Norton span the wheel and stepped back in dismay.
"The rudder!" he barked at his employer through ashen lips. "It doesn't respond to the helm! Hell's bells, Marsden, the spout smashed the steering gear!"
"Good Heavens!" groaned Dr. Marsden. "Why we'll go down in a sea like this, helpless without a rudder!"
"Sure as you're alive!" replied Norton, giving the wheel a hopeful, but futile spin.
The First Officer, arrayed in dripping oilskins, fought his way up a lee companionway, forced open the pilot house door and entered amid a gust of howling wind and spray. His face was white about the corners of his tight-drawn lips.
"We've sprung a whale of a leak, sir!" he reported to Dr. Marsden, shouting to make himself heard above the roar of the storm, and ignoring the captain. "The forward hold, housing the animal specimens, is filling fast. I've got every available man at the pumps between decks. Two of your jaguars and the black python have broken loose from their cages. The snake is curled up in the corner brackets and the cats are perched on top of the highest cages. Hell is breaking loose down there, sir. The beasts are fighting to get loose, for a chance to live and the men at the pumps are getting scared. Any orders, sir?"
Captain Norton gave the wheel a significant spin. First Officer Bob Allen's face went a shade whiter around the gills. A look of alarm swept into his fearless, steel-gray eyes.
"Good Lord, Norton!" he exclaimed. "Are we adrift in this hell-bending blow—without a rudder?"
Captain Norton shook his head like a man in a trance.
"We've either lost the rudder or the spout smashed it, Allen," he cried, in a shaking voice. "Unless we can repair it or rig up a jury rudder, we'll wallow in these seas till we sink!"
Bob Allen braced himself against the frenzied pitching of the Scienta and scowled. He was a tall, lean-waisted, broad-shouldered young man in his late twenties, with a square, firm jaw, strong, determined lips and a personality that made him more than welcome in the palatial household of Dr. Marsden, when the Scienta was tied up at her private dock in New York Harbor.
Any timidity, he might have had toward danger in his earlier years, had been knocked out of him at Annapolis. The Navy gridiron had hardened his muscles; made a real fighting man of him. After his graduation with top honors, two years at sea, first as an ensign and then as a lieutenant in the destroyer and submarine fleets, had rounded him out for the task of living the hard life of the deep water man.
Then he had voluntarily resigned from the service, finally yielding to Dr. Marsden's urge to become First Officer of the Scienta, to automatically take over the captain's berth when Norton’s contract expired.
But there had been more than the prospect of a captain's berth and gold-braid to entice Bob Allen into accepting the offer. Service routine had been proving rather dull for him. He liked to be up and doing; going places and seeing things. He craved action and adventure. The Scienta offered all that his restless nature craved.
AND there had been something else, too, perhaps the most important of all, that had lured him into a berth on the yacht. That was Patti Marsden, adventurous, lovely daughter of the doctor. He had made Patti's acquaintance at a colorful Annapolis prom. and had thrilled at holding her in his arms.
She had been the most popular débutante at the dance. As he whirled her supple, trim body around the floor, he had noticed looks of envy in the eyes of his mates, who waited in vain for him to give her up. Bob Allen fell deeply in love with Patti Marsden at the prom., so deeply in fact that he would have resigned from the service a thousand times to be near her.
When Dr. Marsden sent for him and outlined his offer, Bob Allen rather hoped that Patti had had something to do with it. But in time he brought himself to believe that he had no right to hope for that, for Patti Marsden was the object of Captain Norton's attentions and apparently, he decided, she had no objections.
This discovery had naturally brought him to wonder just how Captain Norton would stand in the Marsden household when his contract expired. But Bob Allen had already signed on the Scienta before he made his discoveries with regard to Patti and Captain Norton, and had been too much of a man to back out; too much in love with her to show that he cared to that extent.
He hadn't liked Captain Norton from the start. Perhaps the reason was the deep-rooted jealously that had suddenly sprung up within him.
Captain Norton, a heavy-set, rather handsome man of thirty-four or five, had seemed so self-important; so utterly cool and indifferent to even an Annapolis graduate. He had displayed his dislike for Bob on several occasions by petty methods and particularly resented the Lieutenant's apparent poaching on what he, Norton, considered his own private preserve. The dislike had become mutual almost from the beginning. It had grown deeper in Bob with Norton’s evident carelessness in handling the Scienta in the hurricane-infested West Indies seas.
With the grim air of a starving man tightening up his belt in defiance of his hunger. Bob looked squarely into Captain Norton's ashen face and thrust his chin forward belligerently.
"Do you mean to say, Captain Norton," he snapped, rolling easily with the deck under his firmly-planted feet, "that you let that spout smash us astern?"
Captain Norton frowned.
"It's not a question of who let the spout strike the Scienta," he growled. "It's a matter of rigging up a jury gear or sink! The rudder is useless and doesn't respond to the helm. It may be jammed in the journal box!"
He shot a strange, haunted look at Dr. Marsden, who fidgeted uneasily at the stanchion. There was something in that look and in Norton's white, twitching face that made Bob Allen grin knowingly. He had suspected all along that Captain Norton was anything but an over-brave man. There was no doubt about it now. Captain Norton was yellow, afraid now in the disastrous situation into which he had either carelessly or thoughtlessly betrayed himself and his command. The swaggering, blustering, self-important skipper of the Scienta hadn't the nerve of the rawest boot in the navy, Bob decided suddenly.
"I knew the minute you took the wheel, Norton," he snapped with scant respect, "that you'd get us into trouble? You were advised to put into Trinidad when the barometer began falling. But no! You wanted to take the helm and show Dr. Marsden how a good
