A Traitor's Wooing

by Headon Hill

Revived by the water she had given him on her last visit, he was suffering now from little more than the discomfort of cramped limbs, and was able to follow intelligently the breathless story which the girl poured out to him. At the conclusion he groaned at his own impotence.

"If I was only free I might find a way of stopping the ship," he said. "Do you think if you could get tools you could draw the staple to which the chain is fastened?"

Nettle stood on tiptoe, and, after a careful scrutiny in the half light, was compelled to admit that the task, even with the aid of tools, would be beyond her powers. The staple, which was really a heavy iron ring, was firmly driven into the oak bulk-head, and without mechanical leverage would remain immovable.

"But what should you have done supposing you were loose?" she asked. "Find a pistol and shoot Brant and the mate? I am afraid I should miss them, or I'd have a try myself."

"You would have to shoot the whole crew," replied Leslie, with a weary smile for her eagerness. "No, I should endeavour to hit upon some plan for damaging the engines. Those of a turbine steamer like this are a very delicate piece of mechanism, and a comparatively trifling injury, not necessarily entailing great violence, would do the trick. Ever such a little delay for repairs would enable the Snipe to catch up if they have allowed her to come as close as you describe."

"Then the sooner I set to work the better," said Nettle, knitting her brows, as the germ of an inspiration was born. "Good-bye, Mr. Chermside, and keep your pecker up. Miss Maynard doesn't know the hobble we're in—still thinks we're on the point of being rescued."

"God bless you for that," Leslie flung after his departing visitor.

But she was already half-way to the ladder to the main deck. In her exploration of the steamer during the run from Weymouth on the previous day she had been idly interested in what Chermside had called the delicate piece of mechanism, so far as its throbbing pulses were visible through the dome-shaped skylight of glass on the upper deck over the engine-room. The glass was opaque and thickly corrugated, but a slide in the dome had been opened for ventilating purposes, and through the aperture Nettle had been fascinated by the antics of gyrating fly-wheels and sucking piston-rods below. As she emerged into the free air of the upper deck she wondered if that convenient slide was open now.

But her first glance was for the pursuing warship, and it told her that the destroyer was a good half-mile further astern since her plunge into the bowels of the Cobra. Her second anxiety was about Brant, and she was comforted to see that he was not on the bridge. As a matter of fact he had gone to his cabin for breakfast, tiring of a joke which had lost its zest with Nettle's disappearance from the deck.

The glass dome over the engine-room was amidships, abaft the funnel. Thither she strolled with seeming carelessness, passing on forward without stopping, but satisfying herself as she did so that the ventilating slide was open. She walked nearly to the bows, and then, on turning to come back, struck a gold mine in the way of good fortune, though it took the humble shape of a zinc bucket full of cinders. It had been placed by the cook outside the door of the caboose, ready to be thrown overboard by one of the sailors—a duty which had been neglected in the excitement of the chase by the Snipe.