Part 1

THE SKIPPER KNOWS BEST

By MURRAY LEINSTER

Author of “The Red Stone,” “Island Honor,” etc.

SKIPPER GROVER AND CHIEF ENGINEER MCGOVERN SAFELY DELIVERED THE OLD “KINGSTON” TO SHEIK ABU NAKHL OF RAS-EL-KASR--AND PROMPTLY FOUND THEMSELVES DELIVERED INTO THE HANDS OF THE PIRATICAL ABU, WHO HAD MOST EVIL DESIGNS ON THE PEARLERS OF THE PERSIAN GULF. ALL OF WHICH GAVE THE SKIPPER A CHANCE TO PROVE HE AT LEAST KNEW BEST HOW TO MAKE A NEW USE OF AN OLD ANCHOR.

Chief Engineer McGovern poked his head up through a hole in the _Kingston’s_ deck and surveyed the shore mournfully. He sighed. It is always bad to be a young man in love. It is worse to be stuck on a tub like the _Kingston_ out of love for the Skipper’s daughter. But to be one of the only two white men on this dilapidated tramp, and to be delivering her to a God-forsaken port like Ras-el-Kasr when her sale to a native owner had reduced the Skipper to a speechless, raging gloom--that was worst of all.

The _Kingston_ moved slowly through the water with her engines at a quarter speed ahead. An Arab leadsman cast and coiled and cast again, singing out the soundings in astounding nasal tones, now and then interrupted by spasmodic contractions of his vocal cords. Captain Grover regarded the land, which was slowly enveloping the _Kingston_, with a concentrated venom.

It was perfectly familiar. The old ship had nosed into this same harbor once before. But in addition, the town of Ras-el-Kasr was, and is, and always will be the exact duplicate of innumerable other heat baked towns on the Persian Gulf. Angular, out-of-plumb houses of sundried brick and stone in the middle, mat huts on the outskirts, a mud wall, a fort with the inevitable towers and the inevitable antique artillery, and a smell.

The smell was one of those corrosive, tropical smells that thrive on heat and sunlight and an overpowering humidity. It rose to the high heavens. It was thick enough to cut. And it reached out to the _Kingston_ and caressed it.

The _Kingston_ moved slowly past a jetty which was obscured by a horde of _btails_ and _bakaras_, angular craft with incredible sails which ought at this time in late August to be out on the pearling banks. Further on, the smell intensified. The expression of concentrated venom upon Captain Grover’s face deepened. The leadsman sang monotonously through his nose.

Chief Engineer McGovern sniffed the air, wrinkled his nose, and spat.

“Why d’ye keep the lead goin’, Skipper?” he demanded. “As I’ve told ye, I can gie ye a bearin’ on the bazaar by the smell, an’ likewise a reasonable accurate cross-bearin’ on the Sheik’s hareem.”

* * * * *

The Skipper waggled his beard and did not reply. He was leaning out of the sagging wheelhouse. He was hatless, and coatless, and collarless. His face expressed the ultimate of bitterness and dislike.

Chief Engineer McGovern closed his eyes.

“Eighty per centum o’ dried fish,” he pursued. “Assorted stenches, nineteen per cent. Sewage, three-quarters o’ one per cent. An’ attar o’ roses, one-eighth o’ one per cent. We are just passin’ the end o’ the jetty.”

He opened his eyes again to check up. He was correct within the limits of good navigation.

“It would ha’ worked,” said McGovern, and sighed. “But I suppose the Skipper knows best.”

Captain Grover turned and glared ferociously at the Arab steersman. The wheelman spun the wheel in haste and the _Kingston_ heeled around in time to miss the clumsy stern of a two-hundred-ton _bagala_.

A hundred yards on, Captain Grover reached his hand to the engine room telegraph, but Chief Engineer McGovern had turned his head and now swore down the hole through which his head projected. The engines stopped. The _Kingston_ drifted forward gently. The Skipper’s whiskers waggled. No man moved. The waggling became violent, and his expression of concentrated venom became more pronounced. A deep rumbling noise began deep down in his chest.

“Let go the anchor!” roared McGovern.

