“Fool!” he muttered; “I clean forgot the main hatch. I like to have fell all the way down to the lower hold and broke my neck. Well, Dick, you’re half way, anyhow.” He crawled around the square opening and proceeded. In a few minutes the way was blocked by a great object that the youth could not account for, but which was really the iron tank containing drinking water. He avoided it and continued to advance, having stopped a moment to stretch his cramped limbs. Next he came to the after hatch, but was on the lookout for it and pushed on steadily, though he began to ache all over from crawling so long. Once a startled rat scurried across his stockinged foot in its haste to escape, causing another momentary scare. Had it not been for the increasing excitement under which he labored, the boy must have been chilled, for a draft of cold air like that in a cellar swept through the ’tween-decks from one end of the bark to the other. The mizzen mast told Dick his journey was nearing its end, and he stopped a few seconds to take breath. His heart beat so quick and fast that he felt stifled, and his limbs trembled in a way that he could not account for. But the thought of the fire-works nerved him, and cans of powder danced before his disordered imagination. There was not much further to go, so after shoving back the hair from his damp forehead, he crept on until the peculiar formation of the vessel’s timbers proved that he was in the stern. He looked up. Directly overhead was a small opening. “That must be _it_!” he whispered. There were no stairs nor any ladder, but standing erect, his head was just on a level with the aperture. First arranging the towel about the top of the lantern so that the light should not be cast upward, he reached up and set it down on the floor above. Then, panting with excitement and bathed in cold perspiration, Dick placed both hands on the edge of the hatch. One agile spring, and he was in the lazarette. CHAPTER III. So quiet was the night, that Freeman’s measured footsteps, as he trod the quarter-deck, sounded with strange distinctness to the guilty occupant of the space beneath. No other sound disturbed the silence but the gentle swish and gurgle of the water alongside, and an occasional creak from some block or pulley. The piles of swelling canvas; the mast-heads nodding against the stars; the white paint-work of the poop; the delicate shadows cast upon the deck by the ropes and shrouds; the motionless figure of the man at the wheel;—all were beautified and softened by the white flood of moonlight. Drops of dew glittered everywhere, and when Freeman laid his hand upon the main brace, it was wet as though from rain. He had been reading odd items in an old copy of the Sydney _Herald_, and put it down just as two great rats that had come up from the hold scampered across the deck. This was nothing unusual, and after stamping with his foot to scare the bold creatures, he glanced at the binnacle.