All the rest of the night Roy Sheldon, who was ill indeed, rolled and tossed in his bunk without once closing his eyes in sleep. At first he was very much afraid that the light-ship would go down, she pitched so furiously; and as his malady grew upon him, he wished from the bottom of his heart that she would spring a leak and sink, and so put him out of his misery. To make matters worse, his rescuers never came near to sympathize with him, or ask if there was anything they could do to relieve him. They left him to fight the battle alone, and their neglect made Roy so indignant that he resolved he would not speak to them again, not even to thank them for the important service they had rendered him. Shortly after daylight, however, he fell into a refreshing slumber, and when he awoke
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 two hours later his sickness was all gone, and he was as hungry as a wolf.
"Well, my hearty," was the cordial way in which he was greeted when he rolled out of his bunk, "you don't look quite as blue about the gills as you did when you turned in. Feel any better? Set down and take another pot of coffee."
"Thank you. I feel a good deal more like myself," was Roy's reply. "I can't begin to tell you how grateful I am to you, or how glad I am that I went overboard when I did, and that I succeeded in laying hold of that anchor-rope before my wind and strength gave out. I was getting tired, I tell you. If I were aboard that ship now how far at sea would I be?"
"A hundred miles, or such a matter, in this wind, and with a fair chance of seeing furrin countries before you come back."
"I would have stood a better chance of becoming food for the sharks, if all I heard about her is true," said Roy, as he seated himself at one end of the mess-chest which served as a table. "The sailor who advised me to desert said he never expected to reach Canton
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 alive. Now, how soon can I get ashore to relieve the anxiety of my friends?"
That was a matter that was settled with half a dozen words. He was given to understand that he would be carried over to the nearest pier as soon as he had eaten his breakfast; and his mind being set at rest, he ate a hearty one. When he thanked the men for their kindness they laughed and said "that was all right," and showed some curiosity to know why Roy was so careful to take their names and address.
"I like to keep track of my acquaintances," said the boy; "I may want to call upon you at some future time, and if I do, I shall know where to find you."
Breakfast being over, Roy, who had put on his own clothes when he left his bunk, climbed into the boat and was pulled ashore. There was a hack-stand near the pier on which he was landed, and although Roy did not know it at the time, Tony and Bob could have put him ashore there the night before if the instructions they received from Colonel Shelly's superintendent had not led them to follow a different
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 course. Being anxious to escape observation Roy took a hurried leave of the light-ship's men, hastened toward the hack-stand, and dived into the first carriage he came to.
"Pull up the windows, put down the curtains so that no one can see me, and go for the Lafayette House at your very best licks," said Roy to the astonished driver, who looked critically at the boy's sleeveless shirt and bandaged eye, and seemed in no particular hurry to obey.
"Been in a fight?" said he.
"Yes; been in half a dozen. Whipped more than forty men, and swam in from a hundred miles out at sea," replied Roy, impatiently. "I've money in my pocket and more at the hotel, if that is what you want to know. Hurry up, and I will give you double fare."
That was something the hackman could understand. Looking curiously at his passenger the while he hastened to obey his orders, and in a few seconds had made the carriage as close as an oven. But Roy did not care for that. He settled back in the corner, and wondered
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 what Arthur and Joe would say when he walked into their presence.
"I know I am a nice looking object," was his mental reflection, "but I should like to see either one of those fellows go through what I did and come out in better shape. I tell you I have had a narrow escape, and Rowe Shelly, whoever he may be, can thank his lucky stars that he was not in my place. I can't do anything for Bob and Tony, but I can bear those light-ship men in mind, and I will too."
With the prospect of a double fare before him the hackman drove as rapidly as he dared, and when he drew rein in front of the hotel to which he had been directed, Roy threw open the door and jumped out, crossed the wide sidewalk with a few swift steps, and sought concealment behind one of the front doors, every move he made being closely followed by the driver, who wanted to make sure of his money before he let his strange passenger out of sight. Then came that hurried interview with the hotel clerk, who could hardly be made to believe that Roy Sheldon was not Robert Barton, after which the new-comer
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 went to his room to change his clothes and send the porter out for a new helmet to take the place of the one he had left on board the White Squall.
"There," said Roy, as he stood before the mirror and tied a clean handkerchief over his left eye, "that looks a little more respectable, but not much. I must have a pretty hard head or that mate would have knocked me senseless. Suppose he had, and that I had been kicked out of the way or carried down into the forecastle, and never come to myself until this morning! I'd been a hundred miles or more at sea, and in a rotten old ship that is liable to go to pieces in the very first storm she encounters. It makes me shudder to think of it."
Having fixed himself up as well as he could, Roy went downstairs and into the reading-room to wait for Joe and Arthur to "show up." At the same time a sharp-looking gentleman, whose eyes were everywhere at once, walked briskly up to the clerk's desk and leaned upon it.
"What do you know?" said he. "I must
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 make out a column some way or other, and if you don't help me out, I shall always think you ought to."
