"And you can _swim_. You'd be surprised, now, how few of 'em could take a stroke to save their lives. Leastways," Mr. Adams confessed, "that's _my_ experience." "I beg your pardon." "Ben's impulsive. I over'eard him tellin' you to stick fast to him; but, all things considered, that's pretty difficult, ain't it? Never you mind; _I'll_ see you aboard the tender." "Aboard the tender?" The Major stepped back a pace as the fellow's absurd mistake dawned on him. "Why, you impudent scoundrel, I'm a Justice of the Peace!" But here a rush of the driven crowd lifted and bore him against the gallery rail. A hand close by shattered the nearest lamp into darkness, and the flat of a cutlass (not Bill Adams's) descending upon our hero's head, put an end for the while to speech and consciousness. CHAPTER XIV. THE "VESUVIUS" BOMB. He awoke with a racking headache in pitchy darkness; and with the twilight of returning consciousness there grew in him an awful fear that he had been coffined and buried alive. For he lay at full length in a bed which yet was unlike any bed of his acquaintance, being so narrow that he could neither turn his body nor put out an arm to lift himself into a sitting posture; and again, when he tried to move his legs, to his horror they were compressed as if between bandages. In his ear there sounded, not six inches away, a low lugubrious moaning. It could not come from a bed-fellow, for he had no bed-fellow. . . . No, it could be no earthly sound. With a strangled cry he flung a hand upwards, fending off the horrible darkness. It struck against a board, and at the same instant his cry was echoed by a sharp scream close beside him. "Angels and ministers of Gerrace defend us!" The scream sank to a hoarse whisper and was accompanied by a clank of chains. "Not dead? You--you are not dead?" The Major lay back in a cold sweat. "I--I thought I was," he quavered at length. But at this point his mysterious bed seemed to sway for a moment beneath him, and he caught his breath. "Where am I?" he gasped. "At sea," answered the voice in a hollow tone. "At sea!" In a sudden spasmodic attempt to sit upright, the Major almost rolled himself out of his hammock. "Ay, poor comrade--if you are indeed he whom I saw lifted aboard unconscious from the tender--'tis the dismal truth." "Beneath the Orlop's darksome shade Unknown to Sol's bright ray, Where no kind chink's assistant aid Admits the cheerful day. "I am not, in the practical sense, seaman enough to determine if this noisome den be the precise part of the ship alluded to by the poet under the name of Orlop. But the circumstances correspond; and my stomach informs me that the vessel is in motion." "The vessel?" echoed the Major, incredulous yet. "_What_ vessel?" "As if to omit no detail of horror, she is called, I believe, the _Vesuvius_ bomb. Phoebus, what a name!" It drummed for some seconds in the Major's ear like an echo.