Argosy All-Story Weekly/Volume 123/Number 4/So Ends the Day

by J. Allan Dunn

 

So Ends the
Day

by J. Allan Dunn
Author of “The Yellow Fetish,” “A Man to His Mate,” etc.

CHAPTER I.

UNDERCURRENT.

FROM northeast to southeast, stretching a full quarter of the horizon, lifting high toward the zenith, loomed a somber, chaotic mass; folded and swollen in strange convolutions that slowly changed form, the semblance of some weird landfall, stricken by convulsions, tumbling reluctantly to ruin. The bulk of it was dull, threatening gray, shadowed with deepest, ominous purple in its canons and deep caverns, the upper crags touched luridly with the hue of raw copper.

The sea was like a sheet of polished brass, of no color—a glare of reflected light from the sun that was just beginning to wheel westward. It heaved in long, low hills, smooth as the breasts of a golden-skinned Apsasa dancing-girl. Only beside the bilges of the barkentine, in the scanty shadow of the hull, the water took on tone. There wavering scallops of blue and bronze and green, the prismatic hues of a peacock's tail, glided out in kaleidoscopic patterns, fading in the sunflare without a hint of foam.

On the ship, flying-jib, jib and staysail, fore-skysail, royal and topgallant, drooped , flaccid, waiting for a breeze. The canvas hung from the lower yards of the bore in brails. The mainsail was down, held in loose gaskets, the mizzen set, sheeted-in; both topsails were furled.

The Malay crew, tall and lean, with flattened dish-faces, light bronze of flesh, were setting up the stays of the mainmast, hauling in unison to their low drone of Bada-a-ah! Trama, tramah, tra-ma-ah! transparent blue shadows shifted back and forth. Their coarse, black hair was confined in gaudy but sun-faded cloths, tied with prick-ears. Sarongs of brown cloth, patterned in red, skirted them to the knees.

Elsewise they were naked, save for the oil that they had anointed themselves with against tissue-smashing rays of the sun. 'Over them presided their tindal, their self-appointed quartermaster; younger, slighter than any of them, but senior, greater in brain; master of their tasks, appointer and often administrator of their punishments.

Over the half-poop deck an awning was stretched from mizzenboom to either rail. Beneath it, on rattan chairs, two women were stretched at full length, one twice the age of the other, both languid in the frightful, nerve-smashing heat of the Banda Sea. A white man leaned against the port rail near the after shrouds, surveying leisurely the younger of the women. Her eyes were half-closed, long lashes entirely shaded them, yet she was quite conscious of his regard, and uneasy under it.

The man, first mate of the vessel, was physically good to look at. He wore a white shirt, open at the throat, the sleeves docked above the elbows, clean duck trousers, with a cummerbund of vivid orange in lieu of belt, emphasizing the narrowing of his hips beneath his wide chest and broad shoulders.

He was swart with the sun, but there was a tinge of crimson heightening the tan on his cheeks, and his lips were full and red. He was clean-shaven, his hair black and curling, but close-cropped. His nose sprang out aquiline from between dark eyes that gazed on the girl. with a look that was provocative, a look that needed little to become possessive.

He was magnificently muscled, and stood the height of a full fathom. There was something of a swagger about him, even in his lounging attitude, something predatory in the grouping of his features.

The girl stirred under his persistent regard, and looked at him. Her hair was pale-gold, her eyes sky-blue, their curving fringes brown. Her skin was cameo-pale with the heat, but her mouth was brightly pink. For all her lassitude she was healthy, full of life and the love of living.

The mate's eyes were fixed on the silk-clad ankles and the graceful swell of what the shifting skirt revealed of her slender legs. Then it traveled appraisingly, boldly admiring, up the slim, rounded length of her, and rested on her face, slowly turning the hue of the inner surface of a pink-lined shell.

“Skipper taking his nap?” he asked.

“He always has his siesta at this time,” she answered. “You should know that.”

“Surely. Regular as a clock, the skipper. Ticking away, day in, day out, always the same, never too fast, always correct, standard time.”

“I imagine that is a valuable attribute in a captain,” she replied, shifting her look from his with a certain suggestion of effort. The mate smiled with a flash of white teeth.

“Aunty!” The elder woman moaned a little, and answered without opening her eyes, a little petulantly. Little beads of perspiration gleamed on her forehead.

“What is it, Mary?”

“Don't you want to go down into the cabin? It is unbearably hot up here. We can get the boy to start the punkah.”

The aunt groaned again.

“It can't be worse than it is on deck. The sun pricks my eyes through the lids. I believe that awning makes it worse. Very well.” She gut up primly, and the girl followed her. Opposite the mate, the latter turned her head toward him, deliberately accepting his challenge. The blue eyes fought the brown, and faltered.

“See you later,” he said, and, as she made no answer, moving on, slight, graceful in her white draperies, he smiled again.

In his cabin, off the trade-room, Sykes, the cockney supercargo, was compounding a rum punch for Pinckney, the second-mate, and Evans, the Welsh carpenter. These, with the skipper and the mate, were the only white men aboard the barkentine. The cook was Chinese; all others Malays.

“It ain't wot it ought ter be, wivout hice,” said Sykes. “But the lime takes the bloomin' thirst out of yer, an' the tamarinds sort of puckers up yore cheek an' cools you orf.”

“And the rum leaves you worse off than you was,” said Pinckney.

“Want me to have it out of yore's?” asked Sykes. “I thought not. Well, 'ere's lookin' at yer both.”

They half-drained their glasses at a gulp and, almost immediately, the sweat broke out on their foreheads. The Welshman scooped his off with the back of his hand, the other two mopped it up with bandanas. All three were in singlets and duck trousers, their feet naked. Overhead was the soft shuffling of the sailors, the faint sound of their chant—Bada~a-ah! Trama, tramah, tra-ma-ah! Suddenly it was topped by a bellowed order. The shuffling quickened. The chant died out and was nod=t resumed.

”Bullyin' 'em again!" slid the Welshman. “Just make 'em sullen. He don't know how to handle 'em.”

“He's new in these seas,” said Pinckney. “Don't see why the skipper picked him.”

“'E knows his bizness, outside of that,” said Sykes. “And there hain't much choice of mates these days. They're scarce. The skipper 'ud 'ave myde you 'first,' Pinky, if you cud navigate.”

“I know it. I'm as high as I'll get. But I'm as good a man as him, outside of shootin' the sun. Nineteen years I've bin at sea. I'm thirty now. But I'm a sailorman. Born in me. But no good at figgerin'.”

“Yo're a good man, Pinky,” said the supercargo. “'Ave another go?”

“No. It's too hot. One's enough. Goes right through you. The old man's goin' to be mortal sorry he shipped Samson as first mate,” he went on, nursing his grievance. “For two reasons.”

“Wots the other one?” asked the supercargo.

Evans said it. “He don't know how to handle the Malays. Good men, but techy. Some day he's goin' to hit one of 'em, an' then there'll be hell to pay. If a Malay does wrong he can be punished, but the tindal's got to do it. They'll stand for Selim, even to a floggin', an' Badoun could crumple him up like I would a bit of paper, but let a white man lay hand to him, an' like as not it means mutiny—or murder.”

