For a moment Barry blazed with a desire to turn the ship inside out, and if necessary search every man clear down to his bedclothes. But the thought of that flying knife came back to him, and the combination of mystery gave him pause; there must surely be some connection between the two occurrences, and the train of thought led directly to the notion that somewhere in the dark recesses of the brigantine lurked the person responsible.

The voices of the two mates, one relieving the other, sounded softly through the open skylight, and Barry decided to curb his impatience. He mounted to the poop again and gave orders to both officers to keep close watch as the land was approached and to see that nobody left the ship. Once more he felt that vague suggestion of a cloaked trap in the second mate's smiling acceptance of the instructions, but now, strangely, the feeling did not bother him. The hint remained nebulous; he shook it off and went to sleep on the more important mystery.

He was called at daybreak and went on deck to find the brigantine stemming the yellow current of a river estuary. A mile ahead the turbid waters churned and slopped over the sand bar, forming a sluggish but powerful eddy across half the river's breadth. Pieces of rotten wood and heaped masses of forest grasses swirled into a floating tangle in the lee of the bar.

Preparations were going forward for bringing up, and the skipper's intention to apprise Little of the events of the past night was perforce laid aside. It was not until the ship was docked that Little heard the story. Rolfe was busy on the forecastle getting ready the anchors, while Vandersee, the bulky Hollander, had stretched out a new lead line along the poop and was carefully marking it off, after well wetting it. For a moment Barry failed to see Little. Even the cheery voice was not in evidence. Then the clattering of iron links, as the cables were ranged for letting go, was followed by a whoop of interest, and the ex-salesman popped into sight in the bows, deep in an examination of the tumbler gear that released the big anchors.

Barry scanned the river mouth closely, dubiously. The available channel was barely wide enough to pass, even with good luck. The breeze blew straight into the river and across the current, causing a confused welter of water that made the picking out of a passage doubly difficult. If the wind had weight enough to overcome the stream, and remained fair, the passage might be accomplished, given shrewd pilotage; but a very slight swerve from the straight and narrow course would place the ship in the grip of that big eddy and inevitably on the bar. That was unthinkable. It could scarcely be hoped that Leyden's navigator would repeat such an error when he arrived, and such a mishap would at once wipe out the advantage gained through Barry's attentions to the schooner in the dry dock.

Vandersee finished his task and coiled up the new lead line. He stepped over to Barry and with respectful confidence said:

"If you know the channel, sir, I'll get into the chains with the lead myself. There's a bad shoal patch this side of the bar, and with the water slicking over it to the out-draw of that eddy, it looks like deep water."

"All right, Mr. Vandersee—Oh, thunder!" Barry flung out the expression in petulance. "Why, you were sent aboard because you know this river, weren't you? I forgot."

"Yes, sir," smiled Vandersee. "I'm fairly well acquainted here. Shall I take her in?"

"Yes. Take the wheel and sing out your directions. Where had we better anchor? Can't go right up, I suppose?"

"Tide's right, sir, and with this breeze, if we manage to avoid swinging across stream in making past the bar, we can carry our draft two miles up, anyway. If we have to bring up before that, there's a snug creek—there, see?—fifty fathom to the eastward of those trees—where we can lie moored fore and aft to the shore."

Barry took up a position at the fore end of the poop, scanning the narrow entrance a trifle anxiously. He had no desire to cast his new command away in making her first port. But Vandersee undoubtedly knew his business. The Barang, for all her slowness, answered to the master touch on her helm and edged surely up for the deep water until the slop of the bar bore well abeam.

For a moment the skipper held his breath as she lurched heavily to the suck of the current. He saw that smooth, flowing patch of oily water, which the second mate had said was in reality a real shoal, draw steadily astern; and he brightened at thought of the danger overcome. Then out of a clear sky came the unforeseen.

From the forecastle head sounded the crash and rattle of chain and a resounding splash. The roar of cable followed, amid a volley of thumping deep-sea oaths from Rolfe directed at the devoted head of Little; and the Barang snubbed up with a jerk, her stern swinging swiftly around towards the bar.

Little stood aghast, replying nothing to the mate's harsh epithets. Barry bawled a demand as to the trouble and turned to the wheel. Again that subtle suggestion of padded steel struck him as he surprised a fleeting but unmistakable smile on Vandersee's calm face.

"I think Mr. Little has unwittingly slipped the tumblers, sir," smiled the big Hollander, stepping away from the useless wheel.

"To hell with Little!" shouted Barry. "Get a boat out, before we plow up that sand!"