The Skipper subsided into his private state of dudgeon as the anchor-chain rolled out. Five-eight fathoms. It stopped its rattling roar and began to ooze gently out, indefinitely.

“Make it fast!” howled McGovern.

The order came as the Skipper was growing apoplectic. An Arab sailor hastened to obey, and the _Kingston_ came to rest in the oily glassy waters while additional and hitherto unsuspected smells from the town floated toward her and enveloped her.

From the town, too, came boats. Boats of all sizes and degrees of unseaworthiness. They clustered about her and the Arab crew explained unintelligible things explicitly and the boatmen swarmed on board to argue the point.

Captain Grover’s beard waggled. He grew purple. A rumbling noise began deep down in his diaphragm. And McGovern said hastily, “I wouldna order them off, Skipper. After all, ye ken, they’ve bought the _Kingston_. But of course you know best.”

Captain Grover’s purple tint persisted, but the rumbling noise stopped. After a raging, anathematic glare about him, he withdrew his head violently into the wheelhouse. And McGovern sighed, mopped his head, and turned to duck down below again.

* * * * *

As he descended the ladder he saw unusual activity below. He looked in instant alert suspicion. And then with a roar of rage he jumped down the last five steps. His own private tool-kit was open and was being enthusiastically inspected by the engine room crew. As he plunged forward a man staggered into view with an especially large armful of McGovern’s personal possessions from his cabin. Other men were behind him, quarreling angrily over the loot. Somebody else was engaged in squabbling over McGovern’s watch and chain with still another man, and a last touch to McGovern’s wrath was given by the sight of his revolver in the hands of a member of the black gang.

“Scum o’ the earth,” roared McGovern, grabbing a slicebar as he rushed, “I’ll----”

A knife flicked past his ear and with one accord the combined engine room and stokehold crews fell upon him. The slicebar landed once, with a satisfying thud. After that, mutiny had pretty much its way. McGovern, fighting in a berserk wrath, landed blows and took them. Once, rolling on his back with a dozen men clinging to him, he saw a bearded face peering down the ladder he had descended. Then he managed to get both legs free and kicked gloriously, to the accompaniment of anguished howls, until somebody landed on his head with a spanner.

He woke up possibly five minutes later. Hardly more, because men were still sitting on him. One man, in fact, was sitting on his head and McGovern’s first conscious effort was to sink his teeth in him. The man arose with a yell, and McGovern spat.

“Now,” he raged, “go ahead an’ knife me an’ be damned to you!”

He did not know what the mutiny was about. There had been no trouble on the voyage. He and the Skipper were delivering the newly sold _Kingston_ to her new owner, the Sheik Abu Nakhl of Ras-el-Kasr. The Skipper was in the depths of despair at the final fate of his ship. McGovern was hopeful of at last being able to go back to England and marry Molly Grover, the Skipper’s daughter. But this mutiny seemed to suggest that the Sheik Abu Nakhl had other plans for him.

“Why don’t ye knife me?” demanded McGovern, raging. “Go ahead! I’m helpless enough! But if I’d had a gun----”

“Please, sar,” said a plaintive voice. “The Sheik Abu Nakhl he give orders you shall not be kill.”

A woebegone member of the stokehold crew, a man McGovern had noticed before was a Persian and not an Arab like the rest, was spitting blood from where a tooth was missing and interpreting at the apparent order of the bearded man above.

“He did, eh?” said McGovern savagely. “An’ why was he so kind?”

“He intend, sar,” said the woebegone little Persian dismally, “he intend to run this ship as pirate to loot the pearling fleet, sar. He want you alive, sar, to fixe engines if they break.”

“You may tell him,” said McGovern grimly, “to go to hell. What’s that noise up there? A fight?”

“Yes, sar,” said the Persian mournfully. “That are captain, sar. He are still fight.”

* * * * *

An inarticulate bellow arose above the crashing of bodies and thudding of feet above-decks. Bumps, blows, howls and crashings told that the Skipper was putting up a beautiful scrap, but the absence of revolver shots at once explained the length of the battle and foretold its ending.

The ending came suddenly. There was a monstrous crash that suggested that one of the flimsy partitions on the _Kingston_ had given way. A howl of anguish and a roar of rage, and suddenly the scrap stopped.

