The Devil's Admiral

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

Now, it was all very well for Captain Riggs and me to sit down there in the forecastle of the Kut Sang and consider ways and means of saving ourselves and the steamer from the Devil's Admiral; but, although we made many plans, we had to drop them all. There was no way out of the place except through the scuttle, and we worked at that and schemed about it; but the wooden frame was bound inside with steel ribs, and on the outside with chains, and we had no tools equal to the task. Nothing but a jack-screw could wrench the covering from the deck.

When the starboard ports turned gray with the light of morning we had given up. There was nothing to do but wait for something to happen, and all we could foresee was our doom in the vessel.

The sea had calmed, and Captain Riggs unscrewed one of the ports and looked out just as the sun popped up over the hills of the Philippine coast.

"Land!" shouted Captain Riggs, as he opened the port, and I climbed up on the bunks and opened a port for myself. "That's the Zambales coast of Luzon, and they have been making a good easting all night; but we are running north now—see that point ahead? It's really an island—the Little Sister, I am sure—and Dasol Bay lies to the north up the channel between the island and the mainland. He's running to get into that channel behind the island and scuttle her there—he knows his business."

In a few minutes the island stood clear of the coast, and I could make it out, low and green and fuzzy, with a rim of white sand running back to the fringe of the jungle and a ruffle of combers on the shingle. We could hear the boom of the waves ashore, beating at the base of the barren brown hills of the coast.

"He's well off the track of the steamers here," said Riggs, "but he won't delay much longer now, unless he can get in behind the island and then he can take his own time, because he can pick up a sail before he is sighted through the ends of the channel. That island caps a little bay, and he'll be snug as a bug in a rug to do his work. Let's have a look on deck and see what's up."

Rajah leaped out of his bunk, and, after looking around for a minute in confusion at his strange quarters, drank the water we had saved for him in the pannikin, and then put his face to a port-hole and surveyed the land.

I took the lead up the companion with the pistol ready, hoping that one of the pirates might be close to the tiny slit I had cut in the board and would offer a target. I applied my eye to the hole.

The Rev. Luther Meeker, still in his suit of duck and pongee shirt and battered pith helmet, just as I had seen him on the mole in Manila, was pacing the bridge in the calm, commanding way that marks the man accustomed to command. He was puffing contentedly at a cigar, and there was something amusing in the manner in which he cocked his head to one side to survey the sea and then the land with a critical eye.

From side to side he tramped, swinging on his heel at each end of the bridge like a grenadier sentry, and giving Petrak, who had the wheel, a stern look as he passed. Buckrow was at the port end of the bridge, with a glass to his eyes scanning the rim of the sea; but Meeker, or Thirkle, kept aloof from his men, and he might well have been an admiral on the bridge of his flagship—the Devil's Admiral, indeed!