Then he hailed forward:

"Mr. Rolfe! Get lines. Carry them to those trees. Hurry!" and to Little he barked: "You, Little, get aft here, and for God's own sake, keep your meddling hooks off things as you come!"

Little started aft, abashed at last. The careful manner in which he avoided contact with crew or gear would have made Barry grin under any other circumstances; but now near disaster impended, simply on account of the irrepressible salesman's voracious appetite for knowledge.

As he approached the poop ladder, Little grimaced up at the skipper and shrugged his shoulders resignedly in anticipation of the storm. Barry's face was flushed and angry, and his strong teeth shone white over his compressed nether lip. The brigantine's stern was awfully close to the edge of the bar, in spite of the swift action of Vandersee, who, in leaving the wheel and before going down to his boat, let go the big mainsail and took the after pressure off the vessel. Now the big second mate hailed from the top of the midship house.

"This boat's all open, sir. She won't float a minute!"

"Oh, blazes!" howled the skipper, flinging his cap on the deck. "Send a man to swim with the line. Any of them. They're all water rats."

"Can't make a man swim here, sir," returned the Hollander, and even now his voice was velvety soft. "Alligators are too thick."

Little paused on the bottom step of the ladder. He measured with his eye the distance to the nearest point ashore. Fifty yards it was; and on the water's edge grew a tangled mass of slimy roots, rising to gnarled, moss-covered trunks, monstrosities rather than trees. Even at that distance suspicious logs could be seen lying half in, half out of the water; but a space ten yards wide, including some of the biggest and ugliest of the trees, seemed bare of those logs.

Barry sent a hail along to the forecastle to avast heaving on the cable; for some of the watch had remained on deck, when the rest went below to pass up lines, and were now taking spasmodic, aimless jerks at the windlass. The mate drove his brown-skinned men to marvellous feats with coiling lines, determined to be ready with his part when the boat was ready. He had not heard Vandersee's report on the boat.

Now on the port side, that farthest from the bar, heaps of cleverly faked-down small lines were ranged along the waterways, in preparation for any emergency of drifting boat. The big Manila hawser lay coiled on the fore hatch, all ready to bend on when a small line was safely ashore. All these things Barry took in with quick professional perception. But now he was stumped. He was the last man on earth to send a man where he himself dare not go; and those filthy, suspicious logs had only too well corroborated the second mate's hint of alligators.

He was aroused from his contemplation of them by a shout from Rolfe, echoed by Vandersee, and followed immediately by a tremendous splash and the whiz of small line running over a teakwood rail. A soft-eyed Javanese seaman worked feverishly near the fore rigging, flinging coil after coil of line overboard until the end was at hand. Then he stooped swiftly, seized the end of a fresh coil, and stood ready to repeat.

Barry looked for Little now and missed him. He ran to the side. An excited chattering among the crew forward, and gesticulating arms, directed his gaze, and he gasped with amazed admiration. Surging through the muddy tide with a powerful trudgeon stroke, making a wake of swirling bubbles across which snaked the black coils of a heaving line, Little headed for the shore. Once he disappeared, as a freak of churning waters gripped several coils of line and jerked him back and under. But the innocent cause of all the trouble made no false estimate of his ability to rectify his error. He forged straight for his mark—that mass of slimy roots and mossy trunks—and soon he was seen to rise waist high from the water, stumble heavily as his feet sank deep in the sticky ooze, and, recovering, plunge headlong up the bank with his line.

A cry of helpless apprehension burst from the brigantine's company as one of those suspicious logs stirred into reptilian life. A great, warty snout jutted upwards, with a swift half-turn towards the intruder, and the yellow water was swept into a furious whirlpool as the saurian secured leverage to turn by a convulsion of his powerful tail.

The cry rose to a shout of warning, and with the shout Barry sprang below to his cabin. He returned on the run with a big-game rifle in time to hear a ripple of relief run from end to end of the ship; and his eyes opened wide with astonishment when he saw the cause.

Other muddy logs had come to life on the foreshore and Little's attitude would have been ludicrous but for the terrible risk he ran. He stared at the suddenly awakened monsters as the sexton of a church might stare if one of his gargoyles suddenly spoke to him. But there was no fear in his bearing; simply the natural wonder of a man faced by a situation which, more than likely, he had disbelieved the possibility of until that moment.

He had kept tight hold of his line, and as Barry watched, he gathered up the slack and with a whoop jumped nimbly over the back of the nearest alligator, charging now with open jaws. As he landed on his feet, he dodged behind a root, and his clear cry rang over the water.