“Tapped him on the head like they did me,” said McGovern gloomily. “God forgie us, what a mess!”

And he lay still to contemplate the future of a white merchant marine officer held on board a Persian Gulf pirate ship to mend the engines if they broke.

* * * * *

Tied up in his cabin a couple of hours later, McGovern dismally revised his estimate of a phrase Molly Grover had first used.

“The Skipper knows best,” she’d said firmly. “And I won’t marry you unless he says so.”

That was at the bottom of all this trouble. The Skipper didn’t know best. When a series of disasters led to the _Kingston_ being sold out of the Baltic trade, for which she was built, into the Mediterranean, then the Levant, and then the ultimate degradation of small cargo-steamers, the pilgrim trade to Jidda--when those disasters happened, the Skipper should have changed his berth. He should certainly have left her when she was sold to Abu Nakhl of Ras-el-Kasr. He didn’t know best when he fell in love with the old tub and stuck to her as she sank down the social scale of the sea to the point of trading in small and heat baked harbors in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. McGovern felt that the Skipper had made a grave mistake.

The only wisdom he was willing to concede to the Skipper just then, was what he had showed in Port Said. McGovern had hired a harbor boat there, had had himself rowed to the _Kingston_, mounted to the deck of the rusty little old tramp and introduced himself politely as the accepted suitor of the Skipper’s daughter Molly. The Skipper had glared at him.

“Ye ken, sir,” said McGovern anxiously, “Molly told me, sir, that she’d not marry me, sir, unless you approved.”

The Skipper turned pink, then a delicate shade of purple. A rumbling noise set up about his belt buckle. It sounded like a coming explosion. The Skipper had just fired a Greek engineer bodily off the _Kingston_, and the engines looked like scrap-iron. He was in no mood to be approached on sentimental topics. The rumbling rose toward speech, which would be blistering, envenomed, wrathful speech. It would probably be a bellow of rage.

“I know, sir,” said McGovern hastily and humbly, “she should make a better match. But I’m already junior engineer o’ the ----” He named his ship with modest pride. “An’ in a couple more voyages, sir----”

* * * * *

The rumbling had stopped short. The Skipper was regarding him ferociously. He stood up. He beckoned. And he led the way in speechless fury to the engine room of the _Kingston_. McGovern looked, was awed at the mess before him, and set to work while the Skipper scowled.

He had thought that a demonstration of his efficiency in his own profession might help to placate his future father-in-law. But when the _Kingston_ left Port Said a former junior engineer on a P. & O. liner was chief and only engineer on board the _Kingston_, and was still in something of a daze at the transition.

He decided then that he was doing it out of love for Molly. Later he conceded that the Skipper did know what was best--in engineers. But he reflected gloomily on how far from best it had turned out to be for him, as he lay trussed up in his bunk in Ras-el-Kasr harbor.

There were excited yells and thumpings outside. Something heavy was being brought on board the _Kingston_. It would probably be a cannon, one of those antiquated brass affairs still venerated in the Persian Gulf, which go off sometimes when loaded, and always make a prodigious and entirely harmless din.

The little Persian had fed him and told him the Skipper was still alive, though battered. He had also explained that the great pearling season, the _Ghaus-al-Kabir_, was about to close and that the pearling fleets would have their entire catch on board, which was the reason for the choice of this particular time for raiding. Mournfully, the little man added, “Why this raid, sar, is because the other boats chase Ras-el-Kasr boats from pearling banks because they steal.”

“Um,” said McGovern. “I’ve heard of that. Abu Nakhl is a born pirate an’ his boats have been up to their old tricks whenever the gunboat was out of sight.”

There is a British gunboat which patrols the pearling banks in the pearling seasons for the suppression of piracy. The task is a noble one which is picturesquely cursed by the crew of the British gunboat told off for the job. Because the Persian Gulf is hot. Even the seawater goes up to a surprising temperature in midsummer.

“Yes, sar,” said the little Persian unhappily. “An’ I, sar, are interpreter, and I beg intercession, sar, if we are captured and you are not killed before surrender.”

