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Title: The skipper knows best
Author: Murray Leinster
Release date: July 12, 2024 [eBook #74015]
Language: English
Original publication: Garden City, Long Island, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc, 1928
Credits: Roger Frank and Sue Clark
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SKIPPER KNOWS BEST ***
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.”
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.]
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