Imprisoned as he was in the hold of the Kenilworth, and feeling sure that the steamer was to be abandoned by her crew as a hopeless wreck, Dan Frazier became almost stupefied with terror and exhaustion. As long as there was any strength in his athletic young body he had pushed and tugged at the mass of freight which penned him in, shouting in his frenzy until his voice failed him and died away in hoarse, broken weeping.

At length his benumbed senses lost themselves in heavy slumber. He dreamed of being at home with his mother in the palm-shaded cottage and she was holding him in her lap and stroking his forehead with her cool hands. But nightmares came to drive away this sweet dream, and he awoke with a choking cry for help.

Dan thought he must have been asleep for hours and hours. More torturing than the realization of his dreadful plight was his burning thirst. But his brain was clearer and he listened to the medley of noises around him with a glimmer of hope. The water had not reached the deck on which he had been trapped, although he could hear it washing to and fro in the bottom of the hold below. The hull of the ship had ceased to pound on the Reef. The breakers beat against her steel sides and fell solid on her upper decks with a sound like distant thunder, but Dan began to feel confident that the gale was blowing itself out and the steamer was going to live through it.

He thanked God that he had not been drowned, at any rate, even though he seemed likely to perish where he was for lack of food and drink. Youth grasps at slender hopes and finds strength in dubious consolations. Dan had expected to be overwhelmed by the sea without a ghost of a chance to fight for his life. Now that this peril seemed to be passing, his wits began to return, and he fished his strong bladed sailor's clasp-knife from his trousers pocket. To hack away at his prison walls was better than doing nothing. He twisted painfully about until he had located the widest crevices between the sides of the packing-cases and began to chip away at the stout planking. It was a task tedious and wearisome beyond words. There was no light, his nerves were unstrung, and he worked with unsteady, groping hand. Rats scampered over him, or squealed in the darkness close by, and he slashed at them savagely. They startled him so that more than once he gave up the task and wept like a little child.

At length Dan cut through the planking of a box which was wedged fast between two larger ones and his knife clinked against tin. He managed to break off a splintered end of board and pulled out a round can of some kind of provisions. This was unexpected good fortune, and he carefully cut into the lid with a muttered prayer of thanksgiving, hoping to find enough liquid to wet his parched tongue. The can proved to be full of French peas, packed in enough water to supply a long drink of cool, refreshing soup. Dan scooped up the tiny peas with his fingers, emptied the tin, and eagerly drove his knife into another of them. The nourishment made him feel like a giant. He returned to his task with genuine hope of being able to whittle a way out of his trap.

But as the weary hours dragged by, and the strokes of the knife became more and more feeble, the prisoner gave himself up to despair. His strength had ebbed so fast that he slumped down and slept with his face in his arms.

A great noise awoke him. The cargo was shifting and tumbling with fearful uproar. From below came the rumble of coal sliding across the bunkers. The deck rolled violently and pitched Dan to the other end of his pen. He expected to be crushed by the cargo, and thought the ship must be turning over. But the commotion gradually ceased and, to his great astonishment, he was alive and unhurt. The deck seemed to have much less slant than before. He raised his arms and they touched nothing over his head. Unable to realize the truth, he scrambled to his feet and stood upright. The great package of freight which had roofed him over had slid clear, carrying along the boxes piled above it. Frantic with new hope of release, Dan clambered upward, tearing his clothes to tatters, plunging headlong from one obstacle to another, bruising his face, hands, and knees against sharp edges and corners. Scrambling over the disordered cargo until he had to halt to get his breath, Dan gasped to himself:

"I can't get on deck through a freight compartment. The hatches will be fastened down above. I must find out how I blundered in here as far as the broken bulkhead."

A moment later he fetched up against solid tiers of cargo which had not been dislodged and knew he must be headed wrong. This gave him a clue, however, and with fast-failing strength he stumbled back over the way he had come. At last he saw a streak of daylight filter down from a skylight far above. Yes, there was a road to the upper deck. Dan glimpsed the shadowy outline of a ladder. It was all he could do to muster courage to attempt the long and dizzy climb. But he set his teeth and clung like a barnacle to one round after another until he fell against the iron door of a deck-house, fumbled with the fastening, and tottered out into daylight.

Half-blinded and blinking like an owl, Dan Frazier covered his face with his hands until his eyes could bear the dazzling reflection of sea and sky which were flooded with glorious sunshine. The wind sang through the shrouds and funnel-stays and the blue ocean upheaved in swollen billows, but the gale had passed. Dan's bewildered gaze fell upon the empty chocks, the dangling falls and the davits swung outboard, where the steamer's life-boats had been. These signs were enough to tell him that the ship had been abandoned. He was left alone in her, and he went forward with a feeling of uncanny isolation. Water to drink was what he wanted more than anything else, and before making a survey of the ship he sought the tank in the chart-room and fairly guzzled his fill. Then he made a ferocious onslaught on the cabin pantry and carried on deck a kettle full of cold boiled potatoes, beef and hard bread, and climbed to the battered bridge.

