"Give me a hammer or something to knock with and I'll try to drive this
into the hole. It's not a butt, it's an auger hole!"
"An auger hole?" both boys gasped in horror.
"An auger hole!" repeated Harry, his lips set and white. "Just a little
more and we'd have been beyond all help. I think this idea of helping
unfortunate castaways is getting to be a good thing."
"Why, who on earth could have been so cold-blooded as to have bored a
hole in our vessel?" cried Arnold. "Surely it wasn't the man whose life
we just saved a short time ago!"
"I came into this cabin," asserted Harry "and could hear the rush of
water. I thought the leak must be here. Of course, I thought at first
that we had started a butt in the rolling a while back, when our friend
Carlos Sneakodorus Madero boarded us and left us."
"But that seems impossible," incredulously offered Tom. "The Fortuna was
built at Manitowoc where they have a reputation of doing first class
work and she hasn't had rough handling at all."
"It was impossible!" cried Harry. "Just as I knelt to raise the floor
board I saw that auger lying there. Then as I raised the board, I saw a
handful of white chips float up through the hole."
"And then you saw the stream of water?" queried Arnold.
"That's all there is to it, except the fact that the life-belts are
pulled from their places on the ceiling," answered Harry.
"Sure enough, they're down in a heap," declared Arnold.
"And if you count them," Harry continued, "I'll wager my next meal that
you'll find one missing.
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