and at the same time scented the odor of
liquor about the fellow.

"Wake up. What have you been drinking? What noise is that?"

But receiving only unintelligible replies, and having to return
immediately to his watch on deck, he reported the circumstances to the
captain, who broke into a storm of invective. Rucker discreetly
withdrew.

Shortly thereafter Duff heard from his stateroom an uproar in the
gangway. Looking out, he saw the captain standing over the prostrate
form of the sentry, whom he had knocked down with the man's own gun.
One of the storeroom doors was open.

"I see now!" foamed Gary, nearly beside himself. "You fellows on watch
have been tapping this rum barrel night and day, I reckon, and mischief
going on right under your feet. But I'll even you up. Where is the
bo's'n?"

Receiving no answer to this last shouted demand, Gary sprang up the
stairway, leaving the insensible sentry stretched upon the floor.

Duff, still watching from his stateroom through the open cabin door,
saw a gaunt, dusky face thrust itself from the storeroom and peer
wildly round. Other faces joined it, and in an instant a dozen naked
black forms were crowding the gangway.

They saw Duff. Several made for him, brandishing short chains from
their fetters, which they had managed somehow to loosen and sever.
Others beat the sentry's brains out, and overthrew the howitzer.

The noise thus made, and Duff's loud calls to alarm the ship, caused
Rucker and one or two seamen to run hastily down the companionway.
Being unarmed they were forced into the cabin or back up the gangway,
by a horde of frantic savages, who were being continually reinforced
from the hold by way of the two holes, which they had somehow cut
through the bulkhead into the storeroom, where among other things, was
the barrel of rum.

The drinking must have been going on secretly for a day or two. In
fact others of the crew were now discovered to be tipsy, and that the
officers had not found it out before was doubtless owing to the growing
laxness of discipline, despite the captain's severity.

Gary, accompanied by Bludson and others, now appeared, armed with
pistols and cutlasses; but the door leading into the hold was already
broken down. Scores of half crazy negroes swarmed into the gangway,
bearing back the whites by sheer weight of numbers, notwithstanding the
weapons of the crew. Revolver and cutlass played an active part, but
the slaves seeme