The engine-room, too, was vacant, and quite as unsavory as the other dens on board.  Perry patronized the engine by a pull or two at the valves, and continued his tour of inspection.

The Ambuster’s skiff, lying on her forward deck, seemed to entertain him vastly.

“Jolly!” says Perry.  And so it was a jolly boat in the literal, not the technical sense.

“The three wise men of Gotham went to sea in a bowl; and here’s the identical craft,” says Perry.

He gave the chubby little machine a push with his foot.  It rolled and wallowed about grotesquely.  When it was still again, it looked so comic, lying contentedly on its fat side like a pudgy baby, that Perry had a roar of laughter, which, like other laughter to one’s self, did not sound very merry, particularly as the north-wind was howling ominously, and the broken ice on its downward way was whispering and moaning and talking on in a most mysterious and inarticulate manner.

“Those sheets of ice would crunch up this skiff, as pigs do a punkin,” thinks Perry.

And with this thought in his head he looked out on the river, and fancied the foolish little vessel cast loose and buffeting helplessly about in the ice.

He had been so busy until now, in prying about the steamboat and making up his mind that Captain and men had all gone off for a comfortable supper on shore, that his eyes had not wandered toward the stream.

Now his glance began to follow the course of the icy current.  He wondered where all this supply of cakes came from, and how many of them would escape the stems of ferry-boats below and get safe to sea.

All at once, as he looked lazily along the lazy files of ice, his eyes caught a black object drifting on a fragment in a wide way of open water opposite Skerrett’s Point, a mile distant.

Perry’s heart stopped beating.  He uttered a little gasping cry.  He sprang ashore, not at all like a Doge quitting a Bucentaur.  He tore back to the Foundry, dashing through the puddles, and, never stopping to pick up his cap, burst in upon Wade and Bill Tarbos in the office.

The boy was splashed from head to foot with red mud.  His light hair, blown wildly about, made his ashy face seem paler.  He stood panting.

His dumb terror brought back to Wade’s mind all the bad omens of the morning.

“Speak!” said he, seizing Perry fiercely by the shoulder.

The uproar of the Works seemed to hush for an instant, while the lad stammered faintly,—­

“There’s somebody carried off in the ice by Skerrett’s Point.  It looks like a woman.  And there’s nobody to help.”

CHAPTER XII.

IN THE ICE.

“Help! help!” shouted the four triphammers, bursting in like a magnified echo of the boy’s last word.

“Help! help!” all the humming wheels and drums repeated more plaintively.