forty-five times, I began to see myself telling it to old Amundsen and
Hilda in the big front room looking out on the plaza, her father and I
having a late supper of flat bread and the goats' cheese and the dried
ptarmigan chips, with Trondhjem beer, and Hilda playing softly on the
piano with an eye and an ear maybe sidewise now and again to me.

And now we were truly homeward bound in old Magellan Straits, with the
hills back of Punta 'renas in sight from our masthead, when we spied a
Norwegian bark with a deckload of lumber ashore on the spit of Pouvenir
Bay, which is on the southerly--the Terra del Fuego--shore of the
straits. Her ensign was upside down in her rigging, and I headed in to
see if we could help her out. I thought it was queer no one showed up
aboard her to answer when I hailed, but no matter--I moored my steamer
just inside the spit and put off with half a dozen men in a boat and
went aboard.

Nobody on her deck, nobody in her below for-'ard. I went aft and dropped
into her cabin, my men behind me, and we were peeking here and there to
see what it was could be wrong, when slap! on goes the cabin hatch over
our heads. Then we hear the padlock slipped on and the lock sprung. We
are prisoners, without even a peek at who it was did it.

We heard them going off. Without waiting any longer, I began slashing
away with my pocket-knife, the only knife among us, and by and by I had
cut our way through the cabin door; but that took a lot of time. From
the bark's deck, when we were clear, there was nothing in sight except
our own steamer to anchor in the bay beyond the spit. The boat we had
come in was gone.

Well, we weren't worrying about the boat, only we had to take the time
to lash together twenty or thirty pine planks and some scantling from
the bark's deckload of lumber and raft ourselves around the spit and
into the little bay to get to our steamer. Everything about her looked
all right, except that none of the crew were in sight when we paddled
alongside. I hurried over the rail to see what was the matter. It didn't
take long to see. The hatches were off her hold and our sealskins and
our ambergris gone from below. A fortune it was, gone--s-st!--like that.

Looking further, we found the rest of the crew nicely locked up in the
fo'c's'le. They didn't know what happened, except that some men had come
rowing in from the direction of the lumber bark in our boat, and one of
them had sung out in English an