Nothing but silence followed, and emboldened by the fact that none of
the _Cobra's_ ruffian crew seemed to be on the lower deck, she called
louder still, and this time she got an answer--an inarticulate
utterance, half-sigh and half-groan, from out of the inky blackness.
Picking her way towards it, her groping hands encountered the blank
space of an open door.

"Mr. Chermside, are you in there?" she asked, excitement rather than
fear of being overheard causing her to drop her voice to a whisper.

Again that curious sound but no informing reply, and Nettle crept into
the cabin. She had penetrated but a few feet when she stumbled over
something, and, stooping down, she felt a soft substance which her sense
of touch informed her was the body of a man. The next instant she gave
vent to a cry of horror when her searching hands came into contact with
a steel chain which her busy fingers quickly traced to a metal circlet
grasping a man's leg.

"Mr. Chermside!" she scarcely breathed. "Give me water," came the faint
response from the unseen.

Nettle Jimpson's presence of mind, which had never really left her,
reasserted itself in full force. "Shan't be a moment," she said, and
whisking out of the cabin, retraced her steps as best she could to the
ladder, climbed to the main-deck, and seized a jug of water from the
table where the ship's officers had supped. She looked around for a
portable lamp or candle, but this deck, like the rest of the vessel, was
electrically lit, and she had abandoned the hope of providing herself
with a light, when she espied a box of wax matches among a heap of
tobacco ashes on a plate.

A minute later she was down on the lower deck again, holding the jug to
Leslie's parched lips, and by the tiny flare of one of the matches
examining the dungeon which Brant's malevolent spite had devised for his
prisoner. Leslie was lying on a plank bench, securely chained from the
ankles to an iron ring firmly set in the stanchion over his head. His
face was covered with blood, and he was white with the loss of it,
though he revived fast when he had drained the water. By the time Nettle
had lit her third match she had assured herself that his injuries were
not dangerous, though she was equally convinced that to release him from
his cruel durance was beyond her powers.

"Miss Maynard--they have not harmed her?" gasped Leslie, as soon as he
could speak.

His ministering angel hastened to reassure him, exaggerat