A knife flicked past his ear and with one accord the combined engine room and stokehold crews fell upon him. The slicebar landed once, with a satisfying thud. After that, mutiny had pretty much its way. McGovern, fighting in a berserk wrath, landed blows and took them. Once, rolling on his back with a dozen men clinging to him, he saw a bearded face peering down the ladder he had descended. Then he managed to get both legs free and kicked gloriously, to the accompaniment of anguished howls, until somebody landed on his head with a spanner.
He woke up possibly five minutes later. Hardly more, because men were still sitting on him. One man, in fact, was sitting on his head and McGovern’s first conscious effort was to sink his teeth in him. The man arose with a yell, and McGovern spat.
“Now,” he raged, “go ahead an’ knife me an’ be damned to you!”
He did not know what the mutiny was about. There had been no trouble on the voyage. He and the Skipper were delivering the newly sold Kingston to her new owner, the Sheik Abu Nakhl of Ras-el-Kasr. The Skipper was in the depths of despair at the final fate of his ship. McGovern was hopeful of at last being able to go back to England and marry Molly Grover, the Skipper’s daughter. But this mutiny seemed to suggest that the Sheik Abu Nakhl had other plans for him.
“Why don’t ye knife me?” demanded McGovern, raging. “Go ahead! I’m helpless enough! But if I’d had a gun——”
“Please, sar,” said a plaintive voice. “The Sheik Abu Nakhl he give orders you shall not be kill.”
A woebegone member of the stokehold crew, a man McGovern had noticed before was a Persian and not an Arab like the rest, was spitting blood from where a tooth was missing and interpreting at the apparent order of the bearded man above.
“He did, eh?” said McGovern savagely. “An’ why was he so kind?”
“He intend, sar,” said the woebegone little Persian dismally, “he intend to run this ship as pirate to loot the pearling fleet, sar. He want you alive, sar, to fixe engines if they break.”