersed in uncomfortably hot vapor.

They clung, rather unnerved by the uproar, enduring the heat for four or five minutes, when suddenly an idea occurred to Madden. He leaned down to Caradoc and shouted in his ear.

"How about going up now? Couldn't see us in this steam."

For reply, Caradoc shoved his friend upward, and so they scrambled aloft like two monkeys.

Fortunately for them, the night was windless and the white steam drifted straight up and as it rose, it spread out in an impenetrable fog. Cloaked in this vapor, the two adventurers scrambled up some thirty-five feet to the first deck. The steam was thick inside the rail. Covered by the noisy shriek of the exhaust, they jumped inside the promenade without being heard or seen, and a moment later, they dropped arm in arm, like two casual strollers, and moved up deck.

Two minutes later, when the roaring exhaust had ceased and the vapor had cleared away, the guard with the gun could never have guessed that the two men he saw slowly promenading the deck had drifted over the rail, out of the night, with the clouds of the noisy exhaust.

Neither of the lads so much as glanced at the sentinel as they strolled past him. Caradoc was saying in the low tones men use when conversing in the darkness:

"Do you suppose that fellow knows anything about engines?"

And Madden replied just as confidentially, as he sized the gun man up out of the tail of his eye, "No, I'm sure he doesn't. An engineer never has to stand guard."

"How are we ever going to spot an engineer?"

For the first time since starting, a little thrill of the joy of adventure crept into Madden's heart. He felt like a ferret venturing into a rat's den.

"Why you can tell an engineer easily," he murmured. "You've seen 'em, oily fellows, with black smudges."

"That describes a fireman, too."

"No, a fireman's not so oily and is more cindery—then we'll know one by his cap."

"Certainly," breathed Smith. "I hadn't thought of that."

Notwithstanding his danger, Madden could not help smiling as he moved along after the fashion of a careless stroller, when he was really keenly alert for a man with an engineer's cap.

The two youths were walking up a long deck, dimly lighted by small incandescent bulbs placed on the inner surface of the outside stanchions about thirty feet apart. Each bulb was carefully blinded from the ocean by a sheath, which confined its glowworm radiance exclusively to the promenade. On the inboard side were a long series of port holes, likewise hooded from observation. Some were aglow, others dark.

The deck, rails, cabin walls, ports, hoods, joists of the top-deck were newly washed and scrupulously clean. Fifty yards up-deck, where perspective and the sheer of the ship gave the promenade the appearance of a long, up-curved tunnel, the boys caught sight of a gang of men scrubbing down deck. A little beyond the scrubbing gang, some garments fluttered on a line drying in the night air.

As they drew nearer, Madden perceived they were muscular men, with faces bronzed by tropic sunshine. Some of their necks and cheeks were peeling, as if from sunburn. On the whole they had a healthy, hearty appearance that fitted in badly with Madden's theory of murderers and thieves. Instead of a piratical aspect, the promenade bore a strong resemblance to a deck scene on some crack transatlantic liner, except for the blinded lights and ports and the armed guard.

The wanderers passed the scrub gang without trouble and came to the drying laundry. The number of these shirts and trousers and under clothing suggested the hulk must contain a large number of men. If these men were smugglers and insurance swindlers, they had systematized their life after rigid military discipline.

They moved through the laundry with fading hopes of kidnapping an engineer from such a formidable institution, when they were startled by a human laugh. It sounded in their ears and was as unexpected as a shriek in church. For an instant they thought they were apprehended. Then they understood the sound came from one of the lighted ports.

They moved softly among the shirts and trousers until they reached the suspected port. Inside they heard a very trivial conversation in English.

"I'm after that jack of yours, Captain Cleghorne," declared a thick voice with a laugh.

"I played low, remember that,"

A silence, then a burst of laughter.

"He ran that jick over your king!"

Leonard stood beside the port blind making a tantalizing effort to recall something. Where had he heard the name "Cleghorne?" He repeated it mentally several times.

"Cleghorne, Cleghorne——" of a sudden it came to him. He had never heard it, but had seen it framed in the license that hung in the chart room of the schooner, Minnie B.

With a heart thumping against his ribs at this strange and amazing coincidence, the American ducked his head carefully under the port hood and looked in.

