He heard a harsh chatter—voices crying out in a foreign tongue. He heard a great booming voice that stirred memory. He heard a pistol-shot. He heard Ruth's voice, raised in a sharp, terror-stricken cry:
"Martin—Billy—Martin! Oh, help!"
The scream galvanized Martin to action. She was calling him!
He struggled to arise, got upon his knees, reached upward and grasped a belaying-pin in the rail above. Clutching the pin, he drew himself erect.
He swayed drunkenly for a moment, still dizzied by his fall. The pandemonium of a moment agone was stilled. Ruth did not cry out again, but voices came from aft. The belaying-pin he grasped was loose in its hole and unencumbered by rope. Quite without reasoning, Martin drew it out, and, grasping it clublike, lurched aft.
Twice during his headlong flight toward the cabin, hands reached out of the darkness to stay him. And twice the stout, oaken club he wielded impacted against human skulls, and men dropped in their tracks.
Martin burst out of the gloom into the small half-circle of half light that came from the now open alleyway door. He rushed through, into the cabin.
He had time but for a glimpse of the scene in the cabin. One whirling glance that took in the scattered company—the bedraggled Japanese, Captain Dabney lying face down across the threshold of his room, his white hair bloodied, Wild Bob Carew lifting a startled face. And Carew was holding a squirming, fighting Ruth in his arms!
Martin hardly checked the stride of his entrance. He flung himself toward the man who held his woman, and his club cracked upon another skull.
A man hurtled against him and drove him against the wall. He saw Carew fall, and Ruth spill free of the encircling arms.