er
quarter, and I slapped him on the shoulder.

"An engineer--an engineer to the core," I cried at him. "Look aloft,
man."

Our quarry was almost to the cross-trees, clambering the shrouds with
a smartness no sailor has ever come to, her yellow body, cut by the
moving shadows of the ratlines, a queer sight against the mat of the
night. McCord closed his mouth and opened it again for two words: "By
gracious!" The following instant he had the lantern and was after her.
I watched him go up above my head--a ponderous, swaying climber into
the sky--come to the cross-trees, and squat there with his knees clamped
around the mast. The clear star of the lantern shot this way and that
for a moment, then it disappeared and in its place there sprang out
a bag of yellow light, like a fire-balloon at anchor in the heavens.
I could see the shadows of his head and hands moving monstrously over
the inner surface of the sail, and muffled exclamations without meaning
came down to me. After a moment he drew out his head and called: "All
right--they're here. Heads! there below!"

I ducked at his warning, and something spanked on the planking a yard
from my feet. I stepped over to the vague blur on the deck and picked
up a slipper--a slipper covered with some woven straw stuff and soled
with a matted felt, perhaps a half-inch thick. Another struck somewhere
abaft the mast, and then McCord reappeared above and began to stagger
down the shrouds. Under his left arm he hugged a curious assortment of
litter, a sheaf of papers, a brace of revolvers, a gray kimono, and a
soiled apron.

"Well," he said when he had come to deck, "I feel like a man who has
gone to hell and come back again. You know I'd come to the place where I
really believed that about the cat. When you think of it--By gracious!
we haven't come so far from the jungle, after all."

We went aft and below and sat down at the table as we had been. McCord
broke a prolonged silence.

"I'm sort of glad he got away--poor cuss! He's probably climbing up
a wharf this minute, shivering and scared to death. Over toward the
gas-tanks, by the way he was swimming. By gracious! now that the world's
turned over straight again, I feel I could sleep a solid week. Poor
cuss! can you imagine him, Ridgeway--"

"Yes," I broke in. "I think I can. He must have lost his nerve when
he made out your smoke and shinnied up there to stow away, taking the
ship's papers with him He would have attached some