it from his
hands.

"Not lest you get too familiar, sir. I've disconnected the clock part of
it."

"Have you any idea what those men looked like?"

He solemnly shook his head.

"You can't guess who they were, or why they wanted to blow us up?" I
persisted. "Shall we notify the port, or what?"

He stood a while silent before answering.

"Mr. Jack, God knows who they are. It was too dark for me to get any
satisfying squint at 'em; but I never saw 'em before--that I know. Three
things are sure: they're either lunatics, or they've taken us for some
mortal enemy, or----"

"Well?"

"Or I'm wrong in those two guesses, sir."

"But you think they're from the _Orchid_, don't you?"

"On another guess, I'd swear it, sir."

"And you're positive you never saw the yacht till yesterday--in any
port?"

"Never, sir. I even made inquiry about her in Havana before we cleared
to-day--that is, without exciting comment. A one-eyed stevedore said she
drops in there maybe once or twice a year, but he didn't know from
where. _I've_ never seen her, and I've sailed close to thirty year most
everywhere in these waters during winter seasons!"

"Well, I'm stumped," I admitted. "Let's take this to the professor and
see what he makes of it." So we went down together.

Monsieur, in his stateroom, sat bent over his counterfeit bill when I
quietly shoved the bomb in front of him. He sprang up with a broadside
of expletives that in the sunlight would have cast a wondrous rainbow.
It was a way with the little professor, and we had learned to keep
respectfully distant during such periods of effervescing energy.

"Tied to our rudder post," I told him.

He seemed to grasp the entire situation at once. I have never known such
a genius for corraling facts! In an instant his mind apparently galloped
completely around the boundary of our discovery, and then circled in.

"You have made it harmless," was his first oral observation.

"Gates did, yes; he disconnected the clock-work."

"It is quickly made, and crude," he mused, turning it over in his hands,
"but the work of one who is not a novice. Give me the other part!--um!
Very pretty, very pretty, indeed!" Then he looked up, calling: "My boy
Tommy, come! We are to see what we shall see!"

"See what?" Tommy sauntered in; but as we explained the situation he
looked positively hopeful. For the chief quality in Tommy that made him
so likable was his abiding love of danger. He would rather fl