“Yo're right, Pinky. But that ain't the main reason. It's the gel. The skipper was a fool to let 'er come aboard for the voyage. Wanted 'er to see wot it was like afore he married her—an' she finds it dull. The mate's out to amuse her. He's a handsome devil.”

“I heard at Singapore that he run away with his last skipper's wife,” said Pinckney.

“Ho. Bazaar-pidgin!” said Sykes scornfully. “Not but wot it might be true. If it was, it warn't our kind of a skipper.”

“The skipper's slow but sure,” said the Welshman, finishing his glass. “Aye, an' deep. Anger 'll damn him for a bit till he thinks things over, but if the flood breaks through there's a sight of force behind. He's blind in love with the gal. Fair worships her. He looks at her as if she was a bit o' Dresden, an' him proud to own it, but afeard to touch. A man that lives at sea is shy o' wimmen. He sees 'em in visions, in the stars, an' in the clouds, fillin' the wide sea spaces wi' dreams. They're far-off, an' so they're more precious. He treats em wi' over reverence—not as they would be treated. But if it's hands off wi' the skipper, wo betide any else that comes too close.”

“Where did yer git hall the stuff about wimmin an' the wide sea-spaces?” jeered the cockney. “For you've spent most of yore life at sea yerself.”

“I've been married twice,” answered Evans. “And every Welshman is a dreamer an' a poet.”

“Spechully arfter a rum-punch.”

Evans ignored him.

“The skipper's lost his luck,” he went on. “Lost it when he changed the name of the ship. Halcyon she was, Mary she is. 'Tis bad luck to shift a ship's name between voyages. He should have married the girl first.”

“'E's a better man than Samson,” said Sykes. “For all the mate's showy looks an' muscles. Shut the two of 'em in a room an' one 'ud come out. It w'udn't be Samson.”

“Fightin' ain't makin' love.” Pinckney shook his head knowingly. “The Welshman's right. The skipper's a novice beside Samson. The gal's bored. The mate's a woman-killer.”

“Mebbe he is,” answered Sykes. “But the skipper's a man-tamer.”

There came a sudden patter or rain on deck. In a moment it was a torrent, drumming furiously on the planks, hissing in the scuppers.

“We may get a breeze after that,” said Pinckney. “It must be close to two bells. My watch.”

“Thank Gawd for the rain! I'm fair messy with the 'eat. Let's hall go on deck an' get a shower-barth.” And Sykes led the way to the ladder.

---

CHAPTER II.

THE SECRET FLAME.

CAPTAIN MARTIN, skipper of the Mary—late the Halcyon—stood three inches shorter than his mate. He weighed close to a hundred and eighty pounds of compact flesh and bone, his legs were slightly bowed, his chest deep, his arms as stout as spars. His beard was luxuriant, but he kept it clipped fairly short. Like his hair, it was reddish-brown, only a shade or so deeper than his weathered skin.

Out of it all his eyes gleamed like jewels inlaid in bronze. They were chameleon eyes, the eyes of a seaman, blue in fair weather, gray in storm. Whenever he looked at Mary Leigh, they held the hue of the shadow of midsea waves under a sunny, cloudless sky. He was perhaps a year or so older than Samson, both around thirty.

The barkentine sailed easily under the stars, the southern cross a glittering pendant over her maintruck, her canvas pyramiding, umber in the shadow, high-lighted to ivory where the rising moon caught it; the harping of the air breeze in the rigging in harmony with the whispering rush of the water along the vessel's run. A forking wake stretched luminous with phosphor to meet the moon-path. In it a troop of porpoises, hunting their supper acrobatically, turned continuous somersaults, churning the sunshine into green fire. The skipper and Mary Leigh stood at the taffrail.

“Beautiful, ain't it?”_he asked. “And a fair wind. We're heading up for Serang, Mary. Like a big garden it is, with a live volcano in the middle. The Spice Islands they call the group; where the nutmegs come from.. Nor' and east of that is the western end o' New Guinea. The Malay's call it the Head of the Dragon. Looks like it on the chart. There's where they get the best birds-o'-paradise. Skins like jewels, purple an' green an' reddish-gold. I'm goin' to get you some, Mary.”

He slid an arm about her waist. She moved away from_the embrace without immediate reply.

“What's wrong, Mary?”

“Nothing. But that man, Badoun, at the wheel?”

“His eyes are in the front of his head, not his back,” answered the skipper. But he did not replace his arm.

“Don't anything ever happen at sea?” she asked him suddenly.

“Lord, yes! Storm and shipwreck, sometimes. But you can fight the one an' dodge the other if you've a good ship an' use judgment, Nothin' you need worry about my dear.”

“Oh, storms!” Her voice was petulant.

“I was hoping you'd like it all,” he said.

She shrugged her shoulders and turned, facing inboard, back to the rail. Behind Badoun the spark of a cheroot showed. Then, the first mate, emerging from the shadows into the spotlight of the moon.

“Great night,” he said affably. “Have a cheroot, skipper? You don't object, Miss Leigh?”

“Not at all,” the girl answered. The skipper refused the cigar. “Isn't the moon gorgeous?” asked Mary Leigh. All her indifference had vanished with the coming of the second male, the formation of the triangle.

“Looks like the inside of a pearl oyster,” said Samson. “I've seen it when it looked like the open door of a furnace. I mind one time in the Solomons. I was mate on a recruity schooner. We'd gone ashore in the red boat in the afternoon. They paint all the whaleboats on a recruity scarlet, Miss Leigh, so the natives know what you're after. Saves time.

“Three natives wanted to go with us; we promised 'em trade rifles over and above their wages for a premium, but the chief didn't want to lose em. So we fixed it they were to come down to the beach after dark.

“Well, there wasn't any dark. The moon was up before the sun was down. We stood off the island and fetched it again after sunset. The moon showed through the cocopalms on the point like it would set the trees afire. The men were there in the scrub—they were worth twenty pounds apiece to us at the plantation—but just as we're gettin' 'em in the boat the tribe comes down with a rush, an' there we were at it; in the shore-surf, up to our middles, spears flyin', clubs whirlin', pistols poppin' an' flashin' in the shadows. The boat looked more like a porkypine than a boat, time we got clear.”

“Were you wounded?” The girl's voice rang eager. The mate showed a scar on his bare forearm, flexing his muscles in the moonlight as she bent to scan it. Her lips were parted, her eyes big with excitement and admiration for this Ulysses of the South Seas.

The skipper, hands buried deep in his pockets, said nothing. He had heard another story about that scar. The girl turned to him.

“That's what I meant,” she said. “Excitement! Life!”

“And death,” the skipper commented. “No place for a woman.”

Samson laughed. “There was another time when we ran on a reef in the New Hebrides,” he commenced. “On a little island off Aoba—”

Sykes had come quietly up the poop-ladder and crossed to them. Now he broke in.

“Taku's sick, skipper. “Got a touch of fever.”

Captain Martin hesitated.

“I'd better go for'ard and take a look at him,” he said.

“I'll wait here,” said Mary Leigh. “Mr. Samson will spin me more yarns. Won't you?”

“Were your men Malays, like these aboard?” she asked the mate when he had finished his perilous tale.

“Not them. Melanesians. Cannibals, with filed teeth. Huskies. Not mollycoddles, like this lot. The skipper mothers 'em too much, to my fancy.” He glanced to see how she took the implied criticism, but she seemed not to have noticed it. They moved to the taffrail.

