Captain Dunlap declared that this berth was good enough for him, that he would drop his anchor right there, and calling a waiter proceeded to order everything on the menu for dinner, telling the waiter to serve it where they were and serve slowly so that they might enjoy a rambling conversation while they dined.
Eating, drinking, talking and smoking, the chums of boyhood days sat for hours, until the streets became, as was the veranda, almost deserted. Suddenly in an interval of silence as they puffed their cigars, a piercing scream disturbed the quiet of the street below. Again and again was the cry repeated in an agonized female voice.
Both men sprang to their feet and peered along the dark avenue that ran toward the bay. About a block away they discerned just within the outer circle of light cast by an electric burner a struggling mass of men. At the instant that Jack and Tom discovered whence came the cries, a figure broke from the crowd and ran screaming through the illuminated spot on the avenue pursued by a half dozen men wearing the Russian naval uniform. The pursued figure was that of a half nude female.
With an angry growl, Jack Dunlap placed one hand on the low railing around the veranda and cleared it at a bound, landing on the sidewalk below, he broke into a run, and dashed toward the group of men under the electric light, who were struggling with the person whom they had pursued and recaptured.
“The flag follows trade in this case,” cried Maxon, who would joke even on his death-bed, as he, too, sprang to the pavement and raced after Jack.
The brutal Finnish sailors of the Russian man-of-war in Manila Bay swore to their mess-mates that ten gigantic Yankees had fallen upon them and taken away the Malay girl. They thus accounted for their broken noses and discolored optics.
Truth is, that it was a rush; the working of four well-trained Yankee arms like the piston rods of a high-speed engine. Outraged American manhood and old Aryan courage against the spirit of brutal lustfulness, ignorance and race inferiority.
“I say, Jack,” cried out Maxon as he raised his face from the basin in which he had been bathing a bruise, “Why don’t you go in for the P.R. championship? You must be a sweet skipper for a crew to go rusty with! Why, Matey, you had the whole gang going before I even reached you. Look here, sonny, you are just hell and a hurricane in a shindy of that kind.”
“Well, I tell you, Tom,” called Jack from the next room, where, seated on the edge of the bed, he was binding a handkerchief around the bleeding knuckles of his left hand.