It required but one keen glance over the side to prove the fact, and now, after one staggering moment of unbelief, the truth flashed upon the mate. The mystery of those gnawing rats, too, was clear.
"You dirty swine!" he screamed at the schooner. "You and your crook of a skipper'll pay for this!"
He snatched up a trailing hawser, saw the ends which had been cut through strand by strand, and with a grasp of the situation that had been better applied earlier, he ran aft, shouting to his crew as he ran:
"Loose a jib and hoist it! Lively! You, Blunt, give her a sheer with the wheel—across the river—that's you."
Sarcastic mirth murmured aboard the schooner, once more fading into a blur; but Jerry Rolfe had his plan, and as the forward canvas rattled up the stay, and the vessel slued across the current, drawing in for the farther shore, he shook his fist at the Padang and growled:
"Cut me adrift and scuttle me, will ye? And, by Hokey, you stay where you are until this ship's afloat again!"
That was his plan, and it worked like a charm. When she had left the schooner a hundred yards up the river, the Barang stuck her nose into the soft mud, slid greasily forward, shuddered and stopped; and every minute she sank deeper, until in ten minutes she stood upright and firm, planted snugly in the river bottom, fair across the channel, leaving no passage fore or aft for anything of bigger craft than a canoe or ship's boat. And after a silence that might almost be felt, uneasy voices began to sound aboard the schooner, until a chorus of furious howlings announced the discovery of a sad miscarriage of an unseamanly trick.
"That's where they get theirs!" chuckled Rolfe, listening rapturously, forgetting for the moment his own sorry plight.
"My respecks, sir. You 'm all the mustard in the sangwidge!" Bill Blunt rumbled in grinning admiration.
The decks were almost awash, and the holds and cabins were full of muddy water, but aboard the Barang there was gratification mixed with the mate's anger, for without a doubt the schooner was shut in as completely as if she were in dry-dock with the gates closed at low tide. In truth it was but fair reprisal for the trick played on Leyden's vessel by Barry in Surabaya; but Jerry Rolfe had not been aware of that exploit, and this last coup was to him simply a piece of bald wickedness, swiftly turned against the perpetrators.