more on deck, the feeling evaporated. The four adventurers stood in the warm sun a moment or two and then plunged into the gloom of the kitchen galley. Over in one corner the rusted stove76 stood awry, its doors gaping open. Ben lifted the lids. Within the stove the thick ashes of many fires lay undisturbed, although a little ash had scattered over the kitchen floor when the boat tilted. All around the walls of the little room shelves climbed up to the ceiling and from them tin cans had rolled helter-skelter. There was not one left on a shelf.

76

Already the sun had sunk low in the west. It was down behind the pines on the hill, and in a few minutes it would be gone.

“It is time to go home,” said Helen. “I’m not going to stay any longer.”

“I think that we are late for supper already,” and from the tones of his voice Ann could tell that Ben had been as anxious as she for some word that would take them over the side of the schooner without having seemed to hurry away.

Ann could not help remembering how that figurehead had leered in the dusk of the evening of their arrival; it hadn’t seemed half as menacing since that time, but to be on the schooner as night fell was more than she was willing to endure unnecessarily.

Jo glanced around the galley as though to prove to himself that he wouldn’t be afraid to stay longer. Suddenly he stopped and threw his head up.

“Listen!” he said in a low tense voice.

They all heard it this time and Helen crept close into Ann’s protecting arm. This was not an evasive faint sound like the other; it was a regular soft sussh-sussh that seemed at first to come from the77 deck. Jo stole to the door on tiptoe but the deck was as bare and empty as when they had entered the galley.

77

The noise did not stop. Sussh-sussh-sussh-sussh. It seemed farther away now, up near the bow and the figurehead. It was stilled for a moment and then it began again, near the captain’s cabin. They heard a faint scratching, as though something had slid along the floor somewhere, and then again the sussh-sussh growing fainter.

“Come on,” Jo spoke hoarsely through pale tight lips. “Now’s our chance to get off.”

The doughty band ran in full retreat to the side of the ship. Jo swung 

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