The next instant it was opened fully and the huge form of Swensen, the giant Swede, stalked out.
Nat was motionless as a frightened rabbit. In the dreadful crisis he was temporarily deprived of the power of crying out or moving.
Swensen's eyes fixed themselves on the boy with a peculiar expression, and in his bare feet—for he was in his night clothes—he began to advance toward him. Closer and closer he came and still Nat stood, held by a dreadful spell that bound his limbs and fettered his tongue—not indeed that it would have done him any good to have cried out.
But suddenly—just as suddenly as he had appeared—Swensen turned and in the same slow, deliberate way started back toward his cabin. It was then that Nat noted something that in his alarm he had not seen before.
The man was asleep!
He had walked out of his cabin in a fit of somnambulism, or sleep-walking, and now he reentered it again and doubtless climbed back into his bunk.
Hardly had his immense bony form vanished and the door clicked to behind him once more before Nat had the chest out of the port and then when it swung at the end of the rope, dropping like the weight on a plumb line, he followed it.
His rope was now much easier to climb, for it was steadied by the weight of the chest at its lower end. The length of the line was sufficient to allow the chest to dangle within a foot or two of the water.
With renewed courage Nat swarmed on up the rope and presently was able to poke his head over the taffrail. As Captain Nelsen had said, the helmsman, by reason of the peculiar steering device of the "Nettie Nelsen," was some little distance from the stern, forming an additional protection in the work that lay before him. Between Nat and the man at the wheel there was a big pile of canvas and boxes, apparently left there by some of the gang after they had ransacked the schooner.
At any rate, Nat managed to clamber up into the boat, which hung out on her davits, without attracting any attention from the man. Once in the boat, the lad took a swift look about him. At the helm was the steersman, a soft light thrown up on his rugged features from the binnacle. From forward some stentorian voice was roaring out a chorus. Nat devoutly hoped that the noise might keep up, for it was not to be supposed that he could lower the boat in absolute quietness.