But this was not all.  She told me there was a scheme to free her and him completely from the captain and the ship.  Well, I had guessed something like that was in the wind; but I did not tell her so.  She said that Mister Lynch was in the plot; aye, this hard bucko, this “square-shooter,” as I had heard him called, was the instigator and prime mover in the affair.  One of the tradesmen was also friendly, and had brought the lady the tool I was using to cut through the deck.  Wong, the steward, who was the lady’s devoted slave, played a very important part.

The plot was this.  We were to get Newman out of the lazaret (she always called him “Roy” when she spoke of him or to him; and when she mentioned Swope, it was always with a little hesitating catch in her voice) through this hole we were making.  She had the key that would release him from irons.  Wong had stolen it from the skipper’s desk.

When he was out of the lazaret, the situation would be managed by Mister Lynch.  The ship’s longboat, in the port skids, was ready for the water.  They planned, said the lady, to launch this boat at night, in the second mate’s watch, and she and Newman were to sail away together.

For it was no haphazard plan born of desperation after Newman’s arrest.  Newman knew all about it.  It had kept him occupied this past week; it was responsible in large measure for the mysterious happenings of the past week, for Newman’s absences, and for the lady’s masquerade in Nils’ clothes.  She had access to Nils’ chest through Wong, who had charge of it, and she first dressed up in Nils’ clothes so that she might, as she thought, move about at night on deck unobserved.  When she was observed, and taken for a ghost, both Newman and Lynch told her to continue the masquerade; it helped their business with the longboat, because it kept spying eyes away from that part of the ship.  They had been provisioning and preparing this boat for a week, working thus in the night, and by stealth.  Another day or two, and they would have been away.

But the captain’s blow this afternoon had jeopardized the entire scheme.  Indeed, it was on the verge of utter ruin.  For Newman was in the black hole in irons, and the crew were preparing to mutiny.

It was this last, the threatened uprising, that terrified the lady.  It would finally ruin their chances of escape, she told me.  At all hazards, we must get Newman out of the lazaret before the sailors’ attack occurred.  We must get him forward, she said, so that he might squelch the mutiny before it began.  Oh, Newman could tame Boston and Blackie, he could tame the stiffs and compose the squareheads; she had no doubt he could do all that, and instantly.  I was not so sure.  I didn’t think that anything or anybody could stop the crew—­unless it was killing Swope, which she forbade.  But I didn’t say so.