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<h2>CHAPTER 20</h2> <div class="figleft"><ANTIMG src="images/image_a.jpg" alt="A" width-obs="72" height-obs="75" /></div> s the Mirabelle sailed farther into tropical seas, Chris and Amos worked out a pattern for their days. Before sunup, while the air was still cool from the night, the two boys were awakened by Ned Cilley or Abner Cloud. They joined the sailors on deck to do their share of chores—mending rigging, patching sails, scrubbing decks, or polishing brass. When the sun rose the boys breakfasted. The men of the Mirabelle then went on with their various tasks, but Amos went up to the Captain's bridge where he listened to Mr. Finney and Captain Blizzard, and Chris went down to their cabin for an hour or more. Supposedly, Chris was studying lessons. This was only partially true, for instead of sums, he was practising magic, in which he soon attained a high degree of proficiency. What he most enjoyed was turning himself into some small commonplace creature to plague his friends on board—a mouse, one day, a flea the next, a fly on the third. Quite naturally, no one suspected his ability to adopt such fantastic disguises. So little did they guess—he had one or two narrow escapes from being swatted or stamped on. It was Zachary Heigh whom Chris wanted to watch, and as a flea or a fly he often rode about on Zachary's jacket listening and observing. But it was not until the Mirabelle had rounded Cape Horn one morning that Chris, in the disguise of a fly, rode unnoticed on Zachary's jacket when that sulky young man, after looking around to make sure the others were all at work, slipped down to the sailor's quarters below decks. There he dragged out his sea chest, and from under his belongings pulled out a second chest. Fitting a key to the lock, he lifted up the lid. Chris, perched on his shoulder, peered over to see the contents. They were disappointing—merely a gray powder carefully packed in a piece of tarpaulin. Wonder why it has to be kept so dry? Chris pondered, but Zachary was already refolding the tarpaulin and locking the lid. In the next moment, Zachary had uncovered a length of white coils. Then Chris understood. By golly! he exclaimed to himself, dynamite! Or gunpowder! And so much! What's it for? Zachary made no other disclosures of interest that day, but after that Chris spent all the time he could, both day and night, watching the young sailor. He was determined to discover if he could what Zachary intended to do with the gunpowder. It was hard for Chris not to be able to ask Mr. Wicker's advice and not to have his master's superior knowledge to lean on. Yet had he known it, it was just this lack which was making him quick witted and more resourceful. One night a short time after Zachary's uncovering of the gunpowder, Chris noticed that Zachary remained on deck after the others had gone to bed, and continued to sit with his back to a stanchion dreamily gazing at the starry sky. Chris was in a fever for Amos to sleep, which his good friend soon did. Then a gray mouse scuttered along the wainscot of the ship's passageways until it reached a good vantage point from which to see the young sailor on deck. Chris had chosen well; a mouse is used to the dark. For several hours Zachary remained still and the mouse dozed, woke with a start, twitched its ears, and waited. Then, long after midnight when, alone of the entire ship's company, only the helmsman and night watch were awake, Zachary very slowly slid his way to the ladder leading to the hold. The mouse, scurrying forward, was able to follow by means of a dangling rope and a leap into pitch-blackness at the rope's end. The poor mouse hit something and ricocheted off. It lay stunned for a moment or two a few inches from Zachary's feet as the sailor stood at the foot of the ladder in the black heavy air of the hold. Then Zachary lit a candle end he had brought in his pocket, and lifted it up above his head to give the maximum amount of radiance. The glow of the candle stub, like a yellow daisy in a cavern, spread petals of light for only a short distance. By its sputtering, the mouse looked up to the towering figure Zachary now made above it, and hearing the sharp squeakings and furtive scratches that signaled rats, the mouse thought it more prudent to adopt the shape of a fly. This Chris did, and on Zachary's shoulder the fly's many-faceted eyes could not only see everything, but see them several times over. Zachary then put the candle on the corner of a packing case and from under his shirt pulled out the coils of the fuse Chris had seen a few days before. He took up the candle stub and began a long and patient search, measuring with the length of fuse, and hunting for a secure hiding place for the gunpowder. In the end he found a cramped space, just big enough for him to slide into, made by the shifting of the cargo which had seemingly rewedged itself firmly, forming a curious little cave of barrel sides, crates, and heavy bales of cotton overhead. Dangerous, thought Chris, should anything rock the Mirabelle in such a way that the cargo shifted back suddenly to its original tight formation. The hold of the Mirabelle was large, the packing case cave was surrounded by hundreds of pounds of solid cargo. It gave Chris a trapped feeling that he did not like, and he was relieved when Zachary edged and squeezed himself out again into a freer part of the hold. <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/image_150.jpg" width-obs="600" height-obs="295" alt="Illustration" /></div> Zachary measured with his fuse from the crate cave, where he evidently intended hiding the gunpowder, to the farthest point away from it and nearest the ladder, for the treacherous young man wanted all the time he could get to escape from the doomed Mirabelle. Time to climb the ladder, reach the ship's side, and perhaps row away to a safe distance. The fuse proved to be rather shorter than Zachary Heigh wished. His candle stub, set on a crate, was burning very low and he had only a few more moments in which—that night at any rate—to decide where he would hide the lighting end of the fuse. Just before the candle went out, Zachary's fuse coil reached a group of molasses barrels, and here the young man decided that the fuse, when the time came, would be hidden and lit. He made a mark in white chalk behind one of the barrels and then hurriedly began coiling up the fuse as he turned toward the ladder. <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/image_151.jpg" width-obs="600" height-obs="279" alt="Illustration" /></div> At that moment the candle end, drowned in a pool of its own melted tallow, guttered, blinked, and went out. The utter blackness of the hold rushed over Zachary and the fly who clutched at the threads of the sailor's coarse shirt. Zachary was only a young boy, scarcely older than Chris himself, and the fly could almost feel the quickening of Zachary's heartbeat at the sudden flood of dark, the sense of the late hour, and the rat-infested hold. Zachary moved quickly in the pitch-black, his hands outstretched to feel the ladder, his breath coming and going rapidly through his parted lips. The heat of the airless place, the heavy smells of the cargo itself, oppressed and weighed on both Zachary and his unsuspected companion. The Mirabelle was moving slowly forward in calm tropic seas, scarcely making headway on an almost breathless night. Down in the hold the ladder eluded Zachary's reaching fingers, and the creaking of the ship was all that was to be heard except for the faint sound of Zachary's breathing. Then all at once, as sometimes happens in a roomful of talking people, there came a moment of total silence. For a second there was a space in the creaking of the ship, the pad of rats, or the slight shift and reshift of boxes. And in that second, just as Zachary's fingers touched the ladder, to Zachary and to Chris on his shoulder, came the distinct sound of another man's breathing. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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