“The porpoises have gone,” she said. “They were like so many animated pinwheels.”

The moon shone full in their faces. The mate never took his eyes from her. He chuckled silently as he thought of her response to his yarning, and now, though eminently conscious of his regard, she did not resent it. The tropic night was full of glamour, the balmy air hinted of the Spice Islands all about them, of great drooping mango-trees heavy with luscious fruit, orchids festooning the fervid bush.

The lure of it was pumping in his veins, and he fancied her blood warming. He glanced at Badoun, like a carven image of ebony at the wheel—save for the play of his arms—thought and action centered on his work, eyes on the compass-card aswim in the light of the binnacle.

“They're off the quarter,” he said; “followed up the school of surface fish. See 'em?”

She shifted her position, leaning over the quarter-rail, one hand on a mizzen backstay.

“I can't. They are too close to the side. I'm not tall enough.”

“Want to?”

She nodded, not catching his meaning. He drew a deep breath, and looked again at Badoun.

“Put your elbows to your sides, hold 'em steady.”

He gripped her arms at the bend, hot palms to bare, cool flesh that warmed to the contact.

She felt herself hoisted steadily, easily up, till her hips leveled his shoulders, while she held the stay for steadiness. Tingling vitality flowed out of his strength, her blood surged scalding, something of what fevered him transmitted through his clutch; intoxicating, dizzying.

“Put me down,” she begged, half gasping.

He set her on the deck and twisted her toward him. She spun, still confused, clinging to him for an instant. He caught at her and crushed her close. As her head fell back he stooped and kissed her. For a moment her body was molded close to his. She could feel the strong beat of her heart through his thin clothing. Then she thrust away.

“How could you? How dare your” she panted. “Badoun!”

He smiled, and half of it was for that word: “Badoun.”

“How could I help but dare?” he demanded, and his voice was husky with passion. But he turned a sharp eye to the Malay. The man's back showed, hardly visible in the shadow, one shoulder sharply accented by the moon.

“He saw nothing,” he whispered. “You're not angry? I couldn't help it. God, but you are wonderful! You set me afire.”

Her hair had become disarranged, or she chose to think it so. She stood apart from him, both hands busy. Her eyes were hidden under their long lashes, but he marked her bosom lift and fall, saw her underlip caught up by her teeth. His own hands were clenched, the veins high on his temples and in his neck. He made a short step forward. Her eyes opened. He read fright in them, where he had expected something else, before he realized that she was looking beyond him. Her hands drooped, fell to her sides.

“Nothing much the matter with Taku,” boomed the skipper's bass. “The quinine 'll fix him by morning. How's she holding up, Badoun?”

He had turned to the binnacle. But how much had he seen? The mate's face became alert, like the face of a beast that thinks it hears the step of the hunter. Mary Leigh stood as if turned to stone. She was cold, all save her lips.

“Your aunt's comim' on deck, Mary.” As the skipper spoke Miss Burton appeared, and the girl went directly to her. Samson faced the captain.

“Man all right, is he? Most of 'em malingerers. Don't pay to baby 'em too much, I've found.”

“I'm not apt to serve out pap where it ain't wanted,” answered the skipper, with dry emphasis. “I know how to handle my men—and my ship, Mr. Samson.” His eyes looked squarely at the mate. They were gray, and cold as steel.

“We're going below, John,” Miss Burton said. “I don't trust this night air.”

“I shouldn't wonder but what you were right. I'll go with you. Mr. Samson, will you please take the deck?”

It was not the mate's watch for a full hour, but he said nothing. After the deck was clear, save for him and Badoun, he lit a fresh cheroot, but did not find it to his taste, tossing it into the sea and pacing from port to starboard and back again. He had made up his mind that the skipper had seen nothing. If he had he would not have stood tamely by. Unless the presence of both the women had restrained him.

The girl, with her fresh coolness, her difference from the longshore women he had known, had maddened him, but he had gone willingly along that path. He had learned, with his knack of piecing such things, that Mary Leigh had a tidy little fortune in her own right.

He compared himself complacently with the skipper, remembering the moment when her body had yielded.

She had not returned his kiss, but she had suffered it. It had roused her, swept her off her feet, if only for a second. He had made the first step successfully. But the path was dangerous. The skipper was not a fool, not a man who let his rights slide. What if Badoun had seen and told? The Malays were crafty, and their senses were abnormal. He itched to question the man, but checked himself.

“I'll wager he's never got under her skin,” he assured himself. “As for the two of us, it's man to man—and may the best win.” And he let his thoughts slide to pleasanter prospects. He saw himself owning his vessel, as Martin owned the Mary, making a good income. out of her, cruising, prosperous among the islands. But there was no image of Mary Leigh in the cabin of his ship.

“I'll not be fool enough to take her to sea,” he told himself, with a muttered laugh, as he found a third cheroot to his taste, and lounged by the taffrail, sending out puffs of fragrant smoke into the air that were wafted to the sensitive nostrils of Badoun, making them quiver, like the nostrils of a dog.

But Badoun had seen nothing, whatever he had sensed. And, if he had seen, he would not have told the captain.

Presently, Sampson slipped below to his cabin. As he passed down the poop-ladder he glimpsed the figures of Miss Burton and the skipper in the cuddy, built under the poop for dining and general assembly room. The girl was not with them.

He descended to the lower cabin, and saw the door of her state-room closed, going on to his own. There he unearthed a bottle of whisky from underneath the mattress of his bunk, and took a long drink, filling a flask to take on deck. Inside of an hour he had finished it.

His reveries had become inflamed, the liquor had fed his sensuous thoughts, never very dormant. When he tossed the last drops down and put away the flask in his trousers pocket for future tipplings, he was in a glow of confidence, sure of conquest, sneering at the chances of the skipper against such a man as he was: Don Juan of a score of lax seaports.

Elizabeth Burton was what Samson would have styled an old maid. The preservation of her virginity had not been from choice. She was well aware that she had been denied the outward and visible charms of her sex, cursed with a dull eye, a dry and sallow skin, a body denied all curves. Equally she knew herself blessed with a nature at once loving and maternal, possessing the intuitions of her sex, where man was concerned, as fully as her niece, and, added to them, deductions derived from observation of the experiences of others.

Between attributes and drawbacks, she managed to preserve a happy balance. She had some of the unavoidable traits of the spinster, but they were not of the spirit. Perhaps because she had never known fruit of her own ripening, had never felt the ennui of love, she was the more interested in other folk's plantations.

Her soul had not shriveled; her common-sense matched her good nature. If her life had not been rounded-out according to the law of sex, she had achieved a very satisfactory oval. And she had fully countenanced and encouraged the suit of her niece by Captain Martin.

Mary Leigh had retired with a headache promptly upon going below. But her aunt remained to chat with the skipper. While he smoked she sewed under the cuddy lamp and led the talk around her subject. Yet she felt that she broached it clumsily at last.

“What happened on deck, John?” she asked.

Martin had seen nothing of the embrace. But he had sensed, with a lover's quickness, the tension between the two he had left chatting, left reluctantly. He knew his own failings in light speech, he was envious of Samson's facility. A seed of jealousy had been already planted, and, as he heard the sibilance of the mate's whisper while he had been mounting the ladder, a tendril had been flung up and out, coiling about his heart. Now he turned squarely to the spinster.

