Still trembling, the shaken mate crept from Captain West’s quarters and closed the door softly behind him. Then he slipped down the passageway toward the tiny cabin occupied by Sandy Steele and Jerry James.
The moment Mr. Briggs vanished from sight, the door of the cabin adjoining the skipper’s came stealthily open. Then, slowly, the figure of a little bald-headed man emerged. He shut the door carefully behind him, and then glanced swiftly up and down the corridor.
On tiptoe, he slipped over to Captain West’s door. He bent his head to listen. Then he backed off carefully and raised both clenched fists to shake them in a gesture of anger and defiance, before he whirled silently and made his way out of sight.
He had heard every word spoken in the captain’s cabin since Sandy and Jerry had made their appearance there. Every inch of his little frame burned with determination to come to the rescue of his young friends and help thwart the schemes of the crafty Captain West.
In their own cabin, meanwhile, the two friends had just climbed wearily into their bunks.
Suddenly they shot erect as they heard a rattling and clanking outside their door. But they knew in the next instant what the noise meant. It was Mr. Briggs “dogging down” the heavy outside handle.
“Well,” Jerry said, “now we’re prisoners.”
“Yes,” Sandy said, “but I have a funny feeling that things are going to start to get better.”
“Because,” Sandy said grimly, “they couldn’t possibly get any worse.”
They worsened, not only for the two youths from Valley View, California, but for everyone aboard the _James Kennedy_—to say nothing of all those other thousands of human souls who sailed the lower Lakes on that memorable summer morning.
For it was on that morning that a freak summer storm that had been rushing down from the north, roared like a scourge across Lake Huron before bursting in all its fury upon the shallow waters of Lake Erie. It was a storm that blew with shattering force across a body of water notorious for rough weather.
There are no storms so sudden and so strong as those that fall upon the Great Lakes, and Sandy Steele and Jerry James were about to witness one of the worst within the memory of the grizzled sailors of “the unsalted seas.”