“But they haven’t got anything on ’em,” he added. “The glass ports were locked—they couldn’t have thrown anything out. So there you are. The captain thinks it was phosphorus and maybe he’s right. It’s a kind of a light you sometimes see in the ocean.”
“Huh,” said one of the soldiers.
“It’s fooled others before. So I guess there won’t be any more about it. Keep your mouths shut.”
Tom passed them and went out upon the deck. He did not venture near the forbidden spot astern, but leaned against the rail amidships. He knew he had the right to spend his time off on deck and he liked to be alone. Now and then he glimpsed a little streak of gray as some apprehensive person in a life belt disappeared in a companionway, driven in by the cold and the rough sea.
Presently, he was quite alone and he fell to thinking about home, as he usually did when he was alone at night. He thought of his friend Roy Blakeley and of the happy summers spent at Temple Camp; of the stalking and tracking, and campfire yarns, and how they used to jolly him, just as these soldiers jollied him, and call him “Sherlock Nobody Holmes” just because he was interested in deduction and had “doped out” one or two little things.
One thing will suggest another, and from Temple Camp, with its long messboard and its clamoring, hungry scouts, and the tin dishes heaped with savory hunters’ stew, his thoughts wandered back across the ocean to a certain particular mess plate, right here on this very ship—a mess plate with a little black stain on it, where someone might have laid a burning match-end.
He caught himself up and thought of Mr. Conne. But this was his time off and he had the right to think about anything he pleased. He could not be reprimanded for just thinking. Nothing would tempt him to run the risk of another encounter with one of those stern, brisk-speaking officers, but he could think.
And he wondered whether that black spot had been made by a match-end. The spot would show plainly, of course, for he knew how shiny and clean mess plates were kept. Had he not done his part in scouring and rubbing them down there in the galley?
He wondered how the mess plate had happened to be in the stateroom, anyway. Sherlock Nobody Holmes again! But the crew, as well as the troops, carried their supper wherever they pleased to eat it. So there was nothing so strange about that. If there had been, why, Uncle Sam’s all-seeing eye would not have missed it.
He fell to thinking of Bridgeboro again. And he thought of Adolf Schmitt and——