Part 2

He peered into the Skipper’s cabin. It had been looted as thoroughly as his own. Even the sheets had been taken from the bunk. Of all the Skipper’s possessions, the only thing remaining was a fair-sized brass-bound box that McGovern remembered as containing the elements of the Skipper’s Christmas dinner, when Christmas should come about. It had been emptied, now. A tinned plum-pudding, a tin of Danish butter, Devon sausages with a large picture of a pig on the label, and two monster Westphalian hams lay on the floor beside it. That explained the security of the box. No Moslem would touch its contents or have any use for a box so thoroughly defiled. If a couple of extra revolvers and a supply of shells were underneath the pork, they were quite safe from looting. No True Believer would look underneath the accursed pork.

The Skipper had his nose pressed to the glass of the porthole. He was watching for something which was included in some incredible scheme of his. McGovern racked his brain for an inkling of it, failed altogether to see any possibility whatever, and uncertainly followed suit. Maybe the Skipper knew best, but he doubted it.

* * * * *

For two solid hours the _Kingston_ went wallowing before the wind. She was a disgrace of a tramp to begin with. Rust-streaked funnel awry, unpainted boats unkempt, her hull a fungoid red from rust with peeling strips of paint dangling from her upper plates, she was a disreputable ship to look at anyhow. But now, with the red-scimitar flag of Abu Nakhl floating at her masthead, with becloaked, bewhiskered and unwashed sons of the Prophet crowded about her decks, with villainous small brass cannon lashed to her forward and after-decks and seagreen water pouring from her scuppers, she was worse than disreputable. She was a disgrace to the high seas. She was a disgrace even to the Persian Gulf.

At the end of the second hour, the wind lessened a little. Simultaneously the sea rose to new heights, plainly betokening shoal water underneath. The waves, hitherto racing monsters, showed a tendency to break and they bounced the _Kingston_ about outrageously. She went wallowing on through them, rolling until her side-rails went under and until the maniacs who manned her had new evidence of the favor of Allah in each successive recovery.

Then a howl went up from her decks, where men clung to rails and stanchions and their weapons. A wild howl of joy. Off to starboard a dim mass showed through the mist, a _batil_ of the pearling fleet, riding at long anchor with a rag of sail up and men pouring oil over her bows.

The _Kingston_ came around in a fashion to turn a seaman’s hair gray. As she swung about in the momentary trough between two monster, curling seas, McGovern turned pale and hung on instinctively. As the following sea lifted her up again and held her balanced for one precarious instant atop a surging wall of water where the full blast of the _shamal_ smote on her, he blinked his eyes. He could feel her going over----

And she sank abruptly into the next trough and came bubbling upright just in time to lurch heavily into the succeeding wave, waver precariously on its summit, and then plunge down one more with a wild uproar as her screw raced in midair.

“M-my God!” said McGovern shakily. “Allah is watching!”

The pearling-boat drifted slowly into sight through the porthole--a clumsy, ungainly craft with a huge mainmast from which a lateen sail would be spread, and a smaller lateen mizzen aft. It had a long anchor-cable out, its decks suddenly swarming with men in spite of the washing seas when the crimson-scimitar flag at the _Kingston’s_ masthead was made out. The _batil_ was rolling and pitching at the end of her anchor-cable. With her heavy mast and heavier lateen boom, it seemed as if at any instant the sticks should roll out of her. And then the _Kingston_, spouting green water from her scuppers, burying her squat bow in every sea, nosed alongside while her decks were black with howling, weapon-waving men.

* * * * *

The oil that had been poured over the pearler’s bows was providential. The gunwale of the pearler crashed against the _Kingston’s_ side, and there was a swarming and leaping of yelling men down. In seconds the deck of the _batil_ was a mass of stabbing, battling figures. Firearms flashed with futile poppings in the _shamal’s_ roar. Men, locked in death-grips, rolled over and over on the decks that were flooded with raging seas. Swords glittered brightly, or were dulled with red. And the _Kingston_, held as close alongside as a wild-eyed steersman dared, crashed again against the pearler’s side and a second wave of Abu Nakhl’s cutthroats went howling down to her deck.

The steamer drew off a little, then. Even a crazy man could see that to linger close was suicide. She drew off fifty yards or more and wallowed and plunged like a mad thing while the fighting went on, on the pearler.

McGovern had been fascinated by the massacre. He almost forgot his own doom ahead. And then the Skipper howled inarticulately through the split plank and McGovern heard his cabin door crash wide.

McGovern crashed through his own only an instant after him, yelling from pure instinct and looking for somebody to shoot at. There was no one in sight. The guard at his cabin door was over on the _batil_ fighting lustily and howling with joy. So was every other man on the _Kingston_ except the engine and fire room crews.

The Skipper’s fat legs twinkled as he went rumbling and racing forward. McGovern followed him out of instinct. The Skipper heaved himself up the bridge-ladder, unseen because all attention was focussed on the pearler. He bellowed over his shoulder to McGovern, balanced himself precariously, and plunged his full weight at the wheelhouse door.

McGovern joined him in the rush, and the two of them went hurtling into the wheelroom on top of the remnants of the splintered door. The Skipper went crashing down to the floor as the man at the wheel swung about and started shooting. McGovern dropped him handily, sneezed from the powder smoke, and helped the Skipper up.

