Emerson and his companions found themselves carried away before the onslaught like chips in the surf, then sucked into a maelstrom where the first duty was self-preservation. Behind locked doors and shivering glass a terrified office-clerk, receiver to ear, was calling madly for Police Headquarters, while in the main building itself the crowd bellowed and roared and the hollow floor reverberated to the thunder of trampling feet and the crash of tumbling freight-piles.
Boyd succeeded in keeping his footing and eventually fought his way to a backing of crated machinery, where he stooped and ripped a cleat loose; then, laying about him with this weapon, he cleared a space. It was already difficult to distinguish friend from foe, but he saw Alton Clyde go down a short distance away and made a rush to rescue him. His pine slat splintered against a head, he dodged a missile, then struck with the fragment in his hand, and, snatching Clyde by the arm, dragged him out from under foot. Battered and bruised, the two won back to Emerson's first position, and watched the tide surge past.
At the first alarm the fishermen had armed themselves with bale-hooks and bludgeons, and for a