Looking down at the steamer from this lofty perch, Dan understood what had caused the violent roll and lunge that set him free from his prison below decks. The storm had driven her, head-on, far up the outer slope of the Reef, where she had lain as if about to break in pieces, with the seas washing clean over her. But while her forward compartments had filled with water, her stern was still buoyant. When the gale had subsided the ship was hanging over the deep water on the inner side of the Reef, and the next high tide had lifted her stern so that she slid bow-first, for half her length, down the opposite side of the shelf which had held her keel fast. It looked like a miracle to Dan, but here was the ship still solid under his feet. Gazing down from one end of the bridge, he could see the inner edge of the Reef shimmering far down through the clear water and the hull of the Kenilworth, hanging only by the after part.

"Where, oh where, is Uncle Jim?" he thought. "He might patch up her bulkheads, lift the water out with his wrecking pumps, and pull her off yet. And I'll bet he'd keep her afloat somehow."

Then a stupendous thought flashed into Dan's mind. It was such a dazzling, gorgeous idea that it made him dizzy with delight. Yes, it was all true. The Kenilworth had been abandoned by her captain and crew as a wreck. She was like a derelict at sea. Whoever should find and board her would have the right to claim heavy salvage on the vessel and her cargo if they were saved and brought into port. It was the unwritten law of the Reef that the first man to set foot on an abandoned wreck was the wrecking master, to be obeyed as such, with first claim on salvage.

Dan tried to arrange his thoughts in some kind of order, and at length he said to himself with an air of decision:

"The wrecking master on this job is Daniel P. Frazier. I earned it all right, and Key West will back me up whether Jerry Pringle likes it or not. And I'm going to hold her down till Uncle Jim comes back. There can't be any more question about who has the wrecking of her. General cargo, too!—I'll bet it's worth several hundred thousand dollars!—and a four thousand ton steel steamer. If we can save her, the owners will have to give up fifty or a hundred thousand dollars in clean salvage money."

The weight of his responsibility soon tamed Dan's high spirits. He could make no resistance if a crew of hostile wreckers should happen along to dispute his title in the absence of Captain Jim Wetherly. The morning sun was no more than three hours high. He must watch and wait through a long, long day, any hour of which might bring in sight the sails of a fleet of wrecking schooners. Dan reckoned that he had been penned below for about thirty hours and that this was the morning of the second day after the wreck. Captain Jim must have a tug on the way by this time. But, on the other hand, if Captain Bruce and his men had been picked up and carried to Key West, their tidings would send Jerry Pringle and his horde of wreckers flying seaward by steam and sail.

Every boy who plays foot-ball has dreamed of breaking through the line, blocking a kick, scooping up the ball, and running down the field like a whirlwind to score the winning touchdown with the other eleven vainly pounding along in his wake. So most of us have dreamed of playing the hero by stopping a runaway horse, saving the life of the prettiest girl that ever was, and being splendidly rewarded by her millionaire father. Dan Frazier's pet dream had a salt-water background. It was of being the first to find an abandoned ship with a rich cargo, triumphantly bringing her into port, and winning a fortune in salvage. At last he had found his ship, but the lone hero had an elephant on his hands.

Dan was too weary in body and mind to roam about the steamer. He rigged a bit of awning on the bridge, dragged a mattress up from below, and lay gazing through the rents in the canvas weather screen until noon. A mail steamer northward-bound passed close to the Reef, slowed down to make sure the crew had left the wreck, and ploughed on her way. Dan grew tired of looking to the southward for schooners beating up from Key West and concluded that the head wind and heavy sea were holding them in harbor. There was no black smudge of smoke to the northward to show that Captain Jim was coming out from Miami in a tow-boat. Over to seaward, however, in the east-north-east, three sails glinted like flecks of cloud. They were close together, and Dan gazed at them idly, thinking they might be coastwise merchant vessels hauling southward before the piping wind. But as they lifted higher, he noticed that they were shaping a straight course for the Reef instead of swinging off to follow the track through the Florida Straits. They were schooners coming with great speed and showing a reckless spread of canvas.

Soon the low hulls gleamed beneath the towering piles of sail and Dan jumped to his feet as he scanned the beautiful sea picture they made.

"Bahama schooners; I know their cut!" he exclaimed. "They've smelled a wreck on the Reef as sure as guns. The news must have reached Nassau by cable yesterday. And those pirates have got a clear field for once. What can I do? They won't listen to my story, not for a minute. They'll swarm aboard like rats and be ripping the cargo out of this vessel in a jiffy."

The youthful wrecking master was at his wits' end and his head began to throb as if it would split, for he had little endurance left. He remained in hiding on the bridge and tried to think out a plan of action as the Bahama schooners swooped across the frothing sea, laying their courses in a bee line for the Kenilworth. Dan's only hope was that he might be able to stay aboard until Captain Jim should return to enforce the law of the Reef with his crew of hard-fisted tow-boat men to back him up. He thought of telling the wreckers that he was a stowaway, left behind when the steamer's men deserted her, but, although Dan Frazier was far from perfect, he hated the notion of lying his way out of this tight corner. He was truthful by habit, for one thing, and there was another reason which he muttered to himself:

"There's been lying enough on this job. The poor old ship has been rotten with lies ever since her skipper first ran afoul of Jerry Pringle. Even her grounding on the Reef was a lie. And I don't believe Uncle Jim would lie to save the ship, or his own skin either. No, this poor old vessel has been good to me so far. I got out of her hold by good luck and I'll trust to luck to pull me out of this scrape."

