s instructor who was
screaming on the end of the wharf.

"He must be mad," muttered Holman. "The darned fool thinks we--Listen!"

A land breeze brought the last line of the chant to our ears as we
neared _The Waif_, and the words seemed to stir me curiously as they
swirled around us. I had a desire to memorize the chant, and even after
we had got out of range of the high-powered voice of the singer I found
myself murmuring over and over again the words:

"That's the way to heaven out
Of Black Fernando's hell."

[Illustration]

CHAPTER II

THE PROFESSOR'S DAUGHTERS

In the old days, when slave-carrying was a game followed by gentlemen
with nerve, the officer with the best nose on board the man-o'-war that
overhauled a suspected slave carrier was always sent aboard to make an
examination. It was his business to sniff at the air in the hold in an
endeavour to distinguish the "slave smell." No matter how the wily
slaver disinfected the place, the odour of caged niggers remained, and a
long-nosed investigator could always detect it.

Now the trouble odour on board a ship is the same as the slave smell. An
experienced investigator can detect it immediately, and when I climbed
over the low bulwarks of _The Waif_ I got a whiff. I couldn't tell
exactly where it was, but I knew that Dame Trouble was aboard the craft.
It's a sort of sixth sense with a sailorman to be able to detect a
stormy atmosphere, and I felt that the yacht wasn't the place that the
dove of peace would choose as a permanent abode. I don't know how the
information came to me. It seemed to filter in through the pores of my
skin, but it was information that I felt sure was correct.

Captain Newmarch was a bilious Englishman with a thin, scrawny beard. He
endeavoured to make one word do the work of two--or three if they were
very short words--and working up a conversation with him was as tough a
job as one could lay hold of. Sometimes a word came to the tip of his
tongue, felt the atmosphere, as you might say, then slid back into his
throat with a little protesting gurgle, and after a ten minutes'
conversation with him, those little gurgles from the strangled words
made me look upon him as a sort of morgue for murdered sentences.

Professor Herndon, the head of the expedition, was on the deck when the
captain and I came up out of the cabin, and Herndon was everything the
comic papers show in the make-up of science professors, with a little
bi