Ken gasped. He felt as if his eyes were about to pop out of his head. The urge to sneeze was irresistible.
“Coming,” the man inside the cabin answered, and the stove lid clattered back on the stove.
There was nothing Ken could do about it. He sneezed. His whole body seemed to erupt in one vast explosion, loud enough—it seemed to him—to wake the dead.
There was a clang inside the cabin and pounding footsteps across the deck outside.
Before Ken and Sandy could even scramble to their feet an overcoated figure loomed above them at the corner of the cabin wall. Even in the faint light from the window he was recognizable, although he apparently was still unable to see in the darkness.
It was the man they knew as Barrack. His eyes were slitted in an effort to penetrate the black shadow thrown by the cabin wall.
“Who’s there?” It was not the affable voice he had used the night before when he had called so inexplicably at Richard Holt’s apartment. It was a curt, furious snarl.
The boys held themselves motionless. The slightest gesture would give away their whereabouts.
Then Barrack, who had been fumbling in his pocket, drew out a torch and flicked it on. Ken and Sandy, spotlighted in the brilliant glare, instinctively shut their eyes against it.
For a long moment none of them stirred.