Bub now quickly learned why he had been brought aboard, and in the prolonged questioning which followed, told nothing but the plain truth.  The truth was harmless; only a lie could have injured his cause.  He did not know much, except that they had been sealing far to the south in open water, and that when the calm and fog came down upon them, being close to the line, they had drifted across.  Again and again he insisted that they had not lowered a boat or shot a seal in the week they had been drifting about in the forbidden sea; but the commander chose to consider all that he said to be a tissue of falsehoods, and adopted a bullying tone in an effort to frighten the boy.  He threatened and cajoled by turns, but failed in the slightest to shake Bub’s statements, and at last ordered him out of his presence.

By some oversight, Bub was not put in anybody’s charge, and wandered up on deck unobserved.  Sometimes the sailors, in passing, bent curious glances upon him, but otherwise he was left strictly alone.  Nor could he have attracted much attention, for he was small, the night dark, and the watch on deck intent on its own business.  Stumbling over the strange decks, he made his way aft where he could look upon the side-lights of the Mary Thomas, following steadily in the rear.

For a long while he watched, and then lay down in the darkness close to where the hawser passed over the stern to the captured schooner.  Once an officer came up and examined the straining rope to see if it were chafing, but Bub cowered away in the shadow undiscovered.  This, however, gave him an idea which concerned the lives and liberties of twenty-two men, and which was to avert crushing sorrow from more than one happy home many thousand miles away.

In the first place, he reasoned, the crew were all guiltless of any crime, and yet were being carried relentlessly away to imprisonment in Siberia—­a living death, he had heard, and he believed it implicitly.  In the second place, he was a prisoner, hard and fast, with no chance to escape.  In the third, it was possible for the twenty-two men on the Mary Thomas to escape.  The only thing which bound them was a four-inch hawser.  They dared not cut it at their end, for a watch was sure to be maintained upon it by their Russian captors; but at this end, ah! at his end—­

Bub did not stop to reason further.  Wriggling close to the hawser, he opened his jack-knife and went to work.  The blade was not very sharp, and he sawed away, rope-yarn by rope-yarn, the awful picture of the solitary Siberian exile he must endure growing clearer and more terrible at every stroke.  Such a fate was bad enough to undergo with one’s comrades, but to face it alone seemed frightful.  And besides, the very act he was performing was sure to bring greater punishment upon him.

In the midst of such somber thoughts, he heard footsteps approaching.  He wriggled away into the shadow.  An officer stopped where he had been working, half-stooped to examine the hawser, then changed his mind and straightened up.  For a few minutes he stood there, gazing at the lights of the captured schooner, and then went forward again.