As the giant sprang toward him. Nick stooped and darted past his guard, under his extended arms, and he seized him around his massive body in a grip as powerful as the giant himself could have exerted. They were oddly matched, these two. The giant towered over the detective like a Goliath over a David. The scene had the appearance of a full-grown man fighting with a half-grown boy.
But the giant was, nevertheless, lifted bodily from his feet, and he hung there, struggling vainly to touch his toes or his heels to the deck, for, like certain animals we know about, his defensive powers were fruitless if he could not get his feet to the ground.
He bellowed like a bull at first, until the pressure of Nick’s powerful arms squeezed him into silence. He swung his arms about him like the blades of a windmill, and he kicked frantically with his feet in an effort to bring the detective down. His huge, animallike face turned red, then purple, then black. Blood oozed from his nostrils and mouth; and then, like the snapping of a whip in the distance, his ribs cracked under the awful pressure which Nick put upon them.
Instantly his hold upon the detective relaxed; his flaying arms dropped to his sides, useless; he gasped, and then, as Nick released him, he fell in a heap to the floor of the cabin, uttering howl after howl of rage and anguish. Like all brutes of gigantic strength, once conquered, he could fight no more, and he remained where he had fallen, moaning, helpless, whipped—and whipped into a bleeding mass of flesh by the mere pressure of the great detective’s muscular arms.
Then Nick turned like a flash toward the others.
Five of the attacking party were down and out, laid where they were by the hammering fists of Maxwell Kane and Chick, for there had been no time or opportunity to make use of their revolvers, which happened to be inside their pockets when the onslaught occurred. Four more men were pressing the two fighters into one corner of the cabin, and were almost at the point of getting the upper hand of them, when Nick rushed to their assistance.
But the fighting powers of the pirates was short-lived after that happened.
Nick Carter’s fist caught one of them under the ear; another went down from a blow against the side of his jaw; a third was knocked squarely into Chick’s arms by a kick in the small of his back from Nick’s foot, and the fourth, dismayed by what was happening around him, lost his head just long enough to give Kane an opening, and he received a well-directed blow on the end of his nose which finished him.
The fight was over, and there was no remnant of one left in any of the men who had entered that cabin so bravely to capture Nick Carter and his friends. There had been ten in all, against three; but now those ten men were bound and speedily rendered helpless, and the three stood over them, comparatively uninjured.
It is true that Kane wore a discolored lump on his right cheek, and that Chick was nursing the knuckles of his right hand tenderly; but otherwise they were uninjured.