"Yes, I know it's risky."

"And how do you hope to get in past that guard?"

"We'll have to climb up the ladder right under him, hang there until he is on his up-deck walk, then swing inside and when he turns around we could be simply strolling up the deck toward him. There must be a lot of fellows on such a big ship. Maybe he doesn't know them all."

"Why do you want to stroll _toward_ him?"

"Because if he saw us walking off in the other direction, he would know we had not passed him, and so we must have come up the ladder."

Caradoc shook his head in the darkness. "I'm going to try to jump on that guard when he turns his back, and down him."

"He'd give an alarm sure. We mustn't disturb him till we get ready to leave, then let him yell."

"What you are planning, Madden, is simply impossible. I like to be as conservative as possible."

"We can turn around and row back to the _Vulcan_--and starve."

"Go ahead to the accommodation ladder. However, it's impossible."

As the two moved silently nearer a murmur of machinery in the vast fabric came to them. As their tiny boat swung in beside the high hull, they could hear this noise quite plainly, and they trusted to this rumble to screen their operations somewhat. They ceased paddling and allowed the dinghy to drift against the iron side of the vessel. They could no longer see the deck and the guard, owing to the swell in the high metal wall. But presently they came to the rope ladder which they anticipated hung below the guard's station.

Madden caught this and tied the dinghy to it with the crawly feeling of a man who expects to have a gun fired at him the next moment.

Caradoc came up and the two adventurers stood in the boat's prow, both holding to the ladder.

"I'll bet that scoundrel shoots down," whispered Leonard, "before we get halfway up."

"Don't talk so loud--are you ready to try it?"

"What are you going to do--jump on him?" breathed Leonard.

"No, your plan. If you see he is going to shoot you before you get inside, jump backwards and dive."

"And remember to go far enough out not to hit the dinghy."

"Good."

Madden stared up into the mysterious vessel, caught the ladder and swung himself silently onto the rungs. Caradoc mounted close behind him. They had mounted only two or three steps, when a sudden terrific report thundered above their heads.

It was so unexpected, so violent, that the two boys almost tumbled into the sea. The next instant they found themselves wrapped in an atmosphere of hot, stifling steam. They clung to the rungs in a veritable steam-bath that roared and plunged around them. When Madden collected his senses, he realized that it was merely a safety discharge from the boilers. The main steam pressure did not strike them, but they swung in the hot wet fringe of the exhaust. Had they been ten feet farther aft, they would surely have been boiled to death. As it was they were immersed in uncomfortably hot vapor.

They clung, rather unnerved by the uproar, enduring the heat for four or five minutes, when suddenly an idea occurred to Madden. He leaned down to Caradoc and shouted in his ear.

"How about going up now? Couldn't see us in this steam."

For reply, Caradoc shoved his friend upward, and so they scrambled aloft like two monkeys.

Fortunately for them, the night was windless and the white steam drifted straight up and as it rose, it spread out in an impenetrable fog.

Cloaked in this vapor, the two adventurers scrambled up some thirty-five feet to the first deck. The steam was thick inside the rail. Covered by the noisy shriek of the exhaust, they jumped inside the promenade without being heard or seen, and a moment later, they dropped arm in arm, like two casual strollers, and moved up deck.

Two minutes later, when the roaring exhaust had ceased and the vapor had cleared away, the guard with the gun could never have guessed that the two men he saw slowly promenading the deck had drifted over the rail, out of the night, with the clouds of the noisy exhaust.

Neither of the lads so much as glanced at the sentinel as they strolled past him. Caradoc was saying in the low tones men use when conversing in the darkness:

"Do you suppose that fellow knows anything about engines?"

And Madden replied just as confidentially, as he sized the gun man up out of the tail of his eye, "No, I'm sure he doesn't. An engineer never has to stand guard."

"How are we ever going to spot an engineer?"

For the first time since starting, a little thrill of the joy of adventure crept into Madden's heart. He felt like a ferret venturing into a rat's den.

"Why you can tell an engineer easily," he murmured. "You've seen 'em, oily fellows, with black smudges."

"That describes a fireman, too."

"No, a fireman's not so oily and is more cindery--then we'll know one by his cap."

"Certainly," breathed Smith. "I hadn't thought of that."

Notwithstanding his danger, Madden could not help smiling as he moved along after the fashion of a careless stroller, when he was really keenly alert for a man with an engineer's cap.

The two youths were walking up a long deck, dimly lighted by small incandescent bulbs placed on the inner surface of the outside stanchions about thirty feet apart. Each bulb was carefully blinded from the ocean by a sheath, which confined its glowworm radiance exclusively to the promenade. On the inboard side were a long series of port holes, likewise hooded from observation. Some were aglow, others dark.

The deck, rails, cabin walls, ports, hoods, joists of the top-deck were newly washed and scrupulously clean. Fifty yards up-deck, where perspective and the sheer of the ship gave the promenade the appearance of a long, up-curved tunnel, the boys caught sight of a gang of men scrubbing down deck. A little beyond the scrubbing gang, some garments fluttered on a line drying in the night air.

As they drew nearer, Madden perceived they were muscular men, with faces bronzed by tropic sunshine. Some of their necks and cheeks were peeling, as if from sunburn. On the whole they had a healthy, hearty appearance that fitted in badly with Madden's theory of murderers and thieves.

Instead of a piratical aspect, the promenade bore a strong resemblance to a deck scene on some crack transatlantic liner, except for the blinded lights and ports and the armed guard.

The wanderers passed the scrub gang without trouble and came to the drying laundry. The number of these shirts and trousers and under clothing suggested the hulk must contain a large number of men. If these men _were_ smugglers and insurance swindlers, they had systematized their life after rigid military discipline.

They moved through the laundry with fading hopes of kidnapping an engineer from such a formidable institution, when they were startled by a human laugh. It sounded in their ears and was as unexpected as a shriek in church. For an instant they thought they were apprehended.

Then they understood the sound came from one of the lighted ports.

They moved softly among the shirts and trousers until they reached the suspected port. Inside they heard a very trivial conversation in English.

"I'm after that jack of yours, Captain Cleghorne," declared a thick voice with a laugh.

"I played low, remember that,"

A silence, then a burst of laughter.

"He ran that jick over your king!"

Leonard stood beside the port blind making a tantalizing effort to recall something. Where had he heard the name "Cleghorne?" He repeated it mentally several times.

"Cleghorne, Cleghorne----" of a sudden it came to him. He had never heard it, but had seen it framed in the license that hung in the chart room of the schooner, _Minnie B_.