Jim held the model attentively in his hand, admiring its beauty and the clever workmanship. But for the life of him he could not see what its use had been to these men. Suddenly, as he was running his hand again over the slender, delicately made keel, it came away in his hand, and he saw a cunningly contrived groove, filled with iron.
He almost shouted in his surprise and exultation. Here was the key to the mystery, and, with the key, the means of defeating it.
But he had to get away first. And, as he moved toward the ladder again, he heard a new voice, that made him realize that one of his fears had been realized. It was Barnes who was talking.
“That’s just what Harding was afraid of,” Barnes was saying. “He knew you’d mess the thing up. This chap you picked up was, undoubtedly, one of Merriwell’s gang. You did the right thing when you snaked him in, but why did you let him bluff you? You ought to have tied him up and kept him from snooping around. The chances are, if it’s Merriwell himself or Phillips, that he knows the whole game by this time.”
Jim could not hear what Barrows said in reply; but there was a growling curse from Svenson.
“We’ve made Mr. Harding and his crowd respect us, anyhow,” said Jim, to himself, with a grin. “They didn’t take us so seriously at first. However—this isn’t any joke. I think that fellow Svenson would just as soon drop me overboard with a weight tied to my feet as not, if he thought he could get away with it. He’s an ugly customer.”
He debated with himself as to what he should do. To go on deck was to court instant recognition by Barnes, and he knew that, if that happened, he would never be allowed to escape in time to tell Dick Merriwell what he had discovered before the race. Then some knowledge he had picked up in a Gloucester fishing-schooner trip some time before came to his help.
He turned away from the deck, and, two minutes later, he was safely hidden, between the lower deck and the ship’s bottom, highly uncomfortable, but reasonably safe from detection. The trick worked, too, for as he lay there, he could hear the searchers passing right over his head, and their lurid language when they discovered that the bird had flown.