t they had not lowered a boat or shot a seal in the week they had
been drifting about in the forbidden sea; but the commander chose to
consider all that he said to be a tissue of falsehoods, and adopted a
bullying tone in an effort to frighten the boy. He threatened and
cajoled by turns, but failed in the slightest to shake Bub's statements,
and at last ordered him out of his presence.

By some oversight, Bub was not put in anybody's charge, and wandered up
on deck unobserved. Sometimes the sailors, in passing, bent curious
glances upon him, but otherwise he was left strictly alone. Nor could he
have attracted much attention, for he was small, the night dark, and the
watch on deck intent on its own business. Stumbling over the strange
decks, he made his way aft where he could look upon the side-lights of
the _Mary Thomas_, following steadily in the rear.

For a long while he watched, and then lay down in the darkness close to
where the hawser passed over the stern to the captured schooner. Once
an officer came up and examined the straining rope to see if it were
chafing, but Bub cowered away in the shadow undiscovered. This, however,
gave him an idea which concerned the lives and liberties of twenty-two
men, and which was to avert crushing sorrow from more than one happy
home many thousand miles away.

In the first place, he reasoned, the crew were all guiltless of any
crime, and yet were being carried relentlessly away to imprisonment in
Siberia--a living death, he had heard, and he believed it implicitly. In
the second place, he was a prisoner, hard and fast, with no chance to
escape. In the third, it was possible for the twenty-two men on the
_Mary Thomas_ to escape. The only thing which bound them was a four-inch
hawser. They dared not cut it at their end, for a watch was sure to be
maintained upon it by their Russian captors; but at this end, ah! at his
end--

Bub did not stop to reason further. Wriggling close to the hawser, he
opened his jack-knife and went to work. The blade was not very sharp,
and he sawed away, rope-yarn by rope-yarn, the awful picture of the
solitary Siberian exile he must endure growing clearer and more terrible
at every stroke. Such a fate was bad enough to undergo with one's
comrades, but to face it alone seemed frightful. And besides, the very
act he was performing was sure to bring greater punishment upon him.

In the midst of such somber thoughts, he heard footsteps approaching. He