As the Mirabelle sailed farther into tropical seas, Chris and Amos
worked out a pattern for their days. Before sunup, while the air was
still cool from the night, the two boys were awakened by Ned Cilley or
Abner Cloud. They joined the sailors on deck to do their share of
chores--mending rigging, patching sails, scrubbing decks, or polishing
brass. When the sun rose the boys breakfasted.
The men of the _Mirabelle_ then went on with their various tasks, but
Amos went up to the Captain's bridge where he listened to Mr. Finney
and Captain Blizzard, and Chris went down to their cabin for an hour
or more.
Supposedly, Chris was studying lessons. This was only partially true,
for instead of sums, he was practising magic, in which he soon
attained a high degree of proficiency.
What he most enjoyed was turning himself into some small commonplace
creature to plague his friends on board--a mouse, one day, a flea the
next, a fly on the third. Quite naturally, no one suspected his
ability to adopt such fantastic disguises. So little did they
guess--he had one or two narrow escapes from being swatted or stamped
on.
It was Zachary Heigh whom Chris wanted to watch, and as a flea or a
fly he often rode about on Zachary's jacket listening and observing.
But it was not until the _Mirabelle_ had rounded Cape Horn one morning
that Chris, in the disguise of a fly, rode unnoticed on Zachary's
jacket when that sulky young man, after looking around to make sure
the others were all at work, slipped down to the sailor's quarters
below decks.
There he dragged out his sea chest, and from under his belongings
pulled out a second chest. Fitting a key to the lock, he lifted up the
lid. Chris, perched on his shoulder, peered over to see the contents.
They were disappointing--merely a gray powder carefully packed in a
piece of tarpaulin.
Wonder why it has to be kept so dry? Chris pondered, but Zachary was
already refolding the tarpaulin and locking the lid. In the next
moment, Zachary had uncovered a length of white coils. Then Chris
understood.
By golly! he exclaimed to himself, dynamite! Or gunpowder! And so
much! What's it for?
Zachary made no other disclosures of interest that day, but after that
Chris spent all the time he could, both day and night, watching the
young sailor. He was determined to discover if he could what Zachary
intended to do with the gunpowder.
It was hard for Chris not to be able to ask Mr. Wicker's advice and
not to have his master's superior knowledge to lean on. Yet had he
known it, it was just this lack which was making him quick witted and
more resourceful.
One night a short time after Zachary's uncovering of the gunpowder,
Chris noticed that Zachary remained on deck after the others had gone
to bed, and continued to sit with his back to a stanchion dreamily
gazing at the starry sky. Chris was in a fever for Amos to sleep,
which his good friend soon did. Then a gray mouse scuttered along the
wainscot of the ship's passageways until it reached a good vantage
point from which to see the young sailor on deck. Chris had chosen
well; a mouse is used to the dark.
For several hours Zachary remained still and the mouse dozed, woke
with a start, twitched its ears, and waited. Then, long after midnight
when, alone of the entire ship's company, only the helmsman and night
watch were awake, Zachary very slowly slid his way to the ladder
leading to the hold. The mouse, scurrying forward, was able to follow
by means of a dangling rope and a leap into pitch-blackness at the
rope's end. The poor mouse hit something and ricocheted off. It lay
stunned for a moment or two a few inches from Zachary's feet as the
sailor stood at the foot of the ladder in the black heavy air of the
hold. Then Zachary lit a candle end he had brought in his pocket, and
lifted it up above his head to give the maximum amount of radiance.
The glow of the candle stub, like a yellow daisy in a cavern, spread
petals of light for only a short distance. By its sputtering, the
mouse looked up to the towering figure Zachary now made above it, and
hearing the sharp squeakings and furtive scratches that signaled rats,
the mouse thought it more prudent to adopt the shape of a fly. This
Chris did, and on Zachary's shoulder the fly's many-faceted eyes could
not only see everything, but see them several times over.
Zachary then put the candle on the corner of a packing case and from
under his shirt pulled out the coils of the fuse Chris had seen a few
days before. He took up the candle stub and began a long and patient
search, measuring with the length of fuse, and hunting for a secure
hiding place for the gunpowder. In the end he found a cramped space,
just big enough for him to slide into, made by the shifting of the
cargo which had seemingly rewedged itself firmly, forming a curious
little cave of barrel sides, crates, and heavy bales of cotton
overhead. Dangerous, thought Chris, should anything rock the
_Mirabelle_ in such a way that the cargo shifted back suddenly to its
original tight formation. The hold of the _Mirabelle_ was large, the
packing case cave was surrounded by hundreds of pounds of solid cargo.
It gave Chris a trapped feeling that he did not like, and he was
relieved when Zachary edged and squeezed himself out again into a
freer part of the hold.
[Illustration]
Zachary measured with his fuse from the crate cave, where he evidently
intended hiding the gunpowder, to the farthest point away from it and
nearest the ladder, for the treacherous young man wanted all the time
he could get to escape from the doomed _Mirabelle_. Time to climb the
ladder, reach the ship's side, and perhaps row away to a safe
distance.
The fuse proved to be rather shorter than Zachary Heigh wished. His
candle stub, set on a crate, was burning very low and he had only a
few more moments in which--that night at any rate--to decide where he
would hide the lighting end of the fuse. Just before the candle went
out, Zachary's fuse coil reached a group of molasses barrels, and here
the young man decided that the fuse, when the time came, would be
hidden and lit. He made a mark in white chalk behind one of the
barrels and then hurriedly began coiling up the fuse as he turned
toward the ladder.
[Illustration]
At that moment the candle end, drowned in a pool of its own melted
tallow, guttered, blinked, and went out. The utter blackness of the
hold rushed over Zachary and the fly who clutched at the threads of
the sailor's coarse shirt. Zachary was only a young boy, scarcely
older than Chris himself, and the fly could almost feel the quickening
of Zachary's heartbeat at the sudden flood of dark, the sense of the
late hour, and the rat-infested hold. Zachary moved quickly in the
pitch-black, his hands outstretched to feel the ladder, his breath
coming and going rapidly through his parted lips. The heat of the
airless place, the heavy smells of the cargo itself, oppressed and
weighed on both Zachary and his unsuspected companion. The _Mirabelle_
was moving slowly forward in calm tropic seas, scarcely making headway
on an almost breathless night. Down in the hold the ladder eluded
Zachary's reaching fingers, and the creaking of the ship was all that
was to be heard except for the faint sound of Zachary's breathing.
Then all at once, as sometimes happens in a roomful of talking people,
there came a moment of total silence. For a second there was a space
in the creaking of the ship, the pad of rats, or the slight shift and
reshift of boxes. And in that second, just as Zachary's fingers
touched the ladder, to Zachary and to Chris on his shoulder, came the
distinct sound of another man's breathing.