For a moment his eyes were blinded by electric lights. Then he observed a group of men sitting around a table playing cards. They were in obviously comfortable spirits, nothing criminal or warlike. One was a long cadaverous figure that suggested to Madden, Cleghorne, the Yankee commander of the Minnie B.

When his eyes strayed across the table to Cleghorne's partner, Leonard's knees almost crumpled in surprise. He was looking at the old commander of the floating dock, Mate Malone.



CHAPTER XVI

CARADOC TAKES COMMAND

Notwithstanding that Madden's head was under the hood, Caradoc sensed the fact that his friend had experienced some profound shock.

"What's the matter? What's wrong?," he whispered from the outside.

"The mate—the mate of the Vulcan is in there!" gasped the American.

"Impossible!" Smith dived under the hood for himself.

Both heads just managed to squeeze in and the two men stared at Malone as if he were raised from the grave. The mate, however, was not funereal. He seemed in the pink of condition, rather fatter than he had been on the dock, and he wore the pleased expression of a man well content with life.

As men will do when under a fixed stare, he presently glanced about and his eyes fell on the porthole. He looked at the dim port for several seconds intently, as if he could not quite make out their faces. Madden frowned, jerked his head up and down in a signal for Malone to approach.

The mate's little eyes went round at the request. He made a surprised gesture to his partner, scrambled to his feet and drew near. The whole cabin followed his motions.

"W'ot is it?" he whispered, still peering into the half-faces seen in the round hole.

"Madden and Smith."

"W'ot!"

"Yes."

"Great sharks! W'ot you lads doin' 'ere?"

"Came off the tug—what is this?"

"W'ot is w'ot?"

"This ship we're on?"

It seemed as if Malone's little eyes would pop out of his head.

"W'ot—didn't they ketch you? You don't mean to say you—you jest straggled aboard?"

"Sure we did. Catch us? Who is there to catch us?"

Malone stared as if at two ghosts. "Say! Say!" he said hoarsely. "You don't mean to say you ain't caught? You don't mean you run th' tug up 'ere an' boarded us! You don't mean——" He turned and whispered hoarsely inside: "It's th' lads off th' dock, though 'ow they got 'ere, an' w'ot they're—douse th' light, some o' you fellows."

A stifled consternation seized the card players, who crowded up to the port. A moment later all the lights were snapped out one after another.

"Tell us who there was to catch us," begged Leonard in a whisper.

"Who? W'y a German warship, that's who! One caught us—an' Cap Cleghorne. Caught th' Cap away hup on th' Newfoundland Banks. Caught us first day——"

"Why should a German warship capture us!" demanded Leonard in a voice that threatened to rise in excitement.

"Quiet! Quiet! 'Eavens, lad! Don't you know? Ain't you 'eard? W'y it's war! War! War's broke out all over th' world! Everyw'ere! Ever'body!"

"War!" gasped Madden.

"War! What countries?" demanded Smith in an excited whisper.

"Hall countries! Hingland, France, Rooshia, Japan, that's one side, an' Germany and Austria on th' other."

"America in it?" demanded Madden.

"Right enough. Canada is sendin' troops and——"

"America! America! The United States of America!"

"Oh, no, she's the only nootral in th' whole world among th' big powers! But she'll be in soon enough!"

"What's this we're on?" inquired Caradoc. "It isn't a warship?"

"Kind o' warship. It's a mother ship for submarines—sort of floatin' dry dock for the little sneakers. She takes 'em aboard, over'auls 'em, gives 'em new stores and torpedoes."

"England at war!" repeated Caradoc in a maze. "I must get out of here!"

"That's th' word, war!" whispered Malone thickly. "They say Hingland's got a tight blockade aroun' th' German ports, so th' German cruisers bring their prizes here in th' Sargasso, load all the prize stores they capture out o' Hinglish bottoms into submarines an' run it into Germany under th' blockade. See? That's w'y this mother ship is 'ere. She fixes 'em up at this end for their run back."

Malone told all this in a hoarse breath.

"What do they do with their prisoners—keep them here?"

"No, ship 'em to German East Africa an' intern 'em. The Prince Eitel is due 'ere tomorrow to ship us."

So that was the explanation of all this mystery—War!

