At the end of the second hour, the wind lessened a little. Simultaneously the sea rose to new heights, plainly betokening shoal water underneath. The waves, hitherto racing monsters, showed a tendency to break and they bounced the Kingston about outrageously. She went wallowing on through them, rolling until her side-rails went under and until the maniacs who manned her had new evidence of the favor of Allah in each successive recovery.
Then a howl went up from her decks, where men clung to rails and stanchions and their weapons. A wild howl of joy. Off to starboard a dim mass showed through the mist, a batil of the pearling fleet, riding at long anchor with a rag of sail up and men pouring oil over her bows.
The Kingston came around in a fashion to turn a seaman’s hair gray. As she swung about in the momentary trough between two monster, curling seas, McGovern turned pale and hung on instinctively. As the following sea lifted her up again and held her balanced for one precarious instant atop a surging wall of water where the full blast of the shamal smote on her, he blinked his eyes. He could feel her going over——
And she sank abruptly into the next trough and came bubbling upright just in time to lurch heavily into the succeeding wave, waver precariously on its summit, and then plunge down one more with a wild uproar as her screw raced in midair.
“M-my God!” said McGovern shakily. “Allah is watching!”
The pearling-boat drifted slowly into sight through the porthole—a clumsy, ungainly craft with a huge mainmast from which a lateen sail would be spread, and a smaller lateen mizzen aft. It had a long anchor-cable out, its decks suddenly swarming with men in spite of the washing seas when the crimson-scimitar flag at the Kingston’s masthead was made out. The batil was rolling and pitching at the end of her anchor-cable. With her heavy mast and heavier lateen boom, it seemed as if at any instant the sticks should roll out of her. And then the Kingston, spouting green water from her scuppers, burying her squat bow in every sea, nosed alongside while her decks were black with howling, weapon-waving men.
The oil that had been poured over the pearler’s bows was providential. The gunwale of the pearler crashed against the Kingston’s side, and there was a swarming and leaping of yelling men down. In seconds the deck of the batil was a mass of stabbing, battling figures. Firearms flashed with futile poppings in the shamal’s roar. Men, locked in death-grips, rolled over and over on the decks that were flooded with raging seas. Swords glittered brightly, or were dulled with red. And the Kingston, held as close alongside as a wild-eyed steersman dared, crashed again against the pearler’s side and a second wave of Abu Nakhl’s cutthroats went howling down to her deck.
The steamer drew off a little, then. Even a crazy man could see that to linger close was suicide. She drew off fifty yards or more and wallowed and plunged like a mad thing while the fighting went on, on the pearler.
