“I could kill them for a greater crime than that,” his port captain reminded him. “Didn't they try twice to sink us without warning? Damn them! They're forty fathoms outside the law this minute.”
CHAPTER LIII
For the first time in his life Cappy Ricks was in financial and physical danger coincidently. Old he was, and a landlubber, for all his courtesy title; but in his veins there coursed the blood of a long line of fighting ancestors. It occurred to him now that in all his life he had never cried “Enough;” that always, when cornered and presumably beaten, he had gone into executive session with himself and, fox that he was, schemed a way out. In this supreme moment there came to him now the words of the gallant Lawrence: “Don't give up the ship!” They inspired him; his agile old brain, benumbed by the shock of the exciting events of the last quarter of an hour, threw off its paralysis; his little five-feet-four body thrilled with the impact of a sudden brilliant idea.
“I have it!” he piped. “By the Holy Pink-Toed Prophet, it might be done! Mike, the submarine lies to starboard. Tell the mate to lower the port gangway.”
Murphy ran out on the end of the bridge and bawled the order. Then he came back, and he and Terence and Cappy Ricks put their heads together while in brief, illuminating sentences Cappy Ricks unfolded the fruit of his genius.
“Tell me,” he pleaded when he had finished, “is that scheme practicable?”
“It might be done, sir,” Mike Murphy assented.
“I'll thry anything the wanst,” Terry Reardon almost barked.