Madden fell silent with the sensation of a man who had lost his footing on earth. All his life he had been accustomed to peace. He thought of wars as small affairs that broke out now and then in South America or when the American Indians got hold of whiskey. But for Germany, France, England to fight, to hurl millions of men at each other! It was inconceivable!

The boy's brain felt numb as if crushed beneath an enormous horror. The world was at war!

Unless a person actually witness a murder, he cannot imagine the shock and dreadfulness of seeing one man shot down, writhe, gasp, grow pale and cease struggling. To picture ten men murdered simply stuns the mind. An effort to realize hundreds, thousands, millions of men mangled, wounded, bayoneted, crushed, blown to atoms by shells and mine—all this becomes vague, formless, a dim, dreadful picture that is as unreal as a dream, or history.

"What caused it?" asked Madden in a strained tone.

"I don't know," whispered the mate huskily. "They say it all started because an anarchist killed an Austrian prince, but I don't believe it—that sounds too onreasonable for me."

"What has an Austrian prince to do with the rest of the nations?"

"I told you I don't believe it!" repeated the mate.

Madden felt impotent at the conclusion of the narrative. As long as he had conceived himself to be attacking a force of pirates and thieves, he was ready to board this great vessel, hunt for an engineer, or attempt any desperate scheme. But now when he learned that men were being murdered, goods stolen, ships scuttled, in accordance with a kind of wild law, called rules of war, he no longer knew what to do. The world was mad. Its people were murdering each other.

He finally said aloud to Caradoc: "I suppose we may as well hunt up the commanding officer, surrender ourselves and sail for Africa with the others."

"No," interrupted Smith, "don't do that." Then he called softly inside, "Malone!"

"Well, w'ot is it?" inquired the mate gruffly, for he persevered in his dislike of Smith.

"Look sharp, Malone! I am an officer in the English navy—it is my right and duty to assume command of all English seamen in case of war!"

A blank silence followed this remarkable assumption of authority. The tone in which it was whispered prevented any doubts in the minds of his hearers.

"Do you understand?" inquired Caradoc in a sharp undertone.

"Yes, sir," replied the mate doggedly.

"How many men have you in there?"

"Eleven Hinglishmen, sir."

"I assume responsibility for those men. From now on accept orders from me!"

"Yes, sir."

"Pass the word around. I am going to hand in some German uniforms through this port. Let every man put on a uniform!"

"Very well, sir!" came the dismayed reply.

Caradoc withdrew his head from the hood. In the faint gleam from the outside incandescents, he fell to untying the strings by which the suits were leashed to the lines. He handed eleven suits to Madden, who passed them under the hood and Malone received them inside. Then Smith deliberately stripped off his own clothes and drew on a pair of German trousers.

"Get on a pair, Madden," he advised. "Civilian trousers will be conspicuous in a bright light. You are going to see this thing through, aren't you?"

Madden nodded and followed his companion's example. Five minutes later the two, transformed into German sailors, walked out of the hanging laundry.

"Don't seem, to observe anything," whispered Caradoc. "Appear to be going somewhere, on an errand. Walk just as if you belonged aboard."

A moment later the Briton turned down a stairway that led to a shadowy deck, which was hung with long rows of hammocks with men sleeping in them. The air down here was remarkably cool, although Madden did not have time to give much thought to this. Caradoc pursued his way unhesitatingly among the sleeping sailors, and presently came to another hatchway, out of which poured the rumble of machinery and a stream of light.

Down this flight of steps, Smith moved with certainty, and a moment later Madden saw they were entering a great machine shop. A full complement of men worked at every lathe, table, drill or saw. The clang of hammers, the guttering of drills, the whine of steel planes smote his ears in a cheerful din of labor. The laborers worked at their tasks with that peculiar flexibility of forearms, wrists, fingers that mark skilled machinists. The scent of lubricating oil the faint tang of metal dust filled the air. Strange to say, the air down here was even cooler than that in the sleeping deck above.

All sorts of queer tasks were progressing. Here, men were working on gyroscopes that fitted into the shells of torpedoes; there, they fabricated little hot-air engines which propelled those instruments of destruction. They were repairing gauges, steam connections, electrical fittings, what not.

