ds that
reached for him. Dodging past, he lurched along the wharf like a drunken
man. The Italian had gathered himself to his knees. When Jeff came
opposite him he dived like a football tackle and threw his arms
around the moving legs. The newspaper man crashed heavily down to
unconsciousness.

When Farnum opened his eyes upon a world strangely hazy he found himself
lying in a row boat, his head bolstered by a man's knees.

"Drink this, mate," ordered a voice that seemed very far away.

The neck of a bottle was thrust between his lips and tilted so that he
could not escape drinking.

"That dope'll hold him for a while, Say, Johnny Dago, put your back into
them oars," he heard indistinctly.

Faintly there came to him the slap of the waves against the side of the
boat. These presently died rhythmically away.

It was daylight when he awakened again. His throbbing head slowly
definitized the vile hole in which he lay as the forecastle of a ship.
Gradually the facts sifted back to him. He recalled the fight on the
wharf and the drink in the boat. In this last he suspected knockout
drops. That he had been shanghaied was beyond suspicion.

Laboriously he sat up on the side of his bunk and in doing so became
aware of a sailor asleep in the crib opposite. His stertorous breathing
stirred a doubt in Jeff's mind. Perhaps the crimps had taken him too.

The ship was rolling a good deal, but by a succession of tacks Jeff
staggered to the scuttle and climbed the hatchway to the deck. A wintry
sun was shining, and for a few moments he stood blinking in the light.

She was a three-masted schooner and was plunging forward into the choppy
seas outside the jaws of the harbor. He whiffed the salt tang of the air
and tasted the flying spray. An ebb tide was lifting the vessel forward
on a freshening wind, and trim as a greyhound she slipped through the
cat's-paws.

A thickset, powerful figure paced to and fro on the quarter-deck,
occasionally bellowing an order in a tremendous voice like the roar of
a bull. He was getting canvas set for the fresh breeze of the open seas
that was catching him astern, and the sailors were jumping to obey his
orders. The pounding sails and the singing cordage, the rattling blocks
and the whipping ropes, would have told Jeff they were scudding along
fast, even if the heeling of the schooner and its swift forward leaps
had not made it plain.

"By God, Jones, she's walking," he heard the captain boom