Finding that no notice was taken of his shouts to be released from the cabin, Breeze finally sat down on the transom beside the bunk in which Wolfe was now sleeping heavily, and tried to puzzle out the meaning of what had taken place. At first he thought it might be a sort of a practical joke, and perhaps the Vixen was only being carried out in the bay to get a good position for an early start in the morning. In that case he did not doubt but he would be allowed to return to the city when she came to anchor. As time wore on, and the schooner still continued to move rapidly through the water, even this hope began to disappear. At last the motion of the vessel convinced him that she had passed out of the bay, and was now riding the long, regular swells of the open sea.

He now remembered that the Vixen had been fitting for a trip to the Grand Bank, and realized that she had really begun the long voyage that might last for months. If he could only have bidden his mother good-by, and told her where he was going! Now the thought of her distress at his unexplained absence completely overcame him. Throwing himself at full length on the hard transom, he buried his face in his hands and sobbed as though his heart would break. Finally, tired out by his long, hard day’s work, his recent excitement, and the strength of his emotions, he fell into a troubled sleep.

Soon afterwards the companion-way slide was pushed back, and the skipper, Hank Hoffer, and another man entered the cabin and tumbled into their bunks, but without waking the prisoners.

“Sleep sound enough, don’t they?” remarked the skipper.

“Yes,” answered Hank Hoffer. “Drunken men always do.”

It was broad daylight when Breeze awoke, cramped and stiff from lying so long on the bare boards of the transom. As he sat up and looked about him, his thoughts were in such confusion that he could not for a moment recall where he was. Seeing Wolfe Brady asleep in the bunk beside him brought back the events of the preceding evening with a rush, and starting up, he went on deck. There a single glance showed him that they were out of sight of land and heading to the eastward.

A young man whose face looked somewhat familiar to him was at the wheel, though he could not recollect where he had seen it.

“Hello!” exclaimed this individual. “Turned out, have yer? Feel any better than you did last night?”

Breeze started at the sound of the voice. It was that of Wolfe Brady’s companion of the night before, of whose face he had not at any time obtained a good view, but whom he now recognized. “What do you mean,” he asked, stepping up to the young man, “by playing such a trick on me? How dared you lock us into that cabin and bring us off in this way?”

“Ho, ho!” laughed the other, “I dare do almost anything. As for what I meant by it, I told you a while ago that I’d get even with you for laughing at me when that mackerel seine broke and pitched us all overboard. I’ve only kept my word.”

Now it flashed across Breeze where he had seen the face before. It was while on his trip in the Curlew, and this young man had been one of the crew of the Rockhaven schooner--the one who had shaken his fist and threatened him for laughing at their ridiculous mishap.

“I laid up another grudge agin you yesterday,” continued Hank Hoffer. “When I went to Captain Coffin and asked for a chance on the Fish-hawk, he said he had just engaged you and your mate, and didn’t want any more hands. So I had to ship on this old packet. When I found your mate hanging around alone last evening, I saw a chance to fix him, and thought I’d get even with you that way. Then you had to come along, like the greenhorn that you are, and walk right into the trap too. I tell you what, young feller, you won’t never gain nothing by running afoul the hawse of Hank Hoffer! So put that in your pipe and smoke it, and see that you remember it too.”

It was all plain enough to Breeze now, and he turned away angry and heart-sick, to think that his own carelessness should have led him into such a predicament. He thought he could not feel any worse than he did, but a minute later he found himself confronted by a new trouble, beside which the other became insignificant.

As he re-entered the cabin he found the skipper awake, and at once began to charge him with having kidnapped them, and to threaten that if they were not set aboard the first homeward-bound vessel they met, he would have him arrested the moment they again reached Gloucester.

The skipper listened to all this in amazement, and when Breeze had ended said,

“You’d better be careful in your choice of words, my young friend, or you may get yourself into trouble. I never kidnapped you or anybody else in my life, and I don’t know what you mean. You came aboard this vessel of your own free-will just as she was about to start. Your friend on deck there told me that you wanted to ship with us for the pleasure of sailing in his company. I took his word for it instead of talking with you, because you were too drunk to--”

“I drunk!” interrupted Breeze, excitedly. “I never drank a drop of liquor in my life, and anybody who says I was drunk last night lies; that’s all.”

