As Featherweight said this he hitched his pony to a limb of the tree, sprang to the ground, and in a few seconds more was pushing the yawl through the bushes toward the schooner. Had he gone around the stern and looked in at one of the windows—the curtains were raised now—he would have seen that the vessel was not deserted, and that there were four men there engaged in consultation: but he pulled straight toward the bow, and after making the yawl’s painter fast to the bobstay, sprang over the rail and looked about him. He could see no one. He listened, but could hear nothing, for the door leading into the cabin was closed, thus shutting out the sound of the conversation carried on by the captain and his men. Stepping to the forehatch he looked down into the hold, and the first, object that caught his eye was a lighted lantern, standing at the foot of the ladder—the same one Bayard had used during his interview with the prisoner.
“That’s the very thing I need,” said Featherweight, as he descended into the hold. “I will look all over this craft now, and see if I can find something to tell me what she is and where she belongs. Suppose she should prove to be a private yacht, whose owner has come up here with a party of friends to go deer-hunting? If they should return suddenly and find me prowling about, they might not like it. Perhaps it would teach them that it is a good plan to leave a watch on board a vessel.”
The first thing Featherweight noticed when he reached the bottom of the ladder was, that for a vessel the size of the schooner, her hold was very shallow. He could scarcely stand erect in it. He was surprised at this, and he would have been still more surprised if he had known that the floor of the hold was provided with a fore, main and after hatchway, like the deck above, and that they led down into a second hold—the real hold of the vessel, in fact—which was nearly as large as the one in which he was then standing. He learned all about that, however, and about a good many other things, before he got through with the schooner. If he had known all that was to happen to him before he put his foot on shore again, he would have got out of that vessel without the loss of a single instant.