* * * * *

McGovern agreed to intercede, but did not expect to keep the promise. As he gathered the details, the raid would be made when the gunboat was known to be some distance away. If possible, in the middle of a _shamal_, one of those monster dust-storms from the Mesopotamian desert, which sweep in a monster spiral over the Gulf and fill the air with dust as with a fog. A hundred and fifty pious cutthroats would be packed on the _Kingston_. With sufficient daring in her handling--and your Arab does not lack daring at sea--she would go lumbering through a fairly brisk gale and throw a horde of bloodthirsty Moslems on the deck of boat after boat on the pearling banks. She would be hidden by the storm. She would leave no witnesses to identify her. And she would be back in Ras-el-Kasr with an alibi prepared by the time the fact of piracy committed was known.

It was simple enough, and probable enough. Ras-el-Kasr is in the middle of that strip the charts still call the “Pirate Coast.” McGovern, and the Skipper if alive, were being held in case of an emergency--to be used to work the _Kingston_ out of any jam that bad seamanship or an engine breakdown might get her into. When they were no longer needed, they would be killed.

McGovern was gloomy enough and growing furious when four men, armed to the teeth, came casually into his cabin and kicked him, and slit his bonds and jerked him up into the chartroom. Abu Nakhl was waiting there, large and impressive and with the cold, dispassionate eye of a large cod. The Skipper was there too, badly battered, with one eye closed, and an expression of speechless rage upon his face.

The Sheik Abu Nakhl spoke, uninterestedly.

“He say, sar,” translated the little Persian almost tearfully, “that you are Christian dogs and he cut your throats presently. But if you help run the ship, he let you live. If you are good pirates, he will turn you free and give you shares in loot taken.”

McGovern narrowed his eyes. He thought he saw a chance to grab a knife, if he sprang quickly enough.

“Ye can say,” he observed pleasantly, “that we’ll see him in the lowest of the seven hells he believes in before we’ll turn pirate. I’m speaking for the Skipper an’ myself.”

The Skipper rumbled as the little Persian turned to translate. He rumbled more loudly until the small man stopped. And he glared at McGovern and waggled his beard speechlessly.

“What d’ye mean, sir?” demanded McGovern. “Aren’t ye with me?”

* * * * *

The Skipper growled negatively. One eye was closed rakishly. His lip was split. His expression was baleful and the perfection of concentrated venom. But he growled at McGovern instead of the Sheik Abu Nakhl.

“Ye mean ye’ll take on this damned cutthroat an’ his damned piracy before ye’ll die like a white man should?” demanded McGovern wrathfully.

The Skipper growled again. But it was unquestionably an affirmative.

“All right, then,” said McGovern savagely, “Tell the old pirate--” he addressed the mournful Persian--“tell him to cut my throat only. He’s got a skipper, but I’m damned if he’s got an engineer.”

He clenched his fists. Despite the hairy arms that clutched him, he thought he had the ghost of a chance to grab one of the weapons that bristled in the sash of the man on his right.

But the Skipper bellowed suddenly. It was not articulate, but it was profane and it was enraged and it was definitely a command. He glared at McGovern as upon a previous occasion he had glared at a young man who came to announce that he was Molly Grover’s accepted suitor.

McGovern stared at him. The fine recklessness that had possessed him evaporated.

“Oh, verra well,” he said sulkily. “Molly says the Skipper knows best. I’ll turn pirate wi’ the rest of ye. But I’d much rather be an honorable corpse.”

Abu Nakhl waited indifferently until the little Persian translated. Then he nodded his head negligently and McGovern was dragged from the chartroom and chucked bodily into his own looted cabin again. A whiskery pirate with a sashful of weapons squatted down outside his door.

* * * * *

Out of his cabin porthole, three days later, McGovern could see the shore. It was low and sandy and bare, and the twin minarets of a mosque showed far behind the _Kingston_, and there was a patch of mud houses and the inevitable towers of the local sheik’s fortress.

The _Kingston_ lay at anchor, baking. McGovern fanned himself and sweated. A day’s run from Ras-el-Kasr, the old ship had been at anchor for two days, now, and in that time McGovern had not stirred from his cabin, nor had a guard stirred from before his door. He had heard the Skipper moving about in the adjoining cabin, but McGovern made no attempt to communicate with him. Thinking over the fact that the Skipper had bellowed him into making terms with a damned pirate, McGovern had grown furious. Now he only waited for a chance to make clear his withdrawal from that compact.

