Page:Cruise of the Dry Dock.djvu/151

 ears had been all the time straining. Madden broke off abruptly and both stood listening with palpitating hearts. It was repeated. A repressed half groan, inarticulate, as if some human being were in distress. It was in the main cabin below them.

Hardly daring to guess at what they would see, the adventurers crept silently out of the chart room, down a short hot passageway to a door. Leonard caught a breath, then opened it without noise.

In the brilliant westering light that flooded the main cabin through the port holes, Madden saw a dining table, disordered as from a recent feast. On the floor around it were fragments of smashed glasses and bloody stains. A cut glass decanter, half full of wine, sat on the table, and in a corner of the cabin shrank the figure of a man.