He clenched his fists. Despite the hairy arms that clutched him, he thought he had the ghost of a chance to grab one of the weapons that bristled in the sash of the man on his right.
But the Skipper bellowed suddenly. It was not articulate, but it was profane and it was enraged and it was definitely a command. He glared at McGovern as upon a previous occasion he had glared at a young man who came to announce that he was Molly Grover’s accepted suitor.
McGovern stared at him. The fine recklessness that had possessed him evaporated.
“Oh, verra well,” he said sulkily. “Molly says the Skipper knows best. I’ll turn pirate wi’ the rest of ye. But I’d much rather be an honorable corpse.”
Abu Nakhl waited indifferently until the little Persian translated. Then he nodded his head negligently and McGovern was dragged from the chartroom and chucked bodily into his own looted cabin again. A whiskery pirate with a sashful of weapons squatted down outside his door.
Out of his cabin porthole, three days later, McGovern could see the shore. It was low and sandy and bare, and the twin minarets of a mosque showed far behind the Kingston, and there was a patch of mud houses and the inevitable towers of the local sheik’s fortress.
The Kingston lay at anchor, baking. McGovern fanned himself and sweated. A day’s run from Ras-el-Kasr, the old ship had been at anchor for two days, now, and in that time McGovern had not stirred from his cabin, nor had a guard stirred from before his door. He had heard the Skipper moving about in the adjoining cabin, but McGovern made no attempt to communicate with him. Thinking over the fact that the Skipper had bellowed him into making terms with a damned pirate, McGovern had grown furious. Now he only waited for a chance to make clear his withdrawal from that compact.
In the meantime he lay on his bunk, sweating and cursing wearily, when he could summon energy for words. The whole ship was quiet. Some holy individual was intoning the Koran while waiting for his opportunity to loot. Somebody else was honing a weapon. There was guttural talk, and the sound of an indolent game being played somewhere, and the gentle slapping of waves against the Kingston’s rusty plates.