“It looks like it.” Sandy laughed shakily. “Now all we have to do is get these ropes off before he comes to again.”
“If we could find a knife I could back up to you and hack through the ones on your wrists,” Ken said, his eyes traveling rapidly over the room. “There must be one here somewhere. He has meals on board.”
But there was no knife visible. There was no drawer in the table where one might be found. Their survey of the room revealed that the only place in the cabin which might conceal a knife was the row of cupboards high on the rear wall.
“I think I could pull the doors of those things open with my teeth, if I were standing up,” Sandy decided. “Anyway, it’s worth a try. Can you see to it that Cal goes on slumbering comfortably while I’m at it?”
Ken thought a moment. Bound as he was, it was unlikely that he could knock Cal out again if the man began to revive.
“I don’t know,” he muttered. “Even if I sat on him, he’s big enough to throw me off. I’ve got it! I know how to take care of him. You go ahead, Sandy—if you’ve got the strength to move.”
Sandy was still breathing heavily. “I’m O.K.,” he said. “I seem to have got my second wind.” He began once more to work himself off the bunk.
Ken wriggled over to the armless wooden chair beside the kitchen table and began to shove it laboriously along the floor toward Cal. The man lay on his back, his head a few feet from the wall against which he had been knocked out. His sou’wester had fallen off, and an egg-shaped bump was beginning to swell up almost in the center of his crown.
Ken managed to get the chair between Cal’s body and the wall, and then shoved it forward until its legs straddled the man’s head.
“Now if I can just climb up on the chair,” Ken explained to Sandy, “with my feet on his chest, I’ll be able to give him a solid thump on the chin with my heels if he begins to stir. And if he tries to sit up suddenly he ought to knock himself out again by hitting the bottom of the chair seat.”