Jo bent his back, for a step, and Ann was the first to climb up to the sloping deck. After she had scrambled to safety she let down her hands to help Ben and then Helen, and then she lent a hand to Jo as he braced his feet against the wooden side and walked as a fly might until he could catch the gunwale and swing himself over the rail.
“It is a very big boat,” ventured Helen, whispering, as she looked over the wide deck with its shining weathered gray boards. “It is much bigger than it looks from the house.”
“Now, right here,” Jo interposed, “let’s make up our minds to one thing. Nobody is to whisper and nobody is to scream, no matter what happens. A whisper will frighten a person even when there is nothing to be afraid of, and if anybody screams in my ear I know I shall jump right out of my skin.”
“I don’t see how you have the courage to come back, Jo,” said Ben admiringly.
“I’m not so terribly courageous,” admitted Jo candidly. “If it hadn’t been for Ann’s thinking that the fire had something to do with the ship I shouldn’t be here now, I know that much!”
“Where shall we go first?” Ann asked, and then, because she thought she might have seemed unsympathetic, she added, “I don’t believe we shall find anything wrong to-day. If men are really hanging about the boat they couldn’t come here in the open daylight, for they’d be sure to be seen.”
“We’ll go down to the captain’s quarters first,” Jo decided. “And then we’ll work forward into the crew’s sleeping place, and later look down in the hold. The whole place was bare and empty when my father and yours came to look her over.”
As they walked along the deck Ben kept close to the railing, as if he thought he could jump over it in case anything happened. And as he walked he ran his hand along the side, for the sea had worn the rails until they felt like silk under his fingers. Suddenly he stopped by a splintered break in the top rail and picked something from its outside edge.
“See what I’ve found,” he exclaimed as he glanced at what he held in his hand. “Oh,” he said in a tone of disappointment, “it is nothing but a piece of old cloth.”
He started to throw it away but Jo caught his arm.