* * * * *

In the meantime he lay on his bunk, sweating and cursing wearily, when he could summon energy for words. The whole ship was quiet. Some holy individual was intoning the Koran while waiting for his opportunity to loot. Somebody else was honing a weapon. There was guttural talk, and the sound of an indolent game being played somewhere, and the gentle slapping of waves against the _Kingston’s_ rusty plates.

But suddenly, out on deck, a bustle began. Someone shouted. Someone else echoed the shout. It ran all over the ship, and there was a rushing of men to look and then a scampering of feet and the tumbling of men down into the engine room and stokehold. The clang of tools and the rattle of coal. Vast activity everywhere.

McGovern dragged himself to the porthole and looked out. The sea was empty. The sun shone down like molten bronze. What little breeze came from the shore was like the hot blast from a furnace. There was no sign of any vessel anywhere. But the horizon was peculiarly blurred. It was no longer a definite line. It was a vague demarkation between sea and sky, and, as McGovern looked, the water and the sky blended insensibly into one.

“_Shamal_,” said McGovern drearily. “The wind’s coming. I hope the old tub founders with all on board.”

The whole ship was in a turmoil for long minutes, while the faint haze crept down the coast. Steam began to blow raucously out of the _Kingston’s_ dented funnel, to force a draught. And then there was a clanking of the anchor-chain and a howling of men, and the _Kingston’s_ screw began to revolve and a wild yell ran over the ship.

The old ship gathered steerage-way and headed out to sea, her engines growling protestingly. Above-decks, of course, the navigation would be fairly adequate. Until driven from the pearling grounds, Ras-el-Kasr had sent thirty boats to the fishery, and the wheelman would know currents and depths and courses thoroughly. The _Kingston_, in fact, would be driven on a basis of one part knowledge and three parts dependence upon Allah.

She was five miles off the coast when the _shamal_ struck. A wild screaming of wind, a dense opacity in the atmosphere, and the _Kingston_ heeled over as under a heavy blow. Immediately after, it seemed, a colossal sea was running and she was making heavy weather of it but being held recklessly on her course.

For an hour, then, McGovern waited grimly in his lurching, looted cabin for the wild yells in the engine room--which was the Arabic idea of discipline--to reach a climax and disclose that something vital had broken. He would be dragged out to fix it. And he would try to get hold of a knife or gun and wipe out the disgrace of having seemed even momentarily to have agreed to the terms of these scum.

At the end of the hour the yelling continued unabated, and the _Kingston_ was still wallowing onward. She pitched. She rolled. She wallowed heavily and groaned as she lurched upright again. And McGovern reflected grimly that before long she would be on one of the pearling banks and would be crashing alongside a pearling-boat to send a horde of yelling men down upon her.

* * * * *

Above the tumult of the _shamal_ outside a blow sounded suddenly, close by his head. A plank in the cabin wall split suddenly, wavered, and was dragged out of sight. And then a deep-toned rumbling noise reached McGovern’s ears and he saw a battered, purpled, infuriated eye gazing in at him. The Skipper reached in his fist and dropped a particularly greasy revolver upon McGovern’s bunk. An instant later his pudgy fist came in with a handful of shells. He dropped them and replaced his eye to the opening.

“Skipper!” said McGovern fervently. “I misjudged ye, man! I apologize! We’ll be runnin’ out an’ fightin’ our way to a sea-cock an’ swamp the old tub? ’Tis the only thing we can do. There’s a hundred an’ fifty of these pirates on board, an’ we’ve no hope of anything more than drowning ’em.”

The Skipper rumbled more loudly. It was close to a roar. And it was an exasperated negative. His expression was baleful and enraged. The rumbling continued to the point of articulation. And at last the Skipper bellowed.

“No!”

He withdrew his eye savagely. McGovern waited, dismally trying to discover some hope of escape for the two of them. There was none. A hundred and fifty Moslems, armed to the teeth, and two white men with revolvers. There was no chance whatever.

“But,” said McGovern without conviction, “the Skipper knows best.”