“What do you mean?”

“Between Mary and Samson.”

“I saw nothing.”

“There was something. Mary thinks you know. She thinks you should have acted.”

“myself,

“Did she tell you?” His voice deepened, quickened. “Never mind, I don't want to know—from you.”

“She did not tell me. It was not necessary. You love her, John?”

He looked at her. She nodded at him.

“Mary is only a girl, John. You know how she lived with me. Never seeing any one worth while, any one of interest. She loved you for the you that is inside, hidden. She doesn't realize that as yet. She loved you for what you stood for, romance, the high seas, adventure, strange places. She was like a child with a book. She admired the pictures first; the sound-sweetness of the tale she had yet to learn to read. She was untouched by passion. You were the first man who ever kissed her. You haven't followed up that kiss, John. You treat her more like a big brother than a lover.”

“I haven't had much experience in that Elizabeth. I have seen rough things, done them. There is a side to my life far apart from hers.”

“Not if you love each other. Not if she is to be your mate.”

“She is—Elizabeth, she is the woman of my sea-visions. Like a flower. I have feared to let myself go. I can talk to you. You understand. There is nothing of the prude about you. If I showed her all I felt, if I could tell her? I am no iceberg, but I am crude. I might frighten her. She would not understand. She is dainty.”

“She is asleep. Or was. Wake her up. Frighten her, if you can. But—love her. John, I know Mary. She is ripening to womanhood. Young love, young passion, first aroused, often mistakes glittering pinchbeck for gold that may be pure, yet unpolished.”

She had laid aside her sewing, and her pale eyes lost their dulness. They shone with earnestness. The cuddy door was open for air, and a step sounded on the ladder. She stopped speaking until Samson came back again, and they heard him above them. And she watched the skipper.

As she had said, she knew her niece, she had seen signs that night that told her of sex aroused. And not by Martin. She wondered if she had spoken too openly. He had not failed to understand. She could tell that by the way he sat biting at the amber of his pipe, gone out. She knew the riddles of his eyes, though she could not always read them. There was a depth to his nature she had never sounded, but suspected. It was strength, but she feared it, if perverted. Under his repression the man was volcanic.

He refilled and relit his pipe.

“Thanks, Elizabeth,” he said. “I'll not pretend to misunderstand you. Samson is a good deal of a skunk, but I can handle him.”

She gathered up her sewing and rose, as he did.

“Man-handle, you mean. What sense is there in disposing of the man if you lose the girl? Good-night, John.”

She looked in at Mary. The moon touched one pillow, with a braid of hair, light gold. The girl's eyes were closed, and she went out softly. But Mary Leigh was not asleep. She was less certain now that Martin had seen. She had lain waiting for the sound of angry voices, waiting for her aunt to come to bid her good night, but she shrank from discussion. Despite the warm, tropic night, she was cold, all but her lips.

Something had suddenly sprung up within her. For one moment, when she had shrunk against the mate's body and received his lips on hers, her flesh and blood had transmuted into flame.

John had never affected her like that. Was there something lacking? Was she tainted with some streak of immorality to remember such a moment and thrill to it? She was plighted to John, but John did not rouse her to such a supreme moment that hinted of deeper transports to which her will and body had leaped.

Was John cold? Were they mismated? Was Samson the one man, as he had been the only one, who could fill her with such delirious desire? She was no simpering innocent, but passion had been born in her for the first time that night; she, a plighted girl, in the arms of another man than her lover. Surely she loved John? Her mind did—or was it only respect?

Fairly in the coils, she tossed on her bed. Behind it all lay dread. A sickening fear of what might happen between the two men.

Pinckney, the second mate, who was to take the middle watch, was, as usual, in the congenial company of the supercargo and the Welshman, in Sykes's snug domain off the trade-room. The three ate at second-table, and, always somewhat embarrassed by the presence of two women aboard, one of them the skipper's fiancée, were glad to do so, keeping away almost entirely from the cuddy, where, as one of the few whites aboard, the carpenter, with the others, usually had right of entrance.

The skipper broke in on their three-handed game of cribbage.

“The watches have been shifted a bit, Pinckney,” he said. “You'll go up at two bells and relieve the mate. I'll take the deck for the morning watch, as usual.”

“Very well, sir.” The skipper nodded curtly to Sykes and Evans, and, without his usual pleasant word, left them.

“My eye!” ejaculated Sykes, when he was sure the skipper was well away. “Somethin' stirrin'. Wot-ho for ructions!”

“Samson!” said Pinckney prophetically.

“Somethin' in the bloomin' wind,” said Sykes. “And the mate to loo'ard. 'Arf a quid yo're right, Pinkey.”

“I'd be a fool to bet against what I think,” said the Welshman. “Your deal, Sykes. It's none of our business.”

The skipper returned to the cuddy, smoking pipe after pipe and brooding, brooding over what the aunt had told him, retrieving past incidents, cursing above his breath at last to find that he had nothing tangible for open grievance.

“I'll get rid of him at Singapore,” he muttered, and reached into the table drawer for the log. There was little to enter save the position, already jotted down in pencil. He was never prolix.

He wrote in his precise hand:

Becalmed all day. A fair wind at sunset. Taku sick with fever. Not serious. Administered 15 gr. quin. At noon: 5' 19" South. 134' 27" East.

The cuddy clock chimed eight bells, midnight. Forward, one of the watch echoed the strokes upon the ship's bell. He added the invariable formula, old as the first merchantman manned by English sailors:

So ends this day.

---

CHAPTER III.

MUTINY.

AN hour later he was still there, the lamp turned low. He saw Pinckney mount the ladder after the clock had chimed two bells, heard him on deck, then another tread, and saw, against the flood of moon that now washed the main deck, the tall figure of Samson descending.

The mate hesitated outside the dimly-lit cuddy, then turned in. He had his own log to write up. The skipper turned up the wick of the lamp, and the two men faced each other. The reek of liquor was distinct. Anger, long groping for pretext, flared up in the captain.

“I don't like my officers drinking on duty,” he said. “There's no harm in a dram, for entertainment, or in emergency, but, outside of that, it's against my orders.”

Samson, his brain fumed with the liquor, his sneering mood toward the skipper still uppermost, said nothing, but his look was eloquent of resentment. Martin's tone had cut like the lash of a whip.

“And I won't have you bullying the Malays,” went on the skipper. As his choler rose he smothered it with the ice of his outer mood. “As you have done. You're new to these seas, or you'd have more sense. A free Malay will not tolerate it. Neither will I.”

“Free Malay, hell!” drawled Samson. “A loafing lot of scum.”

“That is enough, sir. I am the judge of discipline on this ship. I own her.”

“The hell you do? Own all aboard her? Perhaps not as much as you fancy you do.”

A red light danced in the cold steel of the captain's eyes.

“Just what do you mean?” he asked, evenly.

Samson leered.

“You know damned well what I mean.”

The table was between them. The red spark grew to a flame as the skipper vaulted across it, straight for Samson. The mate caught the heavy inkstand and hurled it. It hit the captain's foot, and the contents spurted over the table and the red carpet. Then Samson staggered back from the impact of the skipper's bulk, striking out at him as he went. The blew glanced off Martin's muscle-sheathed arm, and the next second the two had closed, reeling about the cabin.

