Something--Tom did not know just what, but some sudden presentiment--prompted him to step quickly through the passage in order to make sure that he had entered the right room. Then he discovered his mistake. The room he had entered was the store-room from which no supplies were to be taken on the present trip. He turned back and knelt again, the cans he had removed standing all about him. One of them, which in his haste he had laid upon its side, began to roll with the jarring of the vessel, and Tom shuddered with a kind of panic fright at the sudden noise it made, and with trembling hands he set the innocent can upright. Tick, tick, tick, tick.... What did it mean? What should he do? His next impulse was to run upstairs and report what he had discovered. He did not dare to touch the thing again. Then he realized that something--something terrible--might happen while he was gone. Something might happen in five minutes--the next minute--the next second! Still kneeling, for strangely he could not bring himself to move, he watched the thing in a sort of fascination. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick--it went, on its steady, grim journey toward---- Toward what? Still Tom did not budge. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick--it went; heedless, cheerful, like a clock on a mantelpiece. And still Tom Slade remained just where he was, stark-still and trembling. CHAPTER XVII ONE OF THE BLOND BEAST'S WEAPONS Then, of a sudden, Tom Slade, ship's boy, disappeared, and there in his place was Tom Slade, scout; calm, undismayed--the same Tom Slade who had looked about him, calm and resourceful, when he was lost in the great woods, and who had kept his nerve when menaced by a savage beast. He cautiously removed the encircling wire, lifted the object out with both hands, finding it surprisingly heavy, and laid it carefully upon the stationary table where cans were usually assorted and opened. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick--it went cheerfully along on its tragic errand. It appeared to consist of a piece of ordinary stovepipe about twelve inches long. The face and works of an alarm clock, being of a slightly smaller circumference, had been placed within one end of the pipe, the face out, and the intervening space around this was packed with cotton waste. The other end of the pipe was closed with a kind of gummy cement. Tom observed that the little alarm dial in the clock's face was set for nine o'clock, which of course afforded him infinite relief, for it was not yet seven. With the greatest of care and hands trembling a little, he pulled out some of the cotton waste around the clock face, holding the dial steady with one hand, and found that nothing save this packing was holding the clock in place. He joggled it very gently this way and that to make sure that it was not connected with anything behind. Then he lifted it out and stood it upright on a shelf with cans on either side of it to keep it in place.