Dan picked up a pair of glasses and looked at the nearest schooner which had boldly crossed the Reef and was rounding to in the smoother water of the Hawk Channel while a group of black-skinned, ragged wreckers were shoving a boat over the side. Dan felt a new thrill of surprise and alarm as he scrutinized a burly figure poised at the schooner's rail. It was "Black Sam" Hurley, a Bahama wrecker of such evil repute that he had been pointed out to Dan in Nassau harbor as one of the notorious characters of the islands.

Dan felt a new thrill of surprise and alarm

"There are plenty of honest wreckers in the Bahamas," said the lad to himself, while his teeth chattered. "But they don't sail with 'Black Sam.' And he was alongside the Resolute at Nassau, talking to the cook. He'd know me again. It's a good thing I chucked up that idea of lying out of this. It's time for me to get under cover, all right."

Dan crept off the bridge along the windward side of the deck-house and kept well out of sight of the schooners until he reached the shelter of the funnel and the engine-room skylights. Then he slipped into the nearest door and made his way to the flight of ladders up which he had climbed in the morning. He had fled in a state of panic, but one glance down into the black hold made him draw back and take measures to provision himself against a long siege below. There was no need for great haste, and Dan delayed to equip himself with a lantern, matches, a jug of water, and a canvas bag, crammed with food, which he slung about his neck. Then he made his way below with lighted lantern, seeking to find as secure and comfortable a refuge as possible. The Bahama wreckers would begin to loot the part of the cargo easiest to get at and handle, he reasoned, and therefore he passed by the uppermost cargo deck and explored the region below, slowly making his way aft.

It was a dangerous and desperate journey, but Dan was thinking only of keeping out of the way of "Black Sam" until Captain Jim should come back and retake the ship which belonged to him.

"I'm what the lawyers call a vital document when they're arguing a salvage case in the Key West Court," thought Dan with a half-hearted grin. "And from all I've heard of 'Black Sam' Hurley, he'd chuck this vital document overboard if he thought it might interfere with his possession of the wreck."

In this game of hide-and-seek the advantage was with the lad in the hold, and fear of discovery by the wreckers did not greatly trouble him. After a long time he heard clamorous voices somewhere above and he doused his lantern. The wreckers seemed to be exploring the upper cargo decks. Some kind of a dispute arose and the sides of the ship flung back the echoes of it as from a great sounding board. Dan could not make out what the quarrel was about, but at length the sounds grew fainter as if the wreckers had returned to the outside world above.

Dan had felt a gush of cool wind from somewhere over his head and shifted his quarters to get beneath it and out of the reeking, stifling atmosphere of the hold. He knew it must come from a pipe running to one of the great bell-mouthed ventilators on deck and was glad that it had been turned so as to face and catch the invigorating breeze. He had not dreamed that the ventilator might serve as a speaking-tube. While he waited, however, to learn what the wreckers intended to do next, some one began to talk, and he heard every word distinctly. The voice sounded so near his ears that he was as startled as if a ghost had stepped out of the darkness. Dan jumped to his feet, his nerves all of a quiver. He would have fled anywhere to get away from this uncanny voice, but a stronger gust of wind struck his upturned face and the mysterious voice sounded even louder. He thought of the ventilator pipe, got a grip on himself, and scarcely breathed as he listened to the odd intonations of the Bahama negro speech. "Black Sam" was talking. Dan remembered the peculiar guttural cadence of his voice as he had heard it in Nassau harbor. He must have been standing directly in front of the ventilator on deck, for every word carried down the pipe to Dan:

"Ah don't care nuffin' 'bout de ship. We ain't got no tow-boats to pull her off. An' if we don't work quick an' soon them Key Westers'll be a-scatterin' down an' run us back home—you heah me? Take a big bag o' powdah an' blow de side outen her. Dat's what I say do. De cargo ports is all jammed fas'. We can't open 'em nohow. An' we ain't got no steam to hoist wid a donkey-engine. Blow de side outen her. She's hung fas' on de Reef. She ain't gwine sink. When we'se done loaded our schooners wid cargo we can strip the brasses in de engine-room. Blow her up. Ain't I wrecked plenty vessels? Don't I know?"

Dan heard one of the other wreckers rumble: "Sam knows bes'. Cut de fuse to burn ten minutes an' let us get back aboard our schooners. Hang de sack o' powder 'g'inst the ship's plates inside an' let her go. Reckon we'll blow a hole in her fit to run a tow-boat froo, Sam."

To Dan Frazier these last words sounded faint and confused, as if something was the matter with his hearing. He had only time to mutter "They are going to blow her up and me with her." Then he felt so giddy that he put out his arms to steady himself. His knees gave way and he sank down in a heap.