"The other operator?"

"Yup."

"I learned some myself," said Tom.

The operator did not seem inclined to talk more, and Tom went along the deck where a few early risers were sauntering back and forth enjoying the fresh morning breeze. He noticed that life preservers were laid across the rail loosely tied and that others stood in little piles at intervals along the deck, loosely tied also.

He ate his breakfast in messroom No. 2 with the deck stewards and their boys and greatly enjoyed it, though his thoughts more than once turned enviously to the wireless operator. After breakfast he went down into his own domains, where, according to instructions, he took from a certain meat-hook a memorandum of what he was to bring up from below.

Descending the dark companionway, he turned on the electric light, and stood puzzled for a moment, paper in hand.

"That's just exactly like me," he said. "I got to admit it."

The fact was that despite his tour of initiation under the butcher's guidance he was puzzled to know which of the two doors opened into the room from which supplies were for the present to be drawn. At a hazard he opened one of them, and on entering did not immediately perceive the room to be the wrong one.

Sliding open one of the screen doors, he stooped and lifted out a couple of cans from a lower shelf. As he did so he heard the usual, unm.u.f.fled ticking which was pretty sure to accompany the stooping posture with Tom and which always notified him that his big trusty nickel watch was dangling on its nickel chain.

But it was not dangling this time, and Tom paused in surprise, for the ticking continued quite audibly and apparently very close to him. He took out his watch and held it to his ear, and was surprised to find that its sound was quite distinct from another and slower ticking somewhere near by.

He looked about for a clock, but could see none.

"Huh, that's funny," he said, still listening.

Then, of a sudden, he lifted several more cans from the shelf and knelt down, holding his ear close to the s.p.a.ce. From somewhere behind the cans came the steady tick, tick, tick, tick, tick....

For a moment he knelt there in surprise. Then hurriedly he lifted out can after can until there lay revealed upon the shelf a long, dark object. The ticking was louder now.

He touched the object gingerly, and found that it was held fast in place by a wire which ran from a screw in the shelf to another screw in the bulkhead above it, and was thus effectually prevented from moving with the rolling of the ship. Some excelsior lay upon the shelf, which had evidently been stuffed between the ticking object and the back row of cans.

Something--Tom did not know just what, but some sudden presentiment--prompted him to step quickly through the pa.s.sage in order to make sure that he had entered the right room. Then he discovered his mistake.

The room he had entered was the store-room from which no supplies were to be taken on the present trip.

He turned back and knelt again, the cans he had removed standing all about him. One of them, which in his haste he had laid upon its side, began to roll with the jarring of the vessel, and Tom shuddered with a kind of panic fright at the sudden noise it made, and with trembling hands he set the innocent can upright.

Tick, tick, tick, tick....

What did it mean? What should he do?

His next impulse was to run upstairs and report what he had discovered.

He did not dare to touch the thing again.

Then he realized that something--something terrible--might happen while he was gone. Something might happen in five minutes--the next minute--the next second!

Still kneeling, for strangely he could not bring himself to move, he watched the thing in a sort of fascination.

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick--it went, on its steady, grim journey toward----

Toward what?

Still Tom did not budge.

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick--it went; heedless, cheerful, like a clock on a mantelpiece.

And still Tom Slade remained just where he was, stark-still and trembling.

CHAPTER XVII

ONE OF THE BLOND BEAST'S WEAPONS

Then, of a sudden, Tom Slade, ship's boy, disappeared, and there in his place was Tom Slade, scout; calm, undismayed--the same Tom Slade who had looked about him, calm and resourceful, when he was lost in the great woods, and who had kept his nerve when menaced by a savage beast.

He cautiously removed the encircling wire, lifted the object out with both hands, finding it surprisingly heavy, and laid it carefully upon the stationary table where cans were usually a.s.sorted and opened.

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick--it went cheerfully along on its tragic errand.

It appeared to consist of a piece of ordinary stovepipe about twelve inches long. The face and works of an alarm clock, being of a slightly smaller circ.u.mference, had been placed within one end of the pipe, the face out, and the intervening s.p.a.ce around this was packed with cotton waste. The other end of the pipe was closed with a kind of gummy cement.

Tom observed that the little alarm dial in the clock's face was set for nine o'clock, which of course afforded him infinite relief, for it was not yet seven.

With the greatest of care and hands trembling a little, he pulled out some of the cotton waste around the clock face, holding the dial steady with one hand, and found that nothing save this packing was holding the clock in place. He joggled it very gently this way and that to make sure that it was not connected with anything behind. Then he lifted it out and stood it upright on a shelf with cans on either side of it to keep it in place.

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick--it went just as before, as if not in the least disappointed that its tragic purpose had been thwarted; tick, tick, tick, tick--like the old alarm clock that used to stand on the shelf above the sink in Barrel Alley.

There was no Gold Cross for this little act of Tom's, and no "loud plaudits," as Pee-Wee would have said, but Tom Slade had saved a couple of hundred lives, just the same.

It occurred to him now that pretty soon he would be expected upstairs.

The hands of the clock pointed to a quarter of six and Tom's own watch, which was as honest, plain and reliable as he was himself, said twelve minutes of seven.

"That's funny," said he.

He peered into the open s.p.a.ce which the removal of the clock had left in the pipe's end. It ran for about four or five inches, where the pipe appeared to be sealed with the same gummy substance as at the other end.

On the inside of the pipe was a rough-looking, yellowish area about two inches square, and from this two black, heavy cords ran to the cement wall.

Tom understood at once the mechanism of this horrible thing. The bell of the alarm clock had been removed, and the clock so placed that at the fatal tick the striker would have vibrated against this rough area, which was probably inflammable like a match-end and which, on being ignited, would have ignited the fuse.

Tom's imagination traced the hurrying little flames, racing along those two cords to see which would get there first, and he shuddered, thinking of the end of that sprightly little race to the awful goal....

His lip curled a little as he looked at the now harmless piece of junk and as his eyes wandered to the impenitent clock which, without any vestige of remorse or contrition, was ticking merrily up there on the shelf, out of harm's way between the sentinels of cans.

"Huh, I don't call that fighting!" he said.

Tom's knowledge of war was confined to what he had learned at school. He knew about the Battle of Bunker Hill and that ripping old fight, the Battle of Lexington. These two encounters represented what he understood war to be.