“Oh, come now,” said the skipper, beginning to get angry in turn, “that’s too thin. Didn’t you come stumbling aboard last night as no sober man would have done? Didn’t you raise particular Cain down here in the cabin for a while, and then fall into such a heavy sleep that nothing could wake you from it? Don’t your eyes show that you have been drinking? Wasn’t the smell of whiskey almost strong enough to knock a man down when I came into the cabin to turn in, and nobody’d been here but you and your mate? Besides all this, didn’t I see you myself hanging round Grimes’s not more than half an hour before you came aboard? Don’t tell me again you wasn’t drunk. There’s nothing I despise so much as a sneak that tries to crawl out of a scrape by lying about it. Now wake up that partner of yours and turn him out, or I’ll come down here and do it for you with a bucket of salt-water.”

With this the skipper went on deck, leaving Breeze bewildered and stunned by the charge just made against him, and the amount of apparent proof brought to sustain it.

The worst of it all was that if the skipper had seen him in the vicinity of Grimes’s, others might also have seen him there, and would report the fact when inquiries began to be made for him. Then, too, if the whole crew of the Vixen believed as their captain evidently did, that he had been drunk, would anybody ever believe his simple assertion that he had not been so, against their statement that he was? What would Captain Coffin think? What would his mother think? Would not her heart be broken by this horrid report coming on top of his mysterious and unexplained disappearance? In his agony of mind the poor boy groaned aloud. At this sound a voice behind him exclaimed,

“Hello! What’s the matter, Breeze?”

Turning quickly, he saw Wolfe Brady awake, but still lying in his bunk and regarding him with dull eyes.

“Matter enough,” he answered; “for if ever a fellow was in a worse fix than I am I should like to know it. You ought not to be the one to ask, anyhow,” he added, bitterly.

“Why, what do you mean, old man?” inquired Wolfe, leaning upon his elbow and gazing about the dirty cabin with a perplexed air. “Where are we, anyhow? What craft is this? Somehow, it doesn’t seem like the Albatross.”

“Albatross!” exclaimed Breeze. “I should say not. We are on board the Vixen, bound for the Grand Bank, with only our shore clothes for an outfit, and nobody in Gloucester knows what has become of us.”

“You don’t mean it!” cried Wolfe, now thoroughly aroused. “How did it all happen?”

“Do you mean to tell me,” said Breeze, “that you do not remember anything of what happened to us last night?”

“Not a thing. ’Pon my honor. The last I remember is that after waiting a while for you I fell in with a pleasant fellow on the wharf who wanted me to stroll uptown with him. He said we would not be gone more than fifteen minutes. We stopped in at some kind of a place to get a drink. He treated me, then of course I had to treat him, and after that I don’t remember anything more. What vile stuff it must have been! Ugh! my mouth tastes like brass and my head feels as though it were made of red-hot lead.”

“Well,” said Breeze, “that drink of yours has got us into about as mean a scrape as I know of, and if it hasn’t completely ruined my reputation and broken my mother’s heart, I shall be thankful.”

“My dear fellow, you don’t mean to tell me it is as bad as all that!” exclaimed Wolfe, now sitting up, and with a tone of deep concern. “It doesn’t seem possible. I wish you would explain what you mean.”

“There isn’t time now,” answered Breeze; “the cook called breakfast ten minutes ago, and we’ll have to hurry if we want to get any. You’d better get on deck and douse your head in a bucket of cold water. It will do you good. After breakfast I’ll tell you the whole story, and then we can make up our minds what to do.”

The men who sat at the breakfast-table with Breeze and Wolfe regarded them curiously, winked slyly to one another, and made a few jokes in low tones upon their appearance, but nobody spoke to them.

After the meal was over, as no particular attention was paid to them, they found a sheltered place forward, away up in the eyes of the schooner. There Breeze related to Wolfe all that had happened during the preceding night, bringing his story down to that morning, and not omitting the remarks the skipper had made to the effect that he had been intoxicated.

Before he had finished, Wolfe was worked up into a state of furious anger. “You miserable low-lived scoundrel!” he muttered through his clinched teeth, shaking his fist in the direction of Hank Hoffer, whom he now recognized as the one who had played him such a mean trick the night before; “I’ll pay you off for this; see if I don’t.”

“It was a mean trick, and I hope he’ll live to be sorry for it,” said Breeze; “but don’t you think you were almost as much to blame as he?”

“I!” exclaimed Wolfe, in surprise; “how do you mean? By being so soft as to let that fellow get the best of me?”

“I mean by having anything to do with him when you found out that he wanted you to drink with him.”

“Why, man! I thought he only wanted me to take a glass with him in a friendly way.”

“And do you think it is right to take that kind of a glass?”

“Certainly; where’s the harm?”