The skipper's volcano had seethed over. Yet he fought coolly, his determination made. The chance had offered; he would show the mate once and for all who was the better man. They smashed against the table, hurling it to one side as each strove for a fair blow.

There were some antiquated cutlases in a rack on the mast, with a native kris or two. The guns were kept in the main cabin, and in Sykes's quarters, a pistol for each of the white men, never used aboard the Mary.

The skipper's weight and push bore back the mate against the mast, and he grasped a Malay knife, curving, keen. His arm swept up, and the captain pounced upon his wrist, bending down with resistless force, down, and back, until the mate yelled with pain, and the weapon fell to the floor.

The skipper kicked it under the table with his heel, and sent in a slogging blow that caught the dodging mate high on the cheek, bringing a red flush that would soon turn to an angry bruise.

It was delivered with all his strength, backed by his weight, and it temporarily stunned Samson.

In a flash the captain's arms were about him, under his own, compressing his chest. He flogged and thrashed, but he was helpless in the grip that was strong and merciless as that of a bear. The strength oozed out of him. His ribs cracked, his lungs were constricted until] he could taste blood in his throat. Red waves of it rolled in front of him. The cuddy reeled.

He came to lying across the table, breath a pain, his limbs still pithless; the skipper standing by with folded arms, his breath even, his gaze sardonic.

“Get up and down to your bunk,” said Martin. “After this, perhaps you'll know that I'm master aboard this ship. I could have crushed you like an eggshell in the fist. Get out!”

The mate gathered himself together, and obeyed, his head still fuzzy with blood pressure, his knees wabbly. His brain at once shouted for revenge and bade him go cautiously.

He had met his master in fair fight, and he knew it. He slunk out of the cuddy like a whipped dog, with a snarl he took care the skipper should not see. Sere in soul and body, he finished his bottle in his bunk.

 

The heat had flattened out the sea as an iron presses linen. It lay unwrinkled, with the barkentine in the midst of it, motionless as a toy model glued to canvas. The horizon was a sharp line of purple against the lighter sky. No bird vexed the windless air.

Cleaving the surface of the water with barely a ripple, the simitar-shaped dorsals of two sharks kept patrol at the stern, passing from quarter to quarter, ranging ceaselessly after possible scraps of waste. The hatches and bulkhead doors were open, for ventilation.

Breakfast was a farce so far as eating was concerned, lacking even the pantomime of perfunctory performance. Samson did not appear. Neither Mary nor her aunt had caught any sounds of the fight, but both suspected that something of the sort had occurred. Their eyes met and exchanged agreement concerning the skipper's attitude.

He was undeniably sleepy, and announced his determination for a siesta. And he was also undeniably in a satisfied frame of mind. He even breathed like a man who has come up from close atmosphere to free air. And the two women had not discussed between themselves the previous night's incidents, yet, in their sex freemasonry, they traded semiconfidences.

It was the first mate's watch on deck, a perfunctory job under the circumstances, but none the less peremptory. He had opened a fresh bottle to aid him to ignore the bruise showing plainly on his cheek. To him it seemed to blazon the fact of his encounter with the skipper. He himself would have boasted of it to the girl, had he been in the skipper's shoes, and he could not convince himself that the captain had kept silence.

He resented the covert looks of the crew, and he found them numberless tasks. They obeyed them in silence. One order, given through Badoun, was the flushing of the decks every hour with seawater drawn from overside in buckets, hauled in by ropes.

In the cuddy, the skipper left for his cabin, to catch up his needed sleep. Miss Burton languidly asked for the punkah-boy, and took up her sewing. The girl was too restless for any repose, still bothered with her own problem. She was dressed in the lightest of her tropic outfit, and she wandered out on the deck.

The mate was the only white man in sight. He had his back turned to her, and kept it so, as if to avoid her. She sauntered around the mainmast to confront him casually, piqued by his attitude.

She was uncorseted, and the long curves and rounded swells of her almost perfect body were covered, rather than clothed, by the thin Madras of her gown, and the light silks beneath. She became aware of a quality in the attitude of the Malays that offended her. They never seemed deliberately to look at her, but she was continually conscious of glances shot from the corners of long-slitted lids, glances that leered, sweeping her from head to foot.

Once in a while she caught a confidential look pass between two of them, polishing brass or recoiling halyards, and felt that she was the subject. Once, as she paused by the rail; she noticed Badoun deliberately gloating over the sharp shadow of her profiled body on the deck.

It sickened her, made her a little afraid. This had never happened before. It was as if she had been living among men now suddenly revealed: as pit-devils, treacherous and lecherous beneath their light copper skins. Suddenly apprehension swept over her.

Had she suddenly. fallen in the estimation of the Malays? She knew how lax was their own morality, their polygamous practises; she knew how high they esteemed the virtue of the white woman. Did they sense something of what had passed between her and the mate, and, magnifying it, rate her as a light woman, forfeiting their respect?

She raised her head indignantly to see Badoun observing her, and stared him down with haughty pride, passing on to Samson's side.

The bruise instantly caught her eye, and fascinated her. The mate was dressed with unusual care. His fresh linen trousers were starched and even creased, thanks to Quong; his shoes had been newly pipe-clayed, his silk shirt was immaculate. His cummerbund sash was the vivid color of a pomegranate bloom.

He looked at the girl with swift suspicion. If she ignored his disfiguration, he told himself, the skipper had got in his own story concerning it. The suggestion that the captain had caused it did flash into her mind, but her lashes shut off any revelation as she slashed at the knot that puzzled the thread of her thought.

“Did you run into a spar?” she asked with a smile.

The mate's face cleared.

“Just that,” he answered. “Hardly improves my figurehead, does it?”

“It will soon go away.” She knew that he lied, and curiosity tore at her to know the details of the fight she was sure had happened. Happened on her account.

Four bells chimed, and Badoun gave an order. The men stopped their other work, and commenced flushing the deck, avoiding the immediate space about the girl and the mate. But one Malay was careless, and allowed the rim of his bucket to strike the rail as he inhauled. A little fountain of water sploshed up and wetted the girl's skirt. The man caught hastily at his pail, tilted it, and spilled all the contents, soaking the mate's immaculate shoes and the bottoms of trousers.

Samson choked back a curse on account of the girl, and then let loose the mental bile that had been accumulating since his quarrel with the skipper. His lips curled back, and he kicked viciously, expertly, with all his force at the Malay, sending him sprawling on the deck, springing after him and kicking him again, deliberately and foully—though this the girl did not guess. As the anguished wretch rolled on the planks the mate followed him up.

“You clumsy, yellow-pelted Mohammedan hound,” he said in a voice whose concentrated fury amazed the girl, unrealizing his long hours of brooding and drinking, “the next time I'll skin the hide from you!”

Her mind was set for some spontaneous outburst, knives flashing in rising mutiny, and she glanced about her for her best move. But no one appeared to have noticed the incident. The man got himself under control, and picked up his bucket, limping away to the farther rail while the mate stood by sneering.

“Yellow curs, that's what they are! And that's the only way to treat 'em. Looked for an explosion, didn't you? The skipper handles 'em like so much dynamite. Plain mud, that's what they are.”

