“I don’t know about you,” the sailor answered. “But the Skipper never let us down yet. He says he’s gotta have better terms so’s to pay us a bonus. And we’ll get it,” he continued, his voice taking on a mean, determined tone. “We’ll get it, or else!”
Sandy and Jerry, scarcely daring to breathe, lay still in the shadow of the windlass, listening to this exchange. At each word, the black freighter seemed less and less like a place where they wanted to stay. Something had to be done, and fast! As each moment wore on, Jones and the Captain were coming closer to an agreement, and when that agreement was reached, the ship would sail. And if it sailed with them still aboard, Sandy thought, their chance of escape would slim down almost to the vanishing point!
For a few minutes, Turk and his friend stood silently at the rail and smoked their cigarettes. The stillness of the scene was marked only by the glow of coals against the black sea and sky. Then one of the cigarettes made an arch through the night as it was flipped over the side. The figures straightened.
“I’m going back up there,” Turk announced, “and see if I can get any better idea what’s going on. I’ll listen at the porthole, and you stay back on the boat deck and cover for me. If anyone comes along, start to whistle.”
The two dark figures walked back to the deckhouse and disappeared for a moment in the shadows. A few minutes later, Sandy saw their forms outlined briefly against the light from a porthole on the boat deck; then they passed once more from sight.
Turning to Jerry, Sandy whispered, “We’d better get going! If they wind up that business talk before we’re out of here, I don’t give us much of a chance!”
Once more, they crept in the shadows, moving with painful care over the tangled equipment that seemed to cover the decks everywhere. At last, reaching the ladder from the main deck to the boat deck, they paused and took stock. Above them, showing only as a dark shape against the dark sky, loomed the bow of the nearest of the freighter’s four lifeboats. Slowly, and with the greatest of care, they slipped up the ladder until Sandy’s head was at a level with the deck above. He waited and watched to be sure the deck was uninhabited. When he was reasonably certain, he moved ahead, slower now than before, and slid his body up onto the deck. Jerry followed suit, and soon the two, pulling themselves forward on the deck by the flats of their hands and the toes of their sneakers, were sheltered by a life-jacket box below the lifeboat.
Turning over, Sandy scanned the bottom of the lifeboat, until, with a sigh of relief, he saw what he was hoping to see—the screw of a power boat protruding from the stern. This was the object of their search!
As he pointed excitedly to the screw, Jerry whispered with puzzlement, “Now that we’ve found their power gig, what are we going to do with it? It takes four men to launch these things, and even if we could launch it, it would make such a noise that we’d have the whole crew on our necks before it ever hit the water!”
“I didn’t figure on launching it,” Sandy said. “What I want to do is fix it so they won’t be able to follow us in it when we make our getaway on the sloop!”