“Blaze away at the other boats! Kill all you can!” shouted the chief officer of the Alsatian. “Shoot into the thick of them before they pull out of range!”
“Let them go,” gravely counselled O’Shea, who was trying to bandage his bleeding arm. “God Almighty will hand out justice to them. Those boats will not live through the first squall, for they are overcrowded and there are few seamen amongst them.”
The lawful crew of the Alsatian gathered together and watched the boats drift to leeward. There was no more shooting by either side. It was as if a truce had been declared. Johnny Kent made a trumpet of his hands and shouted in tremendous tones to the boat in which Vonderholtz had escaped:
“We tricked you and we whipped you, you cowardly dogs. The ship will float and she’ll be towed to port. The laugh is on you, and you can put that in your pipe and smoke it, my gay chemical professor.”
Cries of rage arose from the boats, but there was no returning to the liner, no possible way of scaling her towering sides. Her own crew held possession of her as securely as if they were in a fortress. The wind freshened briskly and the boats drifted farther and farther away to leeward. The men who filled them must face the dreadful perils and sufferings of castaways in mid-ocean. At length the boats became no more than white specks, and then they vanished beyond the misty horizon.
“If Vonderholtz could have had his way he would have destroyed the ship with every soul in her before he abandoned her,” said O’Shea.
“He had me on the list,” piped up Jenkins P. Chase, who strutted importantly, for he had knocked down a foeman and clubbed him into submission. “Now, about that young woman, Miss Jenness. Hanged if she wasn’t a fine-looking proposition. There’s a romance for you, eh?”
“’Tis my guess that she loved him but could not stand for his violent doctrines,” said O’Shea. “And she was afraid to oppose him for fear she would lose him entirely. And maybe he persuaded her to make this voyage with him and he would take her away to live with him somewhere and be happy. ’Twas an evil day for her when she met him, wherever it was, but she was ready to die for him. The love of women!”
Four days later an unlovely little British cargo tramp, wandering across from South America with an empty hold, sighted the Alsatian helpless and flying signals of distress. The humble skipper of this beggarly craft could not believe his eyes. His wildest, most fantastic dreams of salvage were about to come true. As he steamed alongside the chief officer of the liner shouted:
“Tow us to New York and settle with the owners.”