For the first time she caught the taint of whisky on his breath. She was neither prepared to defend the skipper nor listen to any slur upon him, and she made the excuse of changing her gown to leave Samson and go below.

At tiffin Samson joined the first table. His mind was filled with revenges against the skipper, with the girl as the one best outlet through which he could achieve them. He attempted to hold her in conversation, hoping to annoy both the skipper and the spinster.

To his surprise the former opened up the talk and kept it going, none fluent, but persistent, giving the details of a trip of his ashore on Celebes as guest of a raja, hunting seladang bison from the pad of an elephant.

The mate attempted some cleverly sarcastic remarks, but the girl did not rise to them, and the skipper plowed on through his yarn unstirred. The meal over, the mate went below, and the two women soon followed, hoping for some sort of a doze in the privacy of their cabins, where superfluous clothing could be dispensed with.

The skipper smoked a cheroot in the cuddy, and then applied himself, despite the heat, to his hobby, the correction of charts of the Java, Flores, Banda, and Arafura Seas. Pinckney held the deck until the first dog-watch, when Samson would relieve him, from four until six.

At two o'clock Sykes came on deck to go fishing in the bows, not from much hope of getting any fish, welcome as they would be, but from sheer desperation. Pinckney joined him. The crew squatted about in such shadow as they could find. Evans was tinkering somewhere below decks.

“What kind of lingo are they jabbering in?” Pinckney asked Sykes. The Malays were in small groups about the decks, talking in low tones, with an animation unusual for such weather.

“Harsk me somethin' heasier,” replied Sykes. “I know. Malay pidgin an' some Bengalee, but I can't savvy that dialect. The whole bilin' of 'em are on deck, too, watch-below an' all.”

“Fo'c'sle must be a reg'lar furnace,” suggested Pinckney.

“I s'pose so.” The hot afternoon droned on without a flutter of canvas, without a puff of wind or the gathering of a cloud in the sky. In the cuddy the skipper found his moist hands interfering with his task, and stretched himself on a lounging-chair. Presently Miss Burton and her niece joined him, both pale, from the steadfast heat.

The punkah-boy was dismissed, for the disturbance of the heated air only increased discomfort. Blinds were drawn over the skylight, and the cuddy was too dusky for reading or work.

The two women lay on their rattan couches, silently hoping for a breeze, for rain, for any relief against the terrible oppression and temperature that seemed to drain their bodies to the point of exhaustion, relaxed, thoughtless.

Pinckney left Sykes to hand over the deck to the first mate, and then went back into the bows. They had caught three flying-fish, and believed the capture augured a change in the weather, besides promising a change of diet. Samson glanced aloft, sailor-fashion, and instantly noted that the clewlines of the main royal were hanging loose, as if the quarter-blocks had frayed them. There had been no wind to accomplish this, and he strode to the bows.

“The main-royal clewlines are loose, Pinckney,” he said. “Didn't you notice them?”

“No, I didn't,” answered Pinckney, nettled at his tone. “They were all right when I took the deck. “Chafed with the roll of the ship, I s'pose.”

“Might have,” admitted Samson, and ordered Badoun to send two men aloft to reeve fresh lines.

Mary Leigh came out of the cuddy, unable to bear its confinement any longer. The mate noticed her out of the tail of his eye, but affected not to do so as he watched the two Malays, climbing nimbly, one of them the man called Telak, the one whom he had kicked.

Badoun saw her. She felt his glance upon her, in a sort of compelling hypnosis. His eyes, usually as impassive as dull jet, showed smoldering sparks. They made her shiver. Her whole being was depressed, nervously apprehensive of something about to happen. Badoun, eyeing her covertly, seemed careless to mask a mood half sensuous, appraising, insulting. Yet there was nothing openly to resent. She moved on closer to Samson.

The two sailors had halted at the maintop, and shifted to the mainyard at the slings. The girl saw them peering down at the mate like resentful apes.

“The royal, the royal, you pair of jibbering orangs!” he suddenly bellowed up at them. “Blast your yellow hides, do you have to make me come up there and show you how to do it?”

Mary Leigh saw Badoun, the smoldering sparks in his eyes changed to flame, set his silver whistle, his serang's pipe, to his lips, and blow a shrill call. Instantly the two Malays dropped like cats out of the rigging, fairly upon the struggling mate. The crew, transformed from quiet sailors to Malays gone suddenly amok, came leaping from every direction.

They made no sound, but the astounded girl, held in a strange paralysis of inaction, saw the white roll of their eyes, the flash of their teeth as they grinned, the gleam of krises. She heard the mate's oath as he fought helplessly against his captors, she saw Badoun advancing toward her with the face of a devil!

She tried to scream, but her parched throat failed her. At last she forced from it a hoarse cry that, by some weird fantasy appeared to have been made by some else. The mate was being dragged forward. They were to starboard. She had a dim impression of Pinckney and Sykes springing from the bows, clubbing their way aft along the port side, the sight of their fighting hidden and the sound of it muffled by the screening canvas.

Badoun's arm reached out. She shrank back, galvanized into action, yet weak from terror and the swift precision with which the open mutiny had started. Again she screamed.

A great bulk leaped past her. It seemed as if the wind of its passing swept her to one side. Her faculties returned with a gasp of relief as she saw the skipper. His face was set with furious resolution, his forehead seemed made of stone plates beneath which his eyes flared like blued steel under the sun, the hard line of his jaw showed under his beard.

One blow from his left fist sent Badoun sprawling over the hatchway, collapsing into the slack of the mainsail, his knees caught at their bend by the boom.

Then, with a roar, the skipper sprang upon the men who were dragging off the mate. He had come weaponless from the cuddy, but he caught up a belaying-pin from the rail at the foot of the mainmast and smashed it down upon the skull of the nearer Malay. The man collapsed. The other let go of the mate, ducked under the skipper's blow, and ran in with his kris. The skipper bent his body, supple for all its weight, caught kris and forearm between his own left arm and his chest, and once more brought down the metal club.

He glanced over his shoulder. Badoun had got himself together again. Four Malays were closing in from the bows. There was a fight going on by the companionway.

“Get back to the cuddy, Mary!” shouted the skipper. “Quick—while we hold them off. Samson, get a pin!”

But Samson had already retreated, rushing past the girl, who stood undecided. The Malays charged. One of the stunned men was coming to. The odds were impossible. She saw Badoun on the hatchway ready to spring on the captain, and shrieked a warning.

“Back,” roared the skipper. His hand shot up and tilted a boat in its davits, clutching for an oar. He needed to lengthen his arm, the belaying-pin was no match for so many knives. He swept the stout ash about him as the girl at last obeyed him. Badoun got the thrust of the blade in his chest, and once more toppled, the rest, crowding aft, hesitating before the swing of the oar as the skipper charged, and then, still facing them, took great strides backward.

The girl was in the cuddy-door. Pinckney and Sykes had broken through their gauntlet with the penalty of flesh wounds from which both were bleeding. But they were hard pressed, and the skipper covered his retreat for the moment with his flail-like weapon. A shot came up the companionway. Instantly the Malays closed and secured the door, while Sykes and the second mate, the skipper last, gained the cuddy. The whole mad mêlée had lasted less than three minutes, and it left the crew in possession of the deck. Evans in the main cabin—the two women, the skipper, both the mates, and Sykes, shut up in the little cabin beneath the poop.