"The big rope, Barry, quick! I can dodge these big lizards. It's a cinch!"

The mate bent on the hawser, and men picked up great coils of it and flung them overboard. Barry stood silent, dumbfounded, and watched Little haul in his line, only pausing from time to time to pass from one side of the tree to the other, as the alligators closed in on him. The eye-end of the hawser splashed up the shoal water, was wrapped securely, but in sorry landsman's fashion, about the big roots, and in response to a howl of triumph from the shore, Barry sang out:

"After capstan here! Get a strain on the line, Mr. Rolfe!" And while the dripping rope crawled in through the fair-lead, cracking and twanging to the strain of the ship's arrested drift, he stood at the rail, rifle in hand, and muttered:

"He's a comic-opera sailor, all right; but Lordy! what a man he'll make with his feet on dry earth! Let go my anchor, hey? By Godfrey, he can let go the forestay when we're going about, and I'll forgive him after this."

The ship's stern answered to the steady pull of the line and dragged away from the edge of the sand until she pointed fair into the channel again. Forward, men hove in the cable until the anchor was underfoot; aft, men tailed on to the main halliards and sent the great mainsail aloft with a will. Barry waved the second mate back to the wheel and sent Rolfe forward to finish picking up the anchor. Then he swung around at a shout from the shore. He had momentarily forgotten Little.

"Damnation!" he breathed, and jerked his rifle to his shoulder. Then he dropped his elbow to the rail, took snap-sights and fired.

The greatest alligator of them all, the patriarch of all saurians, had attacked Little. That agile young man saw his foe in time to avoid the rush by leaping over the straining hawser, knee-high, and the ugly jaws closed with a crash on the rope. Barry's shot rang out simultaneously with the singing snap of a Manila strand, and the heavy bullet chugged home in the vulnerable skin on the alligator's throat.

The Barang gathered way, and the hawser sagged into the water as the strain was released. Whatever Little's limitations were as a seaman, he lacked nothing of common sense; he saw that the ship was independent of the line now, and Barry received another shock while trying to decide how to get his friend safely on board again.

"That's the stuff, Barry!" Little shouted, capering madly as the alligator rolled over towards the river. "Keep your blue eye on these fellows and haul away on the rope!"

With the words he was sawing away busily at the Manila with a fearsome knife he had invested in as part of a sailor's outfit.

"Stop! You're crazy!" bawled the skipper. Rolfe cursed luridly, and even Vandersee's sleek face clouded.

If Little heard, he made no sign. Without a wasted second after the line parted, he followed the running end down to the water, took a grip on it, and plunged in with a shout:

"Pull away! Watch out for my toes, Barry!"

The little brown men of the crew needed no order to pull. The sheer intrepidity of the man on the line had ensured their reverence and loyalty, and the heavy hawser came inboard with a whiz. At the end of it struggled Little, striking out frantically with his legs and free hand to keep his head above the water at the pull of those eager arms. As he took the water, from four separate points along the bank great reptiles slithered; their snouts and protuberant eyes left behind them sinister ripples as they converged on the swimmer.

Barry watched with set lips and glittering eyes. He well knew the improbability of hitting a vulnerable spot in a swimming alligator; his marksmanship was scarcely equal to the certainty of finding one of those wicked, armor-lidded eyes. It was with a hard gulp of fear in his throat that he pressed the trigger for a second shot.

The bullet took the foremost reptile on the point of the snout, checking the beast and causing a flurry among its companions. Little gained a few precious feet, and as a patch of dirty gray belly showed for an instant in the over-roll of the smitten beast, Barry fired again, and his friend gained a little more.

Another factor now entered into the contest, and the ex-salesman was safe. The brigantine was steadily stemming the tide, and now fairly past the bar had reached far beyond the point to which the hawser had been made fast. As she forged slowly ahead, with gathering speed as she left behind the influence of the big eddy, the rope trailed more and more astern and the ship's speed was added to that of the incoming hawser.

Little was hauled up to the quarter, and Barry himself let down the boarding ladder and went over the side to assist the half-drowned swimmer on board.

When Little had coughed several pints of muddy river water from his system, he looked up at Barry with a whimsical grin, as if prepared now to take the calling down that his recent action had delayed. But the skipper had nothing to say about the escapade with his anchors. He gripped his friend's hand with a hard squeeze and took him below for a warming shot of rum with a simply spoken:

"Thanks, Little. That's the greatest thing I ever saw. You're free of the ship forever!"