"Ho! stealing!" growled Larry; "as ef there was any one of us aboard worth robbing! No, that don't appeal to me; it's something wus."
"Worse," Bill also thought it. He stood for a while silent and thoughtful and then crept out of the cabin. Yet though he watched from the waist of the ship for an hour, and Jim, who relieved him, sat there for a similar period, nothing occurred to arouse their suspicions. A little later, Larry, with a blanket wrapped round him, groped his way along the deck and lay down at the doorway which led into the forecastle.
"If the feller's on the roam, he's got to roam over me," he thought, as he made himself comfortable. "Of course it may be as he wants to get down one of the hatchways. Ef so, Tom, watching back there, will spot him."
Yet the night passed without incident, and on the following day the three friends continued with their plan, though now doubting more than ever the justice of their suspicions. As to the imposition they were practising, it was never suspected by any of the crew of the steamer.
"That there young Larry's ill," said a stoker, as he pushed his head up from the engine companion and wiped the sweat from his brow with a dirty rag, which had been clean that morning, and which he removed from his neck, as is the habit of the fraternity, "he's just the look of a man what 'ud go down. Pneumonia, eh?" he remarked, as he casually plugged tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. "Huh! shouldn't wonder!" he nodded wisely. "Thin, delicate sort of a chap what 'ud break up easy. That sort doesn't make old bones. Perhaps dead afore morning! You never know! So long, sonny!"
The beaming face, the smoking clay pipe, the black head of tousled hair disappeared; the stoker dived down into the bowels of the ship, and the man to whom he had addressed his somewhat lugubrious remarks heard the rattle of his stoking shovel a few moments later. If the stoker himself could have seen Larry his exclamations might well have been varied.
"Never felt better in all my life," said the invalid, as he sat in the corner of the cabin, smoking a cigar, which, as was his wont, was tucked into the corner of his mouth alongside his teeth, and caused a bulge in one cheek. "Never! Only I'm puzzled about this matter, and don't I want to catch this fellow?—that is," he added, "ef there is a feller, ef young Bill didn't imagine him. He's young is Bill, and there's no saying ef he's grown out of all his youthful imaginings yit."
Whereat Bill flared up, and became even more determined to discover the culprit.
"For I'm sure," he told himself, as he walked up and down the deck, "that I saw someone—someone who was slinking about—a suspicious someone. Well, we shall see. We are more than half-way across to England now, and in a couple of nights we shall make the north coast of Ireland. If anything is going to happen, it's got to happen pretty soon. We shall see!"