As soon as the _Alsatian_ had lifted anchor and was steaming out of the Mersey the passengers ceased grumbling, and settled into the comfortable, somnolent routine of a modern transatlantic voyage. A party of poker-players mobilized in the smoking-room. The ladies reclined all in a row in their steamer-chairs on the lee side of the deck, like so many shawl-wrapped mummies. The spoiled American child whanged the life out of the long-suffering piano in the music-room. A few conscientious persons undertook to walk so many miles around the deck each day. There was much random conversation, a spice of flirtation, and a vast deal of eating and sleeping. That hectoring gentleman Jenkins P. Chase spent most of the time in his own rooms, where he was ministered to by his physician, his secretary, and his valet. Captain O’Shea and Johnny Kent enjoyed the luxury of such a voyage as this. There was no responsibility to burden them on the bridge or in the engine-room. No one guessed that they were uncommonly capable mariners, accustomed to command. Professor Ernst Wilhelm Vonderholtz seemed to find their company congenial, and tried to make them talk about themselves. His curiosity was politely dissembled, but O’Shea took note of it and built up an elaborate fiction to the effect that he was a pavement contractor in New York with friends at Tammany Hall, while Johnny Kent found genuine satisfaction in posing as a retired farmer from the State of Maine. It occurred to O’Shea to remark to his comrade as they were undressing in their room on the second night at sea: “The chemical professor suspects we are not what we seem. And he is anxious to fathom us.” “Oh, pooh! He’s one of them high and lofty thinkers that wouldn’t bother his head about ignorant, every-day cusses like us,” sleepily replied Johnny Kent as he kicked off his shoes. “You fool yourself,” and O’Shea spoke with decision. “He is full of big words and things that I do not pretend to understand at all, but he is not wrapped up in them entirely, like most of the professors and such. There is a pair of keen eyes behind those gold-rimmed spectacles of his, Johnny, and he is not missing anything that goes on.” “I take notice that he ain’t overlookin’ that handsome school-teacher that’s been studyin’ abroad for a year. His eyes are sharp enough to sight her whenever she comes on deck. And she ain’t hostile to him, either.” “I grant ye that, you sentimental old pirate,” said O’Shea, “but I am not a match-maker, and ’tis no concern of mine. What I am wondering is whether the man is really a university professor bent on ‘investigating the scientific education of the United States.’” “You’re welcome to sit up and hatch mysteries by yourself,” grumbled the other. “I want to go to sleep. What’s the clew to all this, Cap’n Mike? What makes you so darned suspicious?”