number of doors. On each side there were six, and evidently they were those of the cabins for the passengers. Beyond them a bulkhead, with a door in it, presumably cut the after part of the ship off from the engine room and crews' quarters.
Advancing stealthily, John peered through the partly open door of one of the cabins. It was empty, and showed no sign of occupation; so he wondered if he dare doss down there for the night, but he decided against it as too risky. Moving on, he reached the bulkhead, cautiously opened the door in it and looked through.
As he did so the hum of engines struck his ears, and only then did he realise that they had been almost imperceptibly reverberating through the ship for several minutes past. Evidently she was very shortly about to put to sea.
For a moment he stood where he was, wondering whether to step through the door in the hope of finding a good hiding place further forward, or to return aft and look for a tubby hole right in the stern. He was still trying to decide which course offered the better possibilities when all chance of making a choice was suddenly snatched from him.
Without any sound of warning, a cabin door some ten feet beyond the bulkhead was pulled open. Through it stepped a big, ginger haired man. His uniform, and the single band of gold braid round its cuffs, showed that he was a junior officer. His glance instantly fell upon John. Surprise dawned in his blue eyes; then, striding towards him, he exclaimed
`Who are you? What do you want down here?'
10
`Once Aboard the Lugger ...?'
The unexpected encounter had taken John as much by surprise as it had the ginger haired officer. For a moment they stared at one another. John's first impulse was to turn and run, but he knew that would be fatal. This was obviously a case for bluff if he could only think of one. He wondered what line C. B. would have taken in these circumstances, but could not, for the life of him, imagine. The big man spoke again, more sharply
`What are you doing down here? Answer me!'
`I am looking for Count Jules,' John blurted, that being
the first plausible lie that had come into his head. `How did you get aboard?'
`By the gangway, of course.'
`And the watchman did not give you directions where to find Monsieur le Comte?'
`No, he was busy talking to someone else at the time.' `Why did you not wait and ask?'
`I was in a hurry, and I thought that in a small yacht like this I would have no difficulty in finding him.'
John's voice gained confidence as he developed his bluff, but his heavily built questioner continued to stare at him suspiciously, and muttered with a scowl, `You are a foreigner; are you not?'
There being no point in denying it, and his accent making it futile to do so, John nodded. Then, in an attempt to escape from this dangerous interrogation, he said, `I'm
sorry to have invaded the private quarters of the ship, but I
must have come down a deck too far by mistake. I'll go up again and ...'
Before he could finish his sentence and turn away, the man interrupted aggressively, `What do you want with Monsieur le Comte?'
`I am an old friend of his.'
`Is he expecting you?'
For a second John hesitated, and in that second he was lost. His `Yes' came too late to carry conviction. The blue eyes staring into his showed frank disbelief. In two strides the officer was upon him. Seizing John my the arm, he rapped out:
`Very well! I will take you to him.'
John's brain worked quickly enough now. He realised that if he once allowed himself to be taken up to Jules his goose would be cooked. He might have tackled Jules alone, had he followed his impulse of a few minutes back to take him by surprise in the saloon, but he could not hope to overcome both Jules and this strapping young man. It seemed certain now that he had let himself in for just the sort of thing C. B. had feared might happen to him if he took the law into his own hands by coming aboard the yacht. They would first beat him up, then hand him over to the police. Such a prospect was bad enough, but the thought which infuriated him beyond all else was that his attempt to protect Christina should be foiled almost before it had started. It was barely ten minutes since he had come on board, and he was now to be lugged before her as a captive. It was revolt at such a swift and ignominious end to his venture that spurred him to action.
The officer had him firmly by the left arm, but his right was free. Thrusting his hand under his coat, he whipped out the cosh, raised it, and struck sharply at his captor. He did not need to deliver a second blow. The leather covered egg shaped piece of lead came down on the man's uniform cap with hardly a sound; but his blue eyes suddenly bulged, his grip on John's arm relaxed, and he slumped in a heap on the deck.
For a second John held his breath; then he felt himself beginning to tremble. He had belatedly remembered what C. B. had said about using the cosh with caution. If he had killed the officer it would be a clear case of murder. Thrusting the weapon back into his trouser top, he stooped, and with frantic hands pulled the limp body towards him, so that he could thrust off the cap and examine the man's head.
The passage was lit only dimly by the small blue ceiling lights that are usually kept on permanently in ships' corridors. Anxiously John peered down at his victim's mat of short, ginger curls for signs of blood. He could see none, and, his searching fingers found only a little wetness. With intense relief he realised that the man's cap and the thickness of his hair must have saved him from serious injury. Even if his skull was slightly cracked the absence of any mushy depression or copious bleeding seemed clear indications that there was no risk of his dying.
Relief at being freed from the awful thought that he might have killed a man was swiftly succeeded by a lesser, but still pressing, anxiety. If he had not got a corpse on his hands, he had something like it. The limp body at his feet showed no signs of returning animation; so he was not faced with the unhappy choice of either humanely rendering it assistance at his own peril or giving it another biff on the head to prevent its calling on anyone else to do so; but if he left it lying where it was some other member of the crew might come upon it at any moment. Should that happen, and a general alarm be raised, unless he had first found himself a safe hiding place, he would again be caught before the yacht left harbour.
The obvious course was to carry the unconscious officer back into the cabin from which he had emerged. John knew that good old `crack' and others of his mother's fiction characters performed such feats without the least difficulty; but, being of slight build himself and having already felt the dead weight of the powerfully built body, he had serious misgivings about his ability to get it there. Nonetheless, feeling that to be the only step by which he could prevent the discovery within a very short time that an act of violence had been committed aboard, he set about . the job with feverish energy.
Getting his hands under his victim's arm pits, he endeavoured to half lift, half drag him towards the cabin; but the best he could manage was to pull him a few inches at a time along the floor. At every tug his head jerked and rolled ludicrously on his shoulders, his arms flapped like mechanical fins, and the heels of his boots scraped noisily on the boards. While John heaved, strained, and panted from his exertions, he expected every moment that someone would appear at one or other end of the corridor and catch him red handed; but after three minutes' gruelling struggle he had the body over the door sill. For him to have got it up on to the bunk unaided would have required further precious moments of exhausting effort; so, instead, he pushed a pillow under the injured man's head before stepping out of the cabin and closing its door behind him.
Breathless, and still trembling a little, he again considered whether his best prospects of coming upon a good hiding place lay forward or, through the bulkhead, astern. As he hesitated a sudden thought struck him with fresh dismay. Getting the unconscious officer back into his cabin had only put off the evil hour of discovery. In a crew of only a dozen or so he would soon be missed. Someone was certain to come down to his cabin to look for him. Had John been able to lock it, there would have been a chance of them assuming that the officer had been detained ashore and missed his ship. But there was no key in the door, so whoever came to look for him would walk straight in on his body.
That would mean an immediate enquiry. Perhaps by then he would have come round sufficiently to describe how he had been attacked. In any case he would do so before many hours had passed. The yacht would then be searched from stem to stern as a precaution against the foreigner who had attacked him still being on board. An 8oo ton yacht was very different from a liner, or even a tramp; it had no great air ducts, baggage holds or
