The captain’s stern command produced a sensation, and all hands wondered what was coming next.
The words were repeated, but no response came from among the crowd of men standing about in the raw morning air.
“That settles it,” said the captain, decisively. “Let the fo’k’sl be searched, and every other part of the bark. If that boy is not to be found, he has paid the penalty of his rashness. He may be dead in the hold, or he may have been blown through the quarter-deck and into the ocean.”
Freeman remembered the conversation of the previous afternoon, when Dick had betrayed his curiosity regarding the signals. Yes, the captain’s theory must be correct, and he shuddered to think how long the boy might have been at work in the lazarette while he walked the deck above. But how had he entered the place? Matt was not so badly hurt but that he was able to swear no one had passed through the hatch, and he, Freeman, had left the quarter-deck but twice during the watch, and then only for a few minutes. The true solution of the problem passed through the minds of Captain Maxwell, his mate and second mate, at almost the same moment, but the two former at first dismissed it as too improbable. Freeman, however, insisted that Dick must have gotten into the lazarette, if at all, by crawling all the way aft through the hold; and as Matt insisted that no one had gone below by the usual way, this view of the matter was the only possible one left.
“God only knows what ailed that boy,” Captain Maxwell said, as Dick’s devilish ingenuity became apparent, “but he’s found out by this time how those signals work, and what twenty-five pounds of powder can do.”
[Picture: Crossing the Line] After two weeks of tribulation, the barkentine _Mohawk_ was through the Atlantic Doldrums. The hot, murky atmosphere, and the low-hanging rain-clouds that seem always ready to open and let fall a deluge, were left behind, and the fact that a breeze had blown from the same point of the compass for three successive hours was another certain indication that this tormenting region of calms, rain-squalls and variable winds was a thing of the past.
When one bell struck, and the steward brought Captain Charles Pitkin his morning cup of coffee, the skipper felt as light-hearted as a boy, and knew, without looking at the compass, that the craft was speeding along towards Buenos Ayres, instead of drifting aimlessly about in the calm belt or beating to the southeast against a head wind.