“Now what?” he asked anxiously. “I didna think it could be done, sir, but you knew best. Now I’ll hold down the stokehold crew while we run the old ship----”

* * * * *

The Skipper boomed a raging negative. He seized the wheel of the _Kingston_. Her head was paying off from the one moment of the wheel’s freedom. He brought her back, squinted carefully, and with the purple complexion of a man on the verge of apoplexy from rage, sent her into a wallowing roll.

She came up, shuddering, with many tons of water on her fore-deck. McGovern gasped.

“Skipper! Ye’ll sink us both!”

The squat bow of the _Kingston_ wavered, wabbled, and settled with a rending crash against the blunt bow of the _batil_. More, one of the _Kingston’s_ anchors, only indifferently stowed away, caught its fluke into the tangle of cordage and chainwork about the _batil’s_ bowsprit.

There was a howl of joy and some of the engine room crew came pouring out and jumped down into the still raging battle.

“Anchor!” howled the Skipper, on the verge of exploding from rage, and pointing to the anchor whose fluke was caught in the cordage of the _batil’s_ bowsprit.

McGovern raced down and forward. The anchor-chain paid out recklessly.

“Why the de’il,” McGovern panted, “he did that----”

From the wheelhouse came an infuriated bellow. The Skipper pointed enragedly to the steel-taut cable at the end of which the pearler wallowed desperately. He made gestures, and McGovern flung up his hands helplessly. The _Kingston’s_ own anchor-chain continued to ooze out until a howl of anguished, helpless rage from the Skipper made McGovern look up. Then, in obedience to unmistakable if infuriated signs, he checked it.

“He’s gone dotty,” said McGovern dismally. “An anchor an’ chain would be cheap riddance.”

Then he saw the Skipper shooting from the wheelhouse. Fifteen or twenty yards separated the two vessels now, and McGovern whirled about to join in the fighting. But the fighting was over. The _batil_ was being happily looted by Abu Nakhl’s men, and they had noted nothing whatever wrong with the _Kingston_. The Skipper continued to shoot, holding the wheel with one hand and shooting with the other. His expression was that of concentrated fury. He emptied his gun, bellowed with wrath at McGovern, and reloaded awkwardly. At his second shot the iron-stiff cable of the _batil_ began to writhe. One of its strands had been severed by a bullet. That loosened strand curled up and writhed--and the cable broke.

* * * * *

The broken end screamed above McGovern’s head and splashed into the sea. Instantly, it seemed, the pearler was being driven astern. Heeling over until half her deck was under water, instant attention was given to the steamer. Wild howls and orders came from the looted _batil_.

And the Skipper, with an expression of pure ferocity upon his face, headed the _Kingston_ into the teeth of the _shamal_ again. Two minutes later came a shock as the paid-out anchor-chain drew taut. It raised from the water, and stiffened, and came inboard bending steel plates and stanchions in its passage. But it held.

McGovern sat down suddenly. He saw the point now. The _Kingston’s_ anchor hopelessly caught in the mass of cordage and chains about the bowsprit of the _batil_, with the full strain of a tow against it, could not be freed except by the hacking away of the whole bow and the immediate swamping of the _batil_. The Skipper was at the wheel of the _Kingston_. The late captors of the two white men were isolated on the pearling-boat in tow. They had to go where the _Kingston_ took them.

“My God!” said McGovern piously.

And he made haste to the engine room, to be ready to argue gently with the remaining members of the stokehold crew with the revolver Captain Grover had given him. Half an hour later, when someone came up from the stokehold to find out why the raid took so long to execute, or perhaps to estimate the loot, he got no farther than the stokehold ladder. There he found himself looking into the muzzle of McGovern’s weapon and saw McGovern smiling sweetly at him. He saw, further, a firehose propped to sweep down into the stokehold, the said firehose being coupled to a pipe full of excessively live steam.

“Scum o’ the earth,” said McGovern tenderly, “get back an’ to work! If yon steam-gauge drops below a hundred an’ fifty, I’ll gie you an’ your friends below a good fifty pounds o’t. Get!”

* * * * *

“Well, sir,” said McGovern hopefully, and admiringly, “since the _Kingston’s_ confiscated as a pirate ship an’ sold to ye at auction for no more than ten per centum o’ the reward paid for Abu Nakhl an’ his fellow pirates, might I take up a matter I mentioned once. before?”

Captain Grover glared at him. The _Kingston_, docked in Aden, was being painted resplendently under his eyes.

“I’m referrin’, sir,” said McGovern anxiously, “to Molly. She said, sir, that she’d marry me if ye had no objection to the match. An’ I was junior engineer on the _Glenarvon Castle_, sir, which is not so bad for my age.”

The Skipper rumbled in his chest. The rumbling grew louder.

“You’re chief engineer of the _Kingston_!” he roared. “And after we give the old ship a lick of paint I’ll be loading a cargo of rugs and olive-oil for Liverpool! When we get there we’ll see what Molly says!”

McGovern sighed.

“She’ll say, sir,” he prophesied morosely, “‘The Skipper knows best!’”

[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the December 10, 1928 issue of Short Stories magazine.]