The door of the next cabin slammed.
Whether or not it was the wind, they could not tell. Warren tore open the door of his state-room, the sticking-plaster on his head going before like a banner, and lurched into the passage. Plunging out after Valvick's big figure, Morgan seized the handrail in the passage just in time to steady himself as the ship plunged once more. The door opening out on C deck was closing again.
Either he had been too quick for them or he had been frightened away. With a rather satiric wink, the rubber edging of the door caught and contracted; the gilt piston closed softly. Over the tortured wrenching and bone-cracking of the woodwork, when the whole ship seemed to be heeling over down a colossal chute, Warren let out a howl and charged for the door. The inrush of wind smashed over them as he got it open; they were whirled sideways in the trough of the wave, and the wind carried away something Captain Valvick was crying, about "be careful," and "hold de rail," and "close to water line."
The spray took Morgan in the face as he clambered out into darkness. Between spray and bellowing wind, he was momentarily blind. The wind cut through him with paralysing chill, and his foot slipped on the wet iron plates. A whistle and drumming went by in the halloo of the blast. A few lights from high up in the ship gleamed out across a darkness shot with ghostly white. The lights shone on creaming white flickers; on a curl of grey-black swell that shone like grained wood, and then a mist of spray as the wet deck tilted sickeningly and the crash of water rose high in a spectral mane. Morgan seized at the bulkhead rail, steadied himself, and shaded his eyes.
They were on the windward side. D deck was long, rather narrow, and very dimly lighted. He saw it go up before them on the rise — and he saw their man. A little way ahead, not holding to the rail, but, head down, a figure was hurrying towards the bows. Even in the dull yellow flicker in the roof they could see that this figure carried something under its arm. And this was a circular black box, flattish, and about ten inches in diameter…
"Steady, boys!" said Warren, exultantly, and flapped against the rail. "Steady, boys! Here we go down again. Hang on!" He stabbed his finger ahead. "And there's the son-of-a—"
The rest of the sentence was lost, although he seemed to keep on speaking. They were after him. Far ahead,
Morgan could see the lamp on the tall foremast swing up, rear, and swerve like a diver. He thought (and thinks to this day) that they did not so much run down that deck as hook their elbows to the rail and sail down it like a stupendous water-chute. They were going so fast, in fact, that he wondered whether they could stop in time, or whether they would go straight at the big enclosure of glass that protected the fore part of the deck from the wind's full violence. Their quarry heard them now. He had reached the turn of the deck by the glass enclosure when he heard the clatter of pursuit; he was almost in darkness, and he whirled round towards them. Juggled on flying water, the liner crested another rise…
"Haaa!" screamed Warren, and charged.
To say that Warren hit the man would be a powerful understatement. Morgan afterwards wondered why that crack did not jar the other's head loose from his spine. Warren landed on his quarry's jaw, with the weight of his own thirteen stone and the catapult-start of the Atlantic Ocean behind. It was the most terrific, reverberating smack since Mr. William Henry Harrison Dempsey pasted Mr. Luis Angel Firpo clean over the ropes into the newspapermen's laps; and it is to be recorded that, when the other hit the glass enclosure, he bounced. Warren did not afterwards even give him time to fall. "You'll go around smacking people with a blackjack, will you?" he demanded — a purely rhetorical question. "You'll come into a guy's cabin, hey! and crack him one with a lead pipe? Oh, you will, will you?" inquired Mr. Warren, and waded in.