Just in time, too! For all his watchful care, Li Fu had been taken unawares, one of the lascars gripping him in both arms, the other with kris upraised for the blow. Barnes was in upon them unseen, and struck down the man with the kris. The other lascar leaped away, gained the far door of the chart-house—and ran into the arms of Hi John. Something happened there. Steel flashed and a man gasped; the lascar slipped to the deck quietly.
"You two men watch the ladders!" snapped Barnes. "When you hear me call, come to the boat."
Revolvers out, each quartermaster took one of the ladders. Barnes turned and ran aft along the deck at top speed, disregarding the low call that the two women sent after him as he passed the boat. He was listening desperately for sounds from below. They came to him, came all in a jumble that his brain sorted out mechanically. First came a jarring wrench that shook the whole ship. Then the engines stopped. Whatever Hi John had done, the work was effective. And at the same instant the night was split by a sudden cry.
"Allah! Allah——"
Then the screaming of the wireless man was cut very short. An oath of desperation on his lips, Jim Barnes gained the small after ladder that led to the stern of the main deck. From below him burst a storm of cries; the shriek of a woman, the staccato yells of men, and a thin, shrill wail that maddened him. He dropped to the deck below, and found himself in the midst of an inferno, clearly illumined by the deck-lights.
Abdullah lay across his water-pipe, stabbed in the back. Nearby was his eldest child, also stabbed, and two lascars were fighting to take another child from the arms of its dying mother. Barnes saw only this much, and then began to fire. He forgot everything but the horror in front of him, and only laughed when several of the lascars began to converge on him.
A shot rang out from one of the forward cabins. Barnes, seizing the child, thrust him up the ladder and then swung about to meet three lascars plunging at him. He shot the first and second, ducked the kris-swing of the third, then tripped the man and shot him as he fell. Then he plunged for the nearest cabin, whence came screams.
Just what happened next is something of which Jim Barnes never speaks. The orders of Lim Tock, to make a clean sweep of Abdullah's family, were being followed to the letter. Barnes was in the cabin for fully a minute—which, just then, was a very long space of time.
By the time he emerged, much had happened. There was a crashing and smashing from the length of the cabins as the doors were battered in. From the bridge, a spatter of revolver shots; and, from below, more shots followed by the wild scream of the old chief as he reached the deck—a scream of half rage, half agony. He died at the rail, trailing blood across the deck, in his fist a blood-spattered spanner. After him, the Chinese stokers poured up to the deck and scattered for loot.
Jim Barnes came out of the cabin, thrusting a dead lascar ahead of him. About his neck clung one of Abdullah's daughters, and under his left arm was another. From the passage leaped a stoker, whom Barnes shot. Then, at the ladder, he urged the two little girls upward to join their brother above.