"I don't know a thing," replied the clerk. "Go into the reading-room and pump that fellow with the bunged-up eye. He's a wheelman from Mount Airy. Came in yesterday with two others, and got into trouble before he had fairly eaten his supper. That's his name right there," added the clerk, as the sharp-looking man, who was a newspaper reporter, pulled a note-book from his pocket and wrote something in it in short-hand. "He just as good as told me that he was mistaken for Rowe Shelly, kidnapped and taken over to the island, and barely escaped being carried to sea."
"On what vessel?" exclaimed the reporter, showing some excitement and no little interest.
"Don't know. Didn't think to ask him, for he was in a great hurry to go to his room."
"So Rowe Shelly has skipped again, has he?" said the reporter. "That won't do me any good, for Shelly owns some of our stock and we can't dip into his private affairs.
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 Don't tell anybody else of it, there's a good fellow, for I want to get a scoop on this whole business. Did this what's his name—Sheldon, look as though he had been in the water?"
"Come to think of it, he did. His uniform was shrunk and mussed, one sleeve of his shirt was missing, and both his eyes were blacked. At least one was, for I saw it. He kept the other covered up."
"I'll bet it's the same chap. Haven't you seen this morning's Tribune? Well, there's an article in it, with the blackest kind of headlines, entitled, 'Mutiny in the Harbor. A Sailor prefers Death to a Voyage in the White Squall,' and so forth and so on, et cetera. One of our fellows wrote that up, and now you just watch me get the sequel. Hoop-la! My column's safe. How'll I know him—by his bunged-up eyes?"
"Look right through the door. That's him, with the blue uniform on and a paper in his hand. But hold on a minute," said the clerk, as the reporter turned away. "If you mean to get anything out of him you'll have to be sly about it, for he says he won't be pumped."
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"Oh, won't he? We'll see about that."
Roy Sheldon, who was deeply interested in that article in the Tribune, and congratulating himself on the fact that his name was not mentioned in it, and that consequently his father and mother would never hear of his adventure until he was ready to tell them about it, did not so much as raise his eyes when the reporter came in and sat down near him. He went on with his reading until he heard a pleasant voice say:
"Good morning, Mr. Sheldon. You have had a pretty rough experience, have you not?"
If the chair in which he was sitting had suddenly given away and let him down on the floor, Roy would not have been half as much astonished as he was when he heard himself addressed in this way by a man whom he had never seen before. He looked at him over the top of his paper, and then drew his head down behind it; whereupon the reporter pulled out his handkerchief and mopped his face to conceal the smile that came to his lips.
"Of course you don't mind what those light-ship men said to me," he continued.
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"Oh! did they tell you about it?" exclaimed Roy, and that was all the reporter wanted to show him that he was on the right track. Being shrewd and experienced in his profession, he had already made up his mind just what that 'sequel' was going to be. The sailor, who was seen by the captain of pilot-boat number twenty-nine to jump into the harbor, was not a seafaring man, but a wheelman. He had succeeded in reaching the light-ship, whose crew rescued him, brought him ashore in the morning, and here he was. Roy had told the clerk he would not be interviewed; but that did not worry the reporter.
"Yes; I have heard all about it," said he. "You see, I am the fellow who supplies those light-ship men with some of their reading-matter."
"Oh," said Roy again, "I was afraid you might be a reporter."
"My dear sir, do I look as if I were that low down in the world? What's the reason you don't want to see any news-gatherers? You have been the hero of an adventure, and most boys would like to see it in print."
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"It's in print already, but fortunately the man who wrote about it did not know my name," replied Roy. "There's a long account of it in the Tribune?"
"And is that account correct?"
"Perfectly. But my father takes the Tribune, and if he had seen my name in that article he would have ordered me home in short order."
"And you don't want to go, I suppose?"
"Certainly not," answered Roy, who then went on to tell where he did want to go; and to prove that his father would be likely to tell him to come home if he got into trouble, he related what Mr. Wayring had done when he learned through the New London papers that Matt Coyle had tied Joe to a tree and threatened to beat him with switches.
"I remember of reading about that," said the reporter. "One of the Tribune's staff was stopping at the Sportsman's Home at the time, and he was the one who wrote it up. I don't blame you for not wanting your name mentioned in connection with that little episode in the harbor last night, and you are wise in
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 keeping your weather eye open for reporters. That's the only one you can keep open, isn't it? Who shut up the other one for you?"
It was by such ingenious and apparently disinterested questions as these, that the reporter gradually led Roy Sheldon on to tell his story from beginning to end. He was really astonished when the boy brought his narrative to a close, and told himself that he was master of some secrets that would eventually bring Colonel Shelly and his superintendent into trouble, and the runaway Rowe into his rights. More than one reporter has run to earth criminals whom the best detectives could not track, and Roy's visitor suddenly resolved that he would do a little in that line himself. He would have given something h............