Mr. Wicker's Window

  CHAPTER 20

  As the Mirabelle sailed farther into tropical seas, Chris and Amosworked out a pattern for their days. Before sunup, while the air wasstill cool from the night, the two boys were awakened by Ned Cilley orAbner Cloud. They joined the sailors on deck to do their share ofchores--mending rigging, patching sails, scrubbing decks, or polishingbrass. When the sun rose the boys breakfasted.

  The men of the _Mirabelle_ then went on with their various tasks, butAmos went up to the Captain's bridge where he listened to Mr. Finneyand Captain Blizzard, and Chris went down to their cabin for an houror more.

  Supposedly, Chris was studying lessons. This was only partially true,for instead of sums, he was practising magic, in which he soonattained a high degree of proficiency.

  What he most enjoyed was turning himself into some small commonplacecreature to plague his friends on board--a mouse, one day, a flea thenext, a fly on the third. Quite naturally, no one suspected hisability to adopt such fantastic disguises. So little did theyguess--he had one or two narrow escapes from being swatted or stampedon.

  It was Zachary Heigh whom Chris wanted to watch, and as a flea or afly he often rode about on Zachary's jacket listening and observing.But it was not until the _Mirabelle_ had rounded Cape Horn one morningthat Chris, in the disguise of a fly, rode unnoticed on Zachary'sjacket when that sulky young man, after looking around to make surethe others were all at work, slipped down to the sailor's quartersbelow decks.

  There he dragged out his sea chest, and from under his belongingspulled out a second chest. Fitting a key to the lock, he lifted up thelid. Chris, perched on his shoulder, peered over to see the contents.They were disappointing--merely a gray powder carefully packed in apiece of tarpaulin.

  Wonder why it has to be kept so dry? Chris pondered, but Zachary wasalready refolding the tarpaulin and locking the lid. In the nextmoment, Zachary had uncovered a length of white coils. Then Chrisunderstood.

  By golly! he exclaimed to himself, dynamite! Or gunpowder! And somuch! What's it for?

  Zachary made no other disclosures of interest that day, but after thatChris spent all the time he could, both day and night, watching theyoung sailor. He was determined to discover if he could what Zacharyintended to do with the gunpowder.

  It was hard for Chris not to be able to ask Mr. Wicker's advice andnot to have his master's superior knowledge to lean on. Yet had heknown it, it was just this lack which was making him quick witted andmore resourceful.

  One night a short time after Zachary's uncovering of the gunpowder,Chris noticed that Zachary remained on deck after the others had goneto bed, and continued to sit with his back to a stanchion dreamilygazing 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 thewainscot of the ship's passageways until it reached a good vantagepoint from which to see the young sailor on deck. Chris had chosenwell; a mouse is used to the dark.

  For several hours Zachary remained still and the mouse dozed, wokewith a start, twitched its ears, and waited. Then, long after midnightwhen, alone of the entire ship's company, only the helmsman and nightwatch were awake, Zachary very slowly slid his way to the ladderleading to the hold. The mouse, scurrying forward, was able to followby means of a dangling rope and a leap into pitch-blackness at therope's end. The poor mouse hit something and ricocheted off. It laystunned for a moment or two a few inches from Zachary's feet as thesailor stood at the foot of the ladder in the black heavy air of thehold. Then Zachary lit a candle end he had brought in his pocket, andlifted 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, spreadpetals of light for only a short distance. By its sputtering, themouse looked up to the towering figure Zachary now made above it, andhearing the sharp squeakings and furtive scratches that signaled rats,the mouse thought it more prudent to adopt the shape of a fly. ThisChris did, and on Zachary's shoulder the fly's many-faceted eyes couldnot only see everything, but see them several times over.

  Zachary then put the candle on the corner of a packing case and fromunder his shirt pulled out the coils of the fuse Chris had seen a fewdays before. He took up the candle stub and began a long and patientsearch, measuring with the length of fuse, and hunting for a securehiding 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 thecargo which had seemingly rewedged itself firmly, forming a curiouslittle cave of barrel sides, crates, and heavy bales of cottonoverhead. Dangerous, thought Chris, should anything rock the_Mirabelle_ in such a way that the cargo shifted back suddenly to itsoriginal tight formation. The hold of the _Mirabelle_ was large, thepacking case cave was surrounded by hundreds of pounds of solid cargo.It gave Chris a trapped feeling that he did not like, and he wasrelieved when Zachary edged and squeezed himself out again into afreer part of the hold.

  Zachary measured with his fuse from the crate cave, where he evidentlyintended hiding the gunpowder, to the farthest point away from it andnearest the ladder, for the treacherous young man wanted all the timehe could get to escape from the doomed _Mirabelle_. Time to climb theladder, reach the ship's side, and perhaps row away to a safedistance.

  The fuse proved to be rather shorter than Zachary Heigh wished. Hiscandle stub, set on a crate, was burning very low and he had only afew more moments in which--that night at any rate--to decide where hewould hide the lighting end of the fuse. Just before the candle wentout, Zachary's fuse coil reached a group of molasses barrels, and herethe young man decided that the fuse, when the time came, would behidden and lit. He made a mark in white chalk behind one of thebarrels and then hurriedly began coiling up the fuse as he turnedtoward the ladder.

  At that moment the candle end, drowned in a pool of its own meltedtallow, guttered, blinked, and went out. The utter blackness of thehold rushed over Zachary and the fly who clutched at the threads ofthe sailor's coarse shirt. Zachary was only a young boy, scarcelyolder than Chris himself, and the fly could almost feel the quickeningof Zachary's heartbeat at the sudden flood of dark, the sense of thelate hour, and the rat-infested hold. Zachary moved quickly in thepitch-black, his hands outstretched to feel the ladder, his breathcoming and going rapidly through his parted lips. The heat of theairless place, the heavy smells of the cargo itself, oppressed andweighed on both Zachary and his unsuspected companion. The _Mirabelle_was moving slowly forward in calm tropic seas, scarcely making headwayon an almost breathless night. Down in the hold the ladder eludedZachary's reaching fingers, and the creaking of the ship was all thatwas 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 spacein the creaking of the ship, the pad of rats, or the slight shift andreshift of boxes. And in that second, just as Zachary's fingerstouched the ladder, to Zachary and to Chris on his shoulder, came thedistinct sound of another man's breathing.