Madden was tempted to pause and stare about this wondershop, when it occurred to him that if he and Caradoc were discovered they would be executed as spies. He had not thought of this before, and the mere suggestion somehow made him feel stiff and wooden. He was not frightened, but he felt clumsy, as a schoolboy does when he makes his first public speech. His arms and legs felt wooden; his head did not seem to sit in a natural manner on his neck. He felt that if anyone glanced at him, he would immediately betray himself. His walk, his looks showed it. He could not imagine why some workman did not leap out, seize his arm and yell "Spy!"

After a long stage-frightened walk, Caradoc turned down another flight of stairs. Here Madden discovered the secret of the cool air. On this deck was a big refrigerating plant, with frost-covered pipes leading in all directions. The sight of this plant gave Madden some faint insight into the thorough preparation made by the German government to carry on their struggle by sea. Long before war was declared, Germany must have planned a naval base in the Sargasso, and have foreseen the use of her submarines in evading the blockade. She had chosen these untraveled seas as a depot, then established a refrigerated machine shop in order that the full-blooded German might work comfortably in the tropics. The plan seemed to have been worked out with infinite detail.

From the refrigeration deck, they descended to still another deck into the very bowels of the ship. This descent brought them to a long gallery that was formed by a bulkhead running down the center of the ship. As they entered this passage, three workmen came out of a small steel door that opened into this central wall. One of the workmen carefully rebolted the door, yawned sleepily and followed his comrades toward the companionway. As he passed he grunted something to Caradoc. Madden's heart beat faster lest they should be discovered at this last hour. He had no idea what mission moved the Englishman, but he sensed that here was his destination. Smith made some reply in German, moved briskly ahead until he came to the small steel door. He laid his hand familiarly upon the bolts, shot them back, swung open the door. One of the men whirled about and stared back at this assured intruder. Smith stood aside and with a curt military gesture motioned Madden to enter. The American drew an uncertain breath, glanced at the three Germans out of the tail of his eye and stepped into the dark square. Caradoc followed him. The laborers went on updeck apparently satisfied.

An electric wire was let in through the door. Caradoc reached for it, followed it with his hand and presently turned a switch. Next moment a bright flood of light bathed the tubular chamber in which they stood.

Madden glanced about. He stood in a room whose roof formed a half circle over his head. The place seemed as full of machinery as a watch case. Fore and aft were circular partitions of steel, like drumheads. These were penetrated with sliding shutters, which stood open. Through the after shutter, Madden saw a large Deisel oil engine, flanked by a compact heavy dynamo. Looking forward, he could see steel cylinders trimmed in shining brass, and a maze of levers, gauges, dials, valves.

The central compartment in which the two stood was dominated by a little spiral stairway leading up into a steel dome. On a shelf set in the bulkhead was a chart, a telephone receiver, speaking tubes, dials with red and black hands, an array of electrometers, pressure gauges.

Glancing up the stairway into the little dome, Madden saw a pilot wheel, more levers and speaking tubes and telephone receivers, and a square of ground glass, that was lined off with delicate cross-lines.

"Where are we?" asked Madden, amazed. "What do they do here? I never saw so much machinery before in so small a space."

Caradoc was stooping over a heavy metal box down at the floor level at the side of the desk. It was one of a series of such boxes. "We're inside of that submarine you saw enter a few hours ago," explained the Englishman shortly.

Leonard stared around with new eyes. "So this is a submarine! Do you know anything about them? What's that spirit level for?" He pointed at a horizontal gauge.

"Measures air pressure—it's not a level."

"What's in these steel tanks overhead?"

"Compressed air."

"What's that you are getting into?" Here Caradoc lifted the lid, and Madden got a view. "Say, that's a torpedo, isn't it?" he asked quickly as he saw a long needle-pointed steel cigar with propeller and rudder on the aft end.

The Englishman made no reply. He leaned over and selected a small steel crowbar from a tool locker, drew it out with a quick nervous movement.

"Say!" cried Madden catching the strange expression on the face of his friend, "are you going to try to launch this and escape on it—escape on a torpedo?"

A mirthless smile flickered over the Englishman's gray face. "Nothing so fanciful."

A sixteen foot torpedo lay in a steel frame on a runway, just ready to slide forward into the big expulsion tube that was the salient feature of the forward compartment. Caradoc walked quickly to the nose of the terrific missile. He looked at his friend and said in a strange voice: "Madden, I'm going to wipe this German ship-trap off the map!"

