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"Why all the haste?" "Lieutenant Mackinson," Slim blurted out; "he's locked in a closet down near the engine room." "Locked in a closet!" the captain repeated incredulously. "How do you know?" "He gave a telegraphic call for help on the steam-pipe which runs through there and connects with the whistle," the lad explained. "I was on deck and heard it. I talked with him over the pipe."
At that moment the ship's physician, accompanied by Lieutenant Mackinson, arrived to give what further comfort he could to the seasick lads. "It is clearing," the lieutenant told them, while the doctor measured out a powder for each boy. "The wind has died down and the sea is becoming calm." "Oh, yes," the physician added, "in an hour or so you will be feeling better than you did before.
"Yes," admitted Lieutenant Mackinson, "but he wouldn't have mentioned it that way if you hadn't deserved it." "I'm not going to lose that letter," announced Jerry. "Nor I," added Joe, "although we only did what any other fellows would have done under the same circumstances."
"That's true," Lieutenant Mackinson admitted again, "but it may serve our purposes just the same." "How?" Slim asked entreatingly. "Tell us what your plan is, Lieutenant." "No," replied the young officer in teasing tones, "I don't want to raise your hopes until I determine whether it can be accomplished." And he plodded on toward the tractor, refusing to answer another question.
Someone in another part of the vessel was rapping desperately upon that pipe! And in the long and short dashes of the international code that someone was repeating a single word "Help! Help! Help!" In another instant, using the heavy end of his jackknife as a crude transmitter, Slim was tapping off the reply: "Who are you and where?" "Lieutenant Mackinson," the message began to come back.
"Get Lieutenant Mackinson and those boys," the captain continued, and the ship's surgeon started down the stairway to find that Joe and Jerry already were summoning Slim and the lieutenant. "It looks as though we'd caught the man," the doctor whispered.
"What was it?" Lieutenant Mackinson barely breathed, after several minutes of silence. Hoskins crawled nearer before he spoke. "How near are we, Lieutenant?" he asked: "I should say about a hundred yards." "Look straight ahead of us when the next rocket goes up," Hoskins suggested.
"You've been done up pretty badly," said Lieutenant Mackinson, as Joe went through the painful motion of moving his head from left to right, letting his gaze take in the now lighted wireless room. "Yes," he answered with an effort. "Nothing serious, though, I guess." And then, full recollection coming to him, "Did he get away?" "Who?" asked the lieutenant quickly. "Who was it beat you up so?"
Summons to a long-delayed meal gave a welcome interruption to their guesses as to just what their first duties would be, and they had scarcely finished their substantial rations of food when an orderly informed Lieutenant Mackinson that he was to report at once to the field headquarters. "Await me here," he said to the five men under his immediate command. "I probably will be only a short time."
"It may not be so bad as it seems," said Lieutenant Mackinson in a voice that seemed unnatural in that vault. "Perhaps it was only a slight cave-in." He flashed his light about the hole. It was difficult to tell where the opening had been. "Joe and Frank Hoskins!" cried Jerry, a new terror in his voice. "I heard Joe shriek!"
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