Above the tumult of the shamal outside a blow sounded suddenly, close by his head. A plank in the cabin wall split suddenly, wavered, and was dragged out of sight. And then a deep-toned rumbling noise reached McGovern’s ears and he saw a battered, purpled, infuriated eye gazing in at him. The Skipper reached in his fist and dropped a particularly greasy revolver upon McGovern’s bunk. An instant later his pudgy fist came in with a handful of shells. He dropped them and replaced his eye to the opening.
“Skipper!” said McGovern fervently. “I misjudged ye, man! I apologize! We’ll be runnin’ out an’ fightin’ our way to a sea-cock an’ swamp the old tub? ’Tis the only thing we can do. There’s a hundred an’ fifty of these pirates on board, an’ we’ve no hope of anything more than drowning ’em.”
The Skipper rumbled more loudly. It was close to a roar. And it was an exasperated negative. His expression was baleful and enraged. The rumbling continued to the point of articulation. And at last the Skipper bellowed.
“No!”
He withdrew his eye savagely. McGovern waited, dismally trying to discover some hope of escape for the two of them. There was none. A hundred and fifty Moslems, armed to the teeth, and two white men with revolvers. There was no chance whatever.
“But,” said McGovern without conviction, “the Skipper knows best.”
He peered into the Skipper’s cabin. It had been looted as thoroughly as his own. Even the sheets had been taken from the bunk. Of all the Skipper’s possessions, the only thing remaining was a fair-sized brass-bound box that McGovern remembered as containing the elements of the Skipper’s Christmas dinner, when Christmas should come about. It had been emptied, now. A tinned plum-pudding, a tin of Danish butter, Devon sausages with a large picture of a pig on the label, and two monster Westphalian hams lay on the floor beside it. That explained the security of the box. No Moslem would touch its contents or have any use for a box so thoroughly defiled. If a couple of extra revolvers and a supply of shells were underneath the pork, they were quite safe from looting. No True Believer would look underneath the accursed pork.
The Skipper had his nose pressed to the glass of the porthole. He was watching for something which was included in some incredible scheme of his. McGovern racked his brain for an inkling of it, failed altogether to see any possibility whatever, and uncertainly followed suit. Maybe the Skipper knew best, but he doubted it.
For two solid hours the Kingston went wallowing before the wind. She was a disgrace of a tramp to begin with. Rust-streaked funnel awry, unpainted boats unkempt, her hull a fungoid red from rust with peeling strips of paint dangling from her upper plates, she was a disreputable ship to look at anyhow. But now, with the red-scimitar flag of Abu Nakhl floating at her masthead, with becloaked, bewhiskered and unwashed sons of the Prophet crowded about her decks, with villainous small brass cannon lashed to her forward and after-decks and seagreen water pouring from her scuppers, she was worse than disreputable. She was a disgrace to the high seas. She was a disgrace even to the Persian Gulf.