There were shutters to the skylight, shutters to the windows, placed for protection against Malay pirates when the barkentine was new to those seas. These they closed and made fast with bolts. The cuddy door was halved, Dutch-fashion, and it was also pierced, like the window shutters, with loop-holes for guns. But all the pistols, a riffle and a shotgun, were in the main and sleeping-cabins with Evans. He might defend himself with them, they were useless to the holders of the cuddy. The only light that now came in to them was through the square ports in the stern.

The skipper swiftly took cutlases from the rack about the mizzen, and laid them on the table, testing their edges and shaking his head at the result.

“They'll be at us with the axes,” he said. “We'll have to tackle 'em as they come in. Take your choice.” He selected his own, and swung it through the air, making the steel sing with the cleaving stroke. “Badly hurt?” he queried at Sykes and the second mate. Miss Burton had quietly started to do what she could for them, the girl assisting her. They tore strips from their white petticoats for bandages.

“Nothink to fuss habout,” said Sykes. “W'ot in 'ell started it?”

“They were after me,” said Samson. He was fiddling with the cutlases. In the dusk of the cuddy his brown face seemed a trifle gray. Mary Leigh noticed that his hand shook as he lifted a weapon. The skipper went to the door and glanced out through a loophole. The Malays were all jabbering amidships. All save the first man he had hit with the belaying-pin.

“Eleven to four of us,” he muttered, half to himself. “We can't count on Evans. They've got him out of it.”

“Is there any way to get into the main cabin through this?” asked the girl, tapping with her foot upon a trap, outlined beneath the cuddy matting.

“No,” answered the skipper. “Leads into the lazaretto. There's a bulkhead between that and the cabin. Locked with hasps that bolt clean through the teak. And the keys in my pocket. If any one could get through it 'ud be Evans, if he happened to think of it. And it 'ud take him an hour. They'd rush him. This thing will be settled before dark. If it isn't— I wonder what the devil they are up to?” he barked irritably.

“What about Quong?” asked the girl.

“You needn't worry about him. He's half Malay, anyway. If they force his hand he'll join. Here comes Badoun.”

---

CHAPTER IV.

“SO ENDS THIS DAY.”

HE had spoken with an eye fast to the loophole. His thoughts were gloomier than they showed in his voice. The Malays had got hold of axes. He feared an attack on the cuddy after dark. He feared that the crew might set fire to the ship, if resistance was too strenuous and costly to their side, leaving, then, in the boats. He feared the heat, thirst, hunger. He thought of a sortie, but to emerge through the cuddy-door would mean that they would be cut down by men who could stand beside the opening and hack at them. And, if the men were killed—what of the women? He thrust that lead aside, welcoming the sight of Badoun.

From somewhere the serang had produced a Malay sword. The skipper thought grimly of the motto—strip a Malay and you'll always find a kris. The crew were supposed to come aboard unarmed, but they had had plenty of opportunities to smuggle in their knives, and had, as usual, availed themselves of them.

With his sword in his hand, Badoun advanced aft, two of his men, carrying axes as well as their krises, close behind him. These he posted by the companion hatch, evidently to guard against any attempt from Evans to break through from below.

It was plain that Badoun was leader. The tindal ruled the men as arbiter of their own regulations, but Badoun was the fighting man. He glanced at the cuddy-door, where the gleam of the skipper's eye must have been visible. His face was cruel and confident. Opposite the door he stopped and hailed the skipper.

“Tuan, let me speak along of you. I wish you no harm. See.”

He laid sword and kris back of him on the hatchway, and stepped closer to the door.

“Stand back,” said the skipper to those in the cuddy. “I'm going to talk with him.”

He flung open the other half of the door.

“Now then, Badoun, what is the meaning of this? It's mutiny on the high seas. You'll hang for it.”

“I think not, Tuan.” Badoun spoke in musical sing-song, but there was menace in the tone—menace, and assurance. “We not want harm you, or ship. We want Samsoni. Suppose you give us him, all right, we take him. We go in boats. Go now, before wind come.

“Suppose you no give us Samsoni,” he went on, “then we kill all of you. We kill all the men. We kill all the women—after little while,” he added with an emphasis that made the two women shudder, and set the skipper's blood to boiling.”

“You talk like a foolish man, Suppose you kill, you hang. Always I have treated you right.” It was hard to get conviction into his words. He knew that if the Malays got clear in the boats it was not far to land, where the bush would swallow them. “Why do you want Mr. Samson?”

At that one of the men by the companion sprang forward. It was the one the mate had foully kicked. Even now he limped, and his face was convulsed with rage. He broke into a volley of Malay. The skipper stopped it with a bellowed command, backed by Badoun, who put his hand on his fellow's naked chest and pushed him away.

“You hear what he say?” said Badoun. “Better you give him up, Tuan. We sure get him. We kill all. I think perhaps we not kill women; we take along in boat. What you speak, Tuan?”

“No!” roared the skipper, and slammed the door. Sweat shone on his face, his eyes were troubled.

“Pretty soon two bells strike, Tuan,” persisted the serang. “Much better you change your mind before that time.”

The eyes of all of them swung to the cuddy clock. It was twenty minutes to three.

“Pinckney,” said the skipper curtly. “See if there is a sail in sight, or any sign of wind?” The second mate looked out through the after ports.

“Nothing,” he said simply.

Samson had turned to Sykes.

“What did he say?” he asked. His lips were dry, and he licked at them. The supercargo surveyed him contemptuously. His dislike of the mate boiled over.

“He says you kicked Telak, and they're goin' to carve the bloody 'eart out of yer, Unless we give you hup!”

“I gave you my orders about mistreating the men, Samson,” said the skipper accusingly. “Now you've brought us to a hard pass.”

There was silence in the cuddy, save for the suave ticking of the clock, beating out the seconds that lay between them and death—for the women, worse.

“Give im hup, I say,” said Sykes. The skipper frowned at him, but he paid no attention. “It's 'im or the rest of us,” went oft the supercargo. “And then,” he jerked his head at the two women. “Ne time to be mealy-mouthed. 'E did it. They've got us, sooner or later. Listen to 'em jabberin'.”

The Malays had evidently come aft, assembling outside the little cuddy.

“Between him and the women,” said Pinckney. “I votes him.”

The skipper looked from the mate to Mary Leigh. She was deathly pale, her eyes fixed on the mate. Then they shifted to him. But he could read nothing in them but dumb entreaty. Her aunt had taken up a kris from the rack, her face set in strained resolution.

Suddenly Samson broke down.

“My God!” he said, and the hand he held out shook like a leaf in the wind. “You're not going to give me up, to them? They wouldn't keep their word. They'd—Mary—you—you—?”

The skipper's face hardened at the Mary. He seemed to be waiting for a sign from the girl. But she, too, appeared to hold back for his decision: It was up to him, the commander. He knew Badoun, he felt certain that they would, at that moment, be satisfied with the body of the mate. Later—? His eyes roamed about the cabin. The hands of the clock had passed on to twelve minutes past five. Twelve minutes. His face became a carving of stone save for the almost imperceptible movement of his lips.

