owed me the little trim cabin
which was to be mine for the voyage. Mr. Jermyn ran ashore up the
gangway, after shaking me by the hand. He called to me over his shoulder
to remember him very kindly to my uncle. A moment later, as the hawsers
were cast off, the little crowd on the wharf called out "Three cheers
for the Gara barquentine," which the Gara's crew acknowledged with three
cheers for Pierhead, in the sailor fashion. We were moving slowly under
the influence of the oared boats ahead of us, when a seaman at the
forward capstan began to sing the solo part of an old capstan chanty.
The men broke in upon him with the chorus, which rang out, in its sweet
clearness, making echoes in the city. I ran to the capstan to heave with
them, so that I, too, might sing. I was at the capstan there, heaving
round with the best of them, until we were standing out to sea, beyond
the last of the fairway lights, with our sails trimmed to the
strong northerly wind. After that, being tired with so many crowded
excitements, which had given me a life's adventures since supper-time, I
went below to my bunk, to turn in.

I took off my satchel, intending to tie it round my neck after I had
undressed. Some inequality in the strap against my fingers made me hold
it to the cabin lamp to examine it more closely. To my horror, I saw
that the strap had been nearly cut through in five places. If it had not
been of double leather with an inner lining of flexible wire, any one
of those cuts would have cut the thong clean in two. Then a brisk twitch
would have left the satchel at the cutter's mercy. It gave me a lively
sense of the craft of our enemies, to see those cuts in the leather. I
had felt nothing. I had suspected nothing. Only once, for that instant
on the wharf, when we stopped to let Dick get his barrel aboard, had
they had a chance to come about me. Yet in that instant of time they had
suspected that that satchel contained letters. They had made their bold
attempt to make away with it. They had slashed this leather in five
places with a knife as sharp as a razor. But had it been on the wharf,
that this was done? I began to wonder if it could have been on the
wharf. Might it not have been done when I was at the capstan, heaving
round on the bar? I thought not. I must have noticed a seaman doing such
a thing. It would have been impossible for any one to have cut the strap
there; for the capstan was always revolving. The man next to me on the