“We will hoist ye into a bunk, Jack. Oh, but you are the jewel of a fightin’ man! I hope ye were not hurt bad.”
“Nothing to speak of, sir, but my wind isn’t what it was,” panted Gorham. “Better look after the nigger first. I didn’t plan to kill him.”
The chief engineer was dragging the hose aft with the praiseworthy intention of washing down the combatants, and the captain told him to turn the cool salt-water on the prostrate bulk of the negro.
“I’ll play nurse to him if you haven’t spoiled him entirely,” said Johnny Kent. “I need more help down below and he’ll make a dandy hand with a coal-shovel when his head is mended.”
Just then the mate, who had returned to the wheel, yelled to Captain O’Shea and jerked the whistle-cord. The skipper ran forward and bolted into the wheel-house. With a flourish of his arm the mate indicated a small boat lifting and falling on the azure swells no more than a few hundred yards beyond the bow of the tug. The occupants were vigorously signalling by means of upraised oars and articles of clothing.
The captain rang the engine-room bell to slacken speed and stared at the boat-load of castaways which had none of the ear-marks of shipwreck and suffering. The white paint of the boat was unmarred by the sea and the handsome brass fittings were bright. Two seamen in white clothes were at the oars, and in the stern-sheets were two women and a young man who could not be mistaken for the ordinary voyagers of a trading-vessel’s cabin.
“I ought to have called you sooner, sir,” sheepishly confessed the mate of the Fearless, “but I was watching the shindy on deck, same as all hands of us. What do you make of it?”
“It looks like a pleasure party,” said Captain O’Shea. “I am puzzled for fair.”
He ordered the engines stopped and the Fearless drifted slowly toward the boat. The ship’s company flocked to the rail to see the castaways, who gazed in their turn at the picturesque throng of twentieth-century buccaneers—the swarthy, unshaven Cubans with their flapping straw hats, bright handkerchiefs knotted at the throat, their waists girded with cartridge-belts, holsters, and machete-scabbards—and the sunburnt, reckless rascals of the crew.
There were symptoms of consternation in the small boat as it danced nearer the crowded rail of the Fearless, also perceptibly less eagerness to be rescued. This was making a choice between the devil and the deep sea. It was now possible to discern that of the two women in the stern of the boat one was elderly and the other girlishly youthful. Both wore white shirt-waists and duck skirts, and the young man was smartly attired in a blue double-breasted coat, of a nautical cut, and flannel trousers. One might have supposed that the party was being set ashore from a yacht instead of tossing adrift in a lonely stretch of the Caribbean beyond sight of land.