her fiancee, the doctor.

"Thank you, I have," he said. "I was going to look up Mr. Lund."

The sentence covered a sudden change of mind. He no longer wanted to go
on deck with the girl. They were not to be intimates. She was to marry
Carlsen. He was an outsider. Carlsen had told him that. So she seemed to
regard him, impersonally, without interest. It piqued him.

"Mr. Lund is in the first mate's cabin," said the girl, indicating a
door. "Mr. Bergstrom, who was mate, died at sea last voyage. Doctor
Carlsen acts as navigator with my father, but he has another room."

She passed him and went on deck. Carlsen was acting first mate as well
as surgeon. That meant he had seamanship. Also that they had taken in no
replacements, no other men to swell the little corporation of
fortune-hunters who knew the secret, or a part of it. It was unusual,
but Rainey shrugged his shoulders and rapped on the door of the cabin.

It took loud knocking to waken Lund. At last he roared a "Come in."

Rainey found him seated on the edge of his bunk, dressed in his
underclothes, his glasses in place. Rainey wondered whether he slept in
them. Lund's uncanny intuition seemed to read the thought. He tapped the
lenses.

"Hate to take them off," he said. "Light hurts my eyes, though the optic
nerve is dead. Seems to strike through. How're ye makin' out?"

Rainey gave Lund the full benefit of his blindness. The giant could not
have known what was in the doctor's mind, but he must have learned
something. Lund was not the type to be satisfied with half answers, and
undoubtedly felt that he held a proprietary interest in the _Karluk_ by
virtue of his being the original owner of the secret. Rainey wondered
if he had sensed the doctor's attitude in that direction, an attitude
expressed largely by the expression of Carlsen's face, always wearing
the faint shadow of a sneer.

"You know they drugged me," Rainey ended his recital of the interview he
had had with the doctor.

"Knockout drops? I guessed it. That doctor's slick. Well, you've not
much fault to find, have ye? Carlsen talked sense. Here you are on the
road to a fortune. I'll see yore share's a fair one. There's plenty. It
ain't a bad billet you've fallen into, my lad. But I'll look out for ye.
I'm sort of responsible for yore trip, ye see, matey. And I'll need ye."

He lowered his voice mysteriously.

"Yo're a writer, Mister Rainey. You've got brains. You can see which way
a thing's hea