“We'll not give you up,” he said, and the contempt in his voice held the sting of a whip-lash. “White men don't work that way. Nor white women, I fancy.”

A glance came over the face of the girl. It was radiant as she gazed at the skipper. But he did not see it. He was opening the locked drawer of the cabin, taking from it a little case, that contained his drugs. As they watched him, fascinated, he took up with steady hand a vial half-filled with white pellets. Two of these he dropped into his palm.

“We've got a show,” he said. “If we take them by surprise. Samson, I suppose you are willing to fight for your life? You're in a corner?” The inference was plain in the scornful tone. Samson winced.

“I'll fight,” he said suddenly.

“All right. They are all on the main deck. We'll go out through those ports, over the taffrail to the poop. If they hear us—there's the end of it! It's three to one. I'll take you, Samson. Pinckney, you and Sykes take the port ladder. We'll take the starboard. On the word, we'll charge 'em. If we can throw the bolts off the companionway and hold off until Evans gets to us with a gun or me; we've won. If not—?”

He shrugged his shoulders and turned to the two women.

“Close those after-ports en we're through. Keep the cuddy closed. You can watch, if you want to. If they get us—put out your hands.”

They extended their palms. They trembled a little as the skipper put into each of them a pellet.

“Cyanide,” he said. “I don't need to tell you what to do. Nor when. You'll never know—” His deep voice faltered, and the sweat ran down his face like a stream. He took half a step toward Mary, and checked himself. “We've just got five minutes,” he said. “Out with you and go like snakes. I'll give the word. When they hear the cabin clock they'll break all hell loose. So, if we're to win out, we must get the jump on them.”

There were four of the stern ports, and each opened. inward. The four men sat on the sills, cutlases beneath their teeth. They reached up to the taffrail, hoisted themselves, feet on the frames. Then, with a spring and a flexing of muscles, they were up and gone, gliding over the rail to the deserted deck, where the idle wheel swung between spokes.

In the cuddy the two women, each with a pellet of death clutched in her palm, closed the windows. Beyond, the two sharks were trailing back and forth in the wake. The women looked at each other, blanched, listening for some sound above, watching the hands of the clock.

Two to starboard and two to port, the four white men writhed over the planks. At the break of the poop they rose to all-fours, still out of sight from below. A shot was heard. Evans was firing at random through the main skylight. If he would understand when they opened the companion, if he had guns ready, they might win through.

Five chiming strokes sounded from beneath them, blending with fainter tinkles from the clock in the main cabin. There was a crash of wood under an ax blow. The skipper leaped to his feet, cutlass gripped.

“Now!” he yelled, and vaulted the poop rail while the rest bounded down the ladders.

There was a moment or two of scythe-like strokes as the cutlases rose and fell. The Malays, taken by utter surprise, massed confusedly. The skipper won through to the companion and backed to it, his left hand fumbling for the bolts while he exchanged blows with Badoun, fighting like a disappointed fiend.

“Evans!” he roared. And his great bass, that could top a gale, boomed vibrant. “Up! With the guns!”

Badoun's sword swept in a feinting circle about the skipper's clumsier weapon. But the captain's fury matched the Malay's speed. His cutlas thrust aside the steel, and, as the serang leaped back, the skipper lunged. The cutlas blade entered Badoun's chest, deep, with the blood spurting as the Malay reeled. And the bolts had been slipped.

Behind the skipper the companion doors slid back, a pistol barked, Telak fell writhing, Evans leaped out, thrusting a revolver into the skipper's ready hand, handing a shotgun at Sykes. Pinckney stooped and gathered up another pistol that lay on the top of the ladder.

The crew fell back at the fall of Badoun and Telak. The shot, the sight of the guns, swept the madness from their brains as a broom clears cobwebs. They knew the fight was lost.

“For'ard with ye!” shouted the skipper. “Down to the foc'sl'e! Drop your knives!”

They fled in a huddle, leaving Badoun gasping his last, Telak on his face, motionless. As they ran they dropped the krises. The skipper herded them, with Pinckney and Evans, fastening the forecastle hatch above them. Sykes turned to the cuddy door, now opening.

“We'll work the ship to Macassar ourselves,” said the skipper. They can stay there. They'll swing for this, the last one of them.”

“Short and sweet that was,” said the panting Sykes to the women. “Did you see the skipper? A man-tamer, that's what he is. But it was a bit of a close shave, at that.”

He flung himself, panting, into a chair, and held out this wrist to the elder woman.

“The bandage shifted,” he said. “D' yer mind fixin' it?”

Mary Leigh stepped to the door. Her mind was clearing slowly from the tragedy that had deadened it. She saw Samson, standing over the fallen Telak, and her glance passed on to where the skipper was coming aft again, big, burly, shouldering along on the deck that he had won. A great light shone in her eyes.

Suddenly Samson, who had been watching her, reckoned the blankness of her gaze as it had ignored him, knowing why it had suddenly become brilliant, kicked savagely at Telak. Perhaps the Malay, clinging to revenge in the face of death, had been shamming, waiting his chance with the unquenchable patience of his kind.

His face turned from the planks, one hand shot out like the flung coil of a serpent, it clutched the mate's ankle, dragged him down with a frenzied jerk. In the other hand a kris rose and fell once. Then Telak's arms dropped with a thud, his twisting features stilled and grayed. And Samson, blood spouting from below his groin, strove to drag himself away.

 

The barkentine was headed into the sunset, flowing in sheets of crimson splendor, clouds moving across the deeper glare like smoke. Into the wind she forged while the eastern sky flowed red, and everywhere, save where the dazzle of the sun played, the sea ran deepest-blue with a hint of glowing foam in the crests.

Mary Leigh was alone with the skipper in the cuddy. Pinckney held the wheel. The course was set for Macassar. Quong had come out of his galley, deprecatory.

“No good for me,” he said. “Me cookee, no good for fight. If I no mixee, mebbe they let me alone. Now evellything allee lightee.”

Badoun and Telak had gone to the sharks. The mutineers, secured below the hatch, would be delivered over to justice within twenty-four hours. Sykes and Evans acted as the working crew for the diminished sailspread. Samson was in his bunk, with Miss Burton tending him. The skipper had just come from patching him up.

“He is not going to die, unless there is blood-poisoning,” said the skipper. “We'll have him in hospital this time to-morrow. This breeze is going to hold.”

He did not look at the girl, though he felt her gaze compelling him. He cleared the table of two cutlases, setting them in place in the rack.

“You had better turn in,” he said. “It has been a strenuous day. You needn't worry about Samson. He'll get well.”

“I'm not bothering about him,” she said, and the trembling quality of her voice brought the skipper face to face with her, “He doesn't matter,” she went on, and her face was the hue of the afterglow. Her eyes as sparkling as the crystal facets of the waves. “Nothing matters—except you!”

The skipper's pent-up passion overflowed as he swept her into his arms, holding her fiercely.

“You mean that?” he asked hoarsely. She answered him with her lips. Presently he felt her relax in his arms with a sigh.

“I'm hurting you,” he said. She smiled up at him.

“Do,” she said. “I want you to. What is it, John, you wrote in your log, after the day's-record?”

He replied wonderingly:

“So ends this day?”

“That's it. So ends this day. And every other day. Like this.”

(The end.)