chum was dead. But he thought of him almost constantly. He bought lots of postcards and mailed them home and received some mail, too. Among the latter, which had come by fast mail steamer and reached port three days ahead of the Cambodian, was a letter from Uncle Toby that puzzled Jack considerably.

“Deer buoy”—it read,—“here’s hopping yew will sune be hoam. Strainge things have been hapning. Capun Walters has gone to glory but—lef me die-and-gram and much infumachun erbout sum berried trezer. Leastwayz itz not berried but hidun. If I kan find it we will be rich, so hurry back, your affeckshonite unkil Toby.”

“Now, what wonderful scheme is this?” said Jack to himself, with a half smile, and speedily forgot the matter, for Uncle Toby was prolific of fortune making plans and usually had a fresh one to broach to Jack after every voyage. Jack would have liked to go to Antwerp to visit the good friends that he and Raynor had made there as a sequel to a surprising night adventure, the details of which were related in the first volume of this series. But he felt that he could not face them with the story of the young engineer’s loss; for even Jack was beginning to lose hope by this time.

There was little to do while the ship was in port, and Jack devoted a good deal of time to putting the finishing touches on his portable wireless set. Captain Briggs was ashore most of the time, coming back to the ship usually late at night and walking none too steadily. His wound had long since healed and the man who had inflicted it had been tried. But owing to some peculiarity of foreign law, he was acquitted. Jack was not sorry when he heard this, for he had come to regard the captain as a coarse, brutal bully, whose excesses only made him the more truculent. As to Jack’s imprisonment, it had not been referred to by the captain and Jack felt inclined to take the chief officer’s advice when his wrath cooled and let “sleeping dogs lie.”

Thus matters stood one evening when Jack, who had been into the town to a moving picture show, was making his way back to the ship. The docks were dark, forbidding places at night. Here and there a sputtering arc light hung from a gloomy warehouse. But these lights only made little islands of light, outside which the shadows lay blacker and thicker than ever.

Brawls were of frequent occurrence among the foreign sailors, and altogether the place bore a bad reputation. As Jack came out of a narrow alley between two warehouses he became aware of a figure skulking along ahead of him.

There was 

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