A sort of spasm clutched the American's diaphragm. "You don't mean——" he managed to gasp.

"Yes, this is for——" He swung up his crowbar.

Madden on the other side the gasoline-scented chamber had a sensation as if someone had jabbed keen needles into his throat, breast, stomach.

"Caradoc! Don't! Don't!" he screamed and leaped toward the desperate man.

It was all done at once.

"For England!" completed Caradoc Smith, and fetched down a furious doubled-handed blow on the primer of the big steel chamber packed with guncotton.

The crowbar landed with a crash!



CHAPTER XVII

THE GET-AWAY

Both lads leaned against the machinery, limp, dripping cold perspiration. Caradoc was the first to speak.

"Didn't have its war head in!"

Leonard mumbled something through the slime in his mouth.

"I ought to find the connection and explode it," repeated Caradoc doggedly.

Madden moved weakly over beside him. "No you won't. You aren't going to murder us all... not going to do it!"

Caradoc remained motionless, his long face gray under the electric lights. "I fail—at everything," he mumbled.

Leonard sat down on the edge of the torpedo case and looked at the long, slender destroyer. He had a watery feeling, as if just arising from a long illness.

"Let's get out of here," he breathed.

"Wait... we must seem normal. You—you look blue—spotted."

"I feel blue and spotted. I was scared—never was so scared in all my life."

"Sit here till you get over your j-jolt."

"What are you going to do?" asked the American apprehensively as Smith arose.

"I must disable this machinery and give the tug a chance to escape."

"Still got that in your head?"

"I must do something—I ought to explode that torpedo!"

"You're not going to do that, Caradoc. You're not! I have no—no appetite to be a martyr."

The Englishman made no reply, but began moving around among the machinery with the crowbar. Leonard stirred himself to follow.

"You—you're not up to anything—not going to blow us up?"

"No, I'm not going to blow you up. That's my word."

Oddly enough, Madden accepted it very simply, and went back and sat on the torpedo case. He fell to stroking the smooth steel flank of the thing as if it were some animal. The thing had, as it were, refused to blow him to bits at Smith's request.

The Englishman walked about busily, thrusting his bar in among dial connections, snapping brass pipes, wrecking the telephone connections. He laid about him viciously, knocking, crashing, smashing. Then he hurried back into the rear compartment, knocked to pieces the bearings and valves of the Deisel engine, tangled up the wiring of the storage batteries and the dynamo, beat off her brushes, disrupted the clutch on the crank shaft.

It was shocking to Madden to see Caradoc smash and destroy such delicate and costly machinery. He went about his task with a kind of bottled ferocity, and in a short time the submarine looked as if it had let loose a cyclone. Presently the youth paused in his vandalism and glanced about with satisfaction.

"All right," he said in a more normal tone, "if you are ready to go, get a wrench and a cold-chisel, smudge your face with a little oil and iron black, and we'll get away from here."

Madden saw the importance of completing his disguise in this manner. He splotched his face, found the tools indicated by Smith in the locker, then walked out through the manhole into the passageway once more.

There was no one in sight as they came out. They passed up through the cool refrigerating room and through the machine shop with its contented workmen. Madden wondered how those men would feel if they knew that a few minutes past, they were hanging on the fringe of eternity.

The two smudged tool-bearers, who walked rather shakily to the upper deck, did not even provoke a questioning glance from the workmen. A few minutes later the boys emerged once more from the sleeping deck onto the boat deck. It was still deserted save for the solitary guard who paced back and forth in stiff military fashion.

Caradoc moved down to the hanging laundry and paused under the port hood. He tapped it gently. From the interior came Malone's thick whisper. Smith passed in the tools and whispered.

"Force the door open gently. Walk out as if you were sailors. Close the door and pretend to lock it. Meet me out here at the head of the ship's ladder, where the guard is stationed."

"Very well, sir," came a whisper.

Then Madden and Smith strolled on down toward the man with the gun. As they walked, Smith whispered:

"When you hear me clear my throat, get within striking distance. When I cough, silence him. I'll help you."

