McGovern sat down suddenly. He saw the point now. The Kingston’s anchor hopelessly caught in the mass of cordage and chains about the bowsprit of the batil, with the full strain of a tow against it, could not be freed except by the hacking away of the whole bow and the immediate swamping of the batil. The Skipper was at the wheel of the Kingston. The late captors of the two white men were isolated on the pearling-boat in tow. They had to go where the Kingston took them.
“My God!” said McGovern piously.
And he made haste to the engine room, to be ready to argue gently with the remaining members of the stokehold crew with the revolver Captain Grover had given him. Half an hour later, when someone came up from the stokehold to find out why the raid took so long to execute, or perhaps to estimate the loot, he got no farther than the stokehold ladder. There he found himself looking into the muzzle of McGovern’s weapon and saw McGovern smiling sweetly at him. He saw, further, a firehose propped to sweep down into the stokehold, the said firehose being coupled to a pipe full of excessively live steam.
“Scum o’ the earth,” said McGovern tenderly, “get back an’ to work! If yon steam-gauge drops below a hundred an’ fifty, I’ll gie you an’ your friends below a good fifty pounds o’t. Get!”
“Well, sir,” said McGovern hopefully, and admiringly, “since the Kingston’s confiscated as a pirate ship an’ sold to ye at auction for no more than ten per centum o’ the reward paid for Abu Nakhl an’ his fellow pirates, might I take up a matter I mentioned once. before?”
Captain Grover glared at him. The Kingston, docked in Aden, was being painted resplendently under his eyes.
“I’m referrin’, sir,” said McGovern anxiously, “to Molly. She said, sir, that she’d marry me if ye had no objection to the match. An’ I was junior engineer on the Glenarvon Castle, sir, which is not so bad for my age.”
The Skipper rumbled in his chest. The rumbling grew louder.