ing.

What she would not see the men had seen, and, in their need, they had
made me their leader. To her I was Leslie, the common sailor. I
registered a vow, that morning, that I would be the common sailor until
the end of the voyage.

"Mr. Turner is awake, I believe," I said stiffly.

"Very well."

She turned back into the main cabin; but she paused at the storeroom
door.

"It is curious that you heard nothing," she said slowly. "You slept
with this door open, didn't you?"

"I was locked in."

She stooped quickly and looked at the lock.

"You broke it open?"

"Partly, at the last. I heard--" I stopped. I did not want to tell
her what I had heard. But she knew.

"You heard--Karen, when she screamed?"

"Yes. I was aroused before that,--I do not know how,--and found I was
locked in. I thought it might be a joke--forecastle hands are fond of
joking, and they resented my being brought here to sleep. I took out
some of the screws with my knife, and--then I broke the door."

"You saw no one?"

"It was dark; I saw and heard no one."

"But, surely--the man at the wheel--"

"Hush," I warned her; "he is there. He heard something, but the
helmsman cannot leave the wheel."

She was stooping to the lock again.

"You are sure it was locked?"

"The bolt is still shot." I showed her.

"Then--where is the key?"

"The key!"

"Certainly. Find the key, and you will find the man who locked you in."

"Unless," I reminded her, "it flew out when I broke the lock."

"In that case, it will be on the floor."

But an exhaustive search of the cabin floor discovered no key. Jones,
seeing us searching, helped, his revolver in one hand and a lighted
match in the other, handling both with an abandon of ease that
threatened us alternately with fire and a bullet. But there was no key.

"It stands to reason, miss," he said, when we had given up, "that,
since the key isn't here, it isn't on the ship. That there key is a
sort of red-hot give-away. No one is going to carry a thing like that
around. Either it's here in this cabin--which it isn't--or it's
overboard."

"Very likely, Jones. But I shall ask Mr. Turner to search the men."

She went toward Turner's door, and Jones leaned over me, putting a hand
on my arm.

"She's right, boy," he said quickly. "Don't let 'em know what you're
after, but go through their pockets. And their shoes!" he called after
me. "A key slips into a shoe mighty easy."

Bu