Madden nodded slightly, and the two drew near the pacing guard. Caradoc lifted hand to forehead as they passed and a little later seated themselves on the rail near the ladder. Madden looked down curiously and thought he could make out the shape of the dinghy below, but was not certain.

The American's nerves still tingled from the torpedo incident, and now he glanced out of the tail of his eye at the guard, whom he would probably have to fight.

The fellow was a broad-chested, short-necked German, armed with rifle and bayonet. The bayonet had a bluish gleam under the incandescent.

It was a queer thought to Madden to know that within the next fifteen minutes, he would perhaps be under rifle fire, rowing or swimming away through the black night, or he might be dead. Dead, and the world would end for him, and the war of the world or the peace of the world would be all the same for him.

Madden shrugged his shoulders, drew a long breath and stared out in the direction of the Vulcan. He could see nothing of the tug. The moon had sunk and the stars burned with a more vivid fire. The musing boy noted the position of the Hydra, and fancied it might be somewhere near midnight. Just then his guess was confirmed by four double strokes of the bell. There would be a change of guards. Perhaps the next man would not be so unsuspecting.

Just then Madden observed another deck gang coming up the promenade. He wondered how often they scrubbed deck on this vessel. He hoped this crew would soon pass, as it would make escape impossible if their men made a break while the sweepers were in hearing. Their slow approach made him nervous. Suppose one of them suspected something wrong?

Just then Caradoc yawned and cleared his throat. Madden looked around at his friend with a slight start. The Englishman did not see the approaching sailors. Madden frowned conspicuously, but Smith's long face was placid, and he cleared his throat again.

The guard was now about to pass Madden. The American shifted his legs slightly for a position to jump, nevertheless frowning warningly at Caradoc. The scrubbers were fairly close now. Caradoc arose negligently and coughed.

In the teeth of the scrub gang, Madden leaped headlong at the guard and his fingers gripped the man's throat. At the same instant, Caradoc ducked under his legs. As the foremost of the scrub gang wrenched the rifle from the guard's hands, Madden saw with joy that they were Malone and his men. The three fell with a dull thumping on the deck. The guard tore at Madden's fingers which crushed in his throat. From underneath, Caradoc panted in sharp whispers:

"Overboard! Down the ladder! Quick!"

As he snapped out his orders, the Englishman was working his hold up past the floundering guard's waist. Madden's grip was about to break under the strain the Teuton put on it, but his fingers clung desperately to the fellow's throat, for one shout would bring a hornet's nest around the fugitives. Just then Malone whispered hoarsely:

"They're all overboard, sir."

Leonard caught the soft stir of oars in the water below.

"Shall Hi stick 'im, sir?" whispered Malone, grabbing the guard's bayoneted rifle. "Yonder, comes the new guard!"

Caradoc, who had been willing to blow up a whole shipful of men, panted out a sharp "No!" Just then the Englishman's long fingers slipped up on the tendons that ran down the guard's neck from his ears. He pinched them sharply. The struggling man suddenly gasped and lay still. Caradoc leaped to his feet. Madden scrambled up. Both were dripping with sweat. A man with a rifle was running down the deck toward them. The fellow raised his rifle.

"Overboard!" gasped Caradoc and took a sudden leap over the rail into the night. Madden followed, trusting not to hit the dinghy and kill himself. Malone was already scrambling down the rope ladder as fast as he could go.

While a dive of one or two hundred feet is not uncommon, still Madden's thirty-five foot drop sent chill tickly sensations through his chest and throat. It seemed as if he would never stop falling through the darkness, but at last he struck the water and went down, down, down.

When he finally kicked himself back to the surface and thrust his head out, he heard a violent whispering among the excited boatmen. A moment later an oar struck him under the armpit. Madden seized it, whispered his own name and scuttled in over the gunwale. The men were shoving desperately at the ship's side in an effort to get the dinghy under way.

From the deck overhead came guttural shouts in German and fainter answers. Fortunately the guard did not take upon himself the responsibility of shooting down into the boat, and in a minute or two the refugees had assembled the oars and were rowing furiously from the mother ship.

In the dim zone of light that belted the promenade, Madden could see a number of hurrying figures. Then came a sharp command, and a rifle stabbed the darkness with a knife of fire and a keen report.

Immediately came another, then another, then several. Bullets chucked viciously into the water about the dinghy.