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from beyond the bulkhead.
    They came from behind him!
    “Turn around slowly,” said a voice. “Don’t try any funny stuff.”
    Smitty disobeyed the first order, but obeyed the second. He turned fast—but then did not try anything.
    The sawed-off shotgun was about a foot from his head. It was held in the hands of a big man who had a scar on the bridge of his nose and wore horn-rimmed glasses—the man that Bert Hatch had said was named Gleason. One of Gleason’s lenses seemed to be of plain glass, the other one was a reducing lens. That little tailor, Hatch, was an observant man.
    With the big fellow was a smaller man who had dead-looking yellow hair. When he moved, he limped. Score another for Hatch’s description.
    Smitty chewed his lips furiously. He was certainly caught off base. Unless that shotgun wavered a bit—
    There wasn’t a waver in a carload, he decided, a minute later. The gun was rock-steady in a practiced hand. Smitty hadn’t a chance of trying a swift move.
    The little fellow had opened the steel door by now.
    “Back in,” ordered the big man with the glasses.
    Smitty took a backward step.
    The giant was perfectly familiar with boats, but in the stress of the moment he forgot the combing customarily at the bottom of nautical doors—a sort of six-inch-high sill of metal. He stumbled over that and fell straight back on his head.
    The world blinked out like a light with the switch opened.

CHAPTER V

Souvenir
    To give her credit, Nellie had really intended to follow orders when she was left in the shed behind the sheltering pile of lumber. She meant to stay there as a lookout while Smitty investigated the boat.
    She didn’t want to stay. She wanted to be in with the big fellow. The tiny blonde, seemingly so fragile in her soft pink-and-whiteness, thrived on action that would have turned an average policeman’s hair gray.
    But it was safer for Smitty to have a lookout here; and the safety of the looming mass of muscle was pretty precious to Nellie, though she’d have died rather than admit it openly.
    However, circumstances combined to make her disobey.
    First, two men stepped through the opening in the street side of the shed which Smitty had made by ripping the board off. Nellie had been apprehensive about that opening. It would have been better to shut the thing back up by replacing the board. But the plank had been too splintered by Smitty’s sinewy hands for that.
    They’d had to leave the opening as it was, and now two of the gang had spied it and were prowling to investigate. One of the two was big, and had on horn-rimmed glasses. The other, smaller, was yellow-haired and limped. So Nellie spotted them.
    The bigger man got out a shotgun as he climbed in, and he started grimly for the boat.
    “So what do I do?” Nellie demanded of herself.
    She could radio Bleek Street, but help couldn’t get here before those two got to the boat. She could yell a warning to Smitty, and probably get them both shot. Or she could tackle the two men herself.
    In the little blonde’s purse, as in the pockets of the rest of Justice, Inc., were usually some of Mac’s anesthetic-gas pellets. These, broken at the feet of an enemy, put that enemy to sleep for several minutes. But this time Nellie did not have any of the pellets.
    As she was wildly reflecting what to do, Nellie was tapping the little mike of her belt-radio.
    “S . . . S . . . S . . .”
    But Smitty didn’t answer his call letter. At that moment he was using his radio as a dictograph. But Nellie didn’t know that. All she knew was that he wasn’t answering, so she couldn’t warn him.
    There was no help for it. She’d have to light into the two men, to stall for time, and almost certainly be captured. If they decided that she was the one who had, somehow, ripped the board off, they’d take her without caution to the boat, thus tipping the giant off and giving him a chance to knock them out.
    The two men were almost out of the shed by