“Well, I expect you and I have been differently brought up, then. My father thinks it is the very worst and most dangerous habit a young man can get into. As for the harm, seems to me it is plain enough in this case at any rate. If it hadn’t been for that glass we wouldn’t be in this fix now, and mother wouldn’t be breaking her heart at home, as I’m sure she is at this minute, for not knowing what has become of us.”

“I hadn’t thought of it in that light,” said Wolfe, who had never been taught as Breeze had, to regard drinking as a sin.

“I wish I could get you to think of it in that light now,” said Breeze. “Oh, Wolfe! if you would only promise, this very minute, that you’d never touch another glass of liquor as long as you live, I believe I should be glad that all this had happened--will you?”

Wolfe looked at him for a moment without speaking, then he said, “Would you rather I’d promise you that than anything else, Breeze?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Then I’ll do it. Not long ago you risked your life to save mine, and I told you that from that time on it was at your service. This is the first thing you have asked of me since, and I’m not the lad to go back on my word. So now I promise you, and there’s my hand on it, that so long as I live I’ll never taste another drop of strong drink unless you ask me to.”

“Then you never will,” said Breeze, smiling; “and, Wolfe, if you only knew how glad I am to have that promise, it would make you very happy to think you had given it to me.”

“It makes me happy already to see you smile again, for I begin to see now how I have brought on all this trouble.”

“Let’s not call it trouble any longer,” said Breeze, cheerily, “but do as my mother does, and try to look on the bright side of it. We were coming to the Banks, anyway, in a week or so, and perhaps this trip will be luckier than the one on the Fish-hawk would have been, who knows?”

Just then the skipper came up to where they were sitting, and said, “Well, boys! how goes it now? Feeling any better than you did?”

“Yes, very much,” answered Breeze, “but not so well as we should if you’d only get rid of the idea that I was drunk when we came aboard last night.”

“It’s true, skipper,” added Wolfe, earnestly, “I was a little under the weather, I acknowledge, but Breeze, here, never drinks, and was as sober as a halibut. I can vouch for that. And I’m never going to get that way again either. I’ve sworn off.”

“Oh, well,” answered the skipper, carelessly, “it’s all right now. There isn’t a drop aboard this craft,^[F] so I ain’t afraid but that you’ll keep straight enough till the end of the trip anyhow.”

“Now that you have got us off here,” said Wolfe, “what are you going to do in the way of finding us something to wear, besides these store clothes?” Here he looked ruefully at the new suit he had bought the day before, which was already showing signs of hard usage.

“What!” exclaimed the skipper, “are those all you’ve brought with you?”

“Of course they are; we have not a rag except what we stand in.”

“Well, now, that’s bad; but perhaps some of the other fellows can spare a few old things, and there are a couple of extra oil suits aboard that you can have and I’ll charge ’em up to you. By-the-way, I suppose you two will go dorymates?”

“Of course,” answered Breeze, promptly; “we’ve already been dorymates on one trip, and we mean to be on every other we ever take together.”

“You’ll use dory No. 6, then,” said the skipper, “and you’d better get to work overhauling your trawls right off. You want to have everything in order before we get to the Banks, ’cause there won’t be any time to waste then. When we once get to fishing I shall expect every man on board the old packet to jump quick and make every minute tell, or else he’ll have to reckon with me for it.”

“That’s all right, skipper. We’ve made up our minds to do our best so long as we are here and can’t help ourselves,” said Breeze. “But we belong to the Fish-hawk, you know, and if we should happen to run across her at any time while we are on the Banks, you must not be surprised if we turn up missing some fine day.”

“We’ll see about that when the time comes,” replied the skipper, grimly; “but mind you, if you leave the vessel before the trip’s finished, you’ll lose all interest in what has been caught up to that time, and can’t claim a cent’s worth of it.”

Both sides having thus arrived at a fair understanding with each other, the boys proceeded to make themselves as comfortable as possible under the circumstances. Though they declined to have anything to do with Hank Hoffer, they soon established friendly relations with the rest of the crew. They found the Vixen to be a dirty old craft, and very uncomfortable in many respects. She was, however, an able sailor and a good sea-boat, and after weathering a pretty stiff gale she reached Grand Bank, nearly nine hundred miles from Gloucester, during the night of the sixth day out.

Although the boys had said nothing more about deserting her, if they had a good chance they had fully made up their minds to do so. Little did they imagine, however, under what circumstances this leave-taking was to be effected, or how they should long to once more set foot on the well-worn deck of the old Vixen.