Having accomplished his task, the lieutenant ordered all but four of his men back into the boat.  Then the midshipman, a lad of sixteen, looking strangely mature and dignified in his uniform and sword, came aboard to take command of the captured sealer.  Just as the lieutenant prepared to depart his eye chanced to alight upon Bub.  Without a word of warning, he seized him by the arm and dropped him over the rail into the waiting boat; and then, with a parting wave of his hand, he followed him.

It was only natural that Bub should be frightened at this unexpected happening.  All the terrible stories he had heard of the Russians served to make him fear them, and now returned to his mind with double force.  To be captured by them was bad enough, but to be carried off by them, away from his comrades, was a fate of which he had not dreamed.

“Be a good boy, Bub,” the captain called to him, as the boat drew away from the Mary Thomas’s side, “and tell the truth!”

“Aye, aye, sir!” he answered, bravely enough by all outward appearance.  He felt a certain pride of race, and was ashamed to be a coward before these strange enemies, these wild Russian bears.

“Und be politeful!” the German boat-steerer added, his rough voice lifting across the water like a fog-horn.

Bub waved his hand in farewell, and his mates clustered along the rail as they answered with a cheering shout.  He found room in the stern-sheets, where he fell to regarding the lieutenant.  He didn’t look so wild or bearish after all—­very much like other men, Bub concluded, and the sailors were much the same as all other man-of-war’s men he had ever known.  Nevertheless, as his feet struck the steel deck of the cruiser, he felt as if he had entered the portals of a prison.

For a few minutes he was left unheeded.  The sailors hoisted the boat up, and swung it in on the davits.  Then great clouds of black smoke poured out of the funnels, and they were under way—­to Siberia, Bub could not help but think.  He saw the Mary Thomas swing abruptly into line as she took the pressure from the hawser, and her side-lights, red and green, rose and fell as she was towed through the sea.

Bub’s eyes dimmed at the melancholy sight, but—­but just then the lieutenant came to take him down to the commander, and he straightened up and set his lips firmly, as if this were a very commonplace affair and he were used to being sent to Siberia every day in the week.  The cabin in which the commander sat was like a palace compared to the humble fittings of the Mary Thomas, and the commander himself, in gold lace and dignity, was a most august personage, quite unlike the simple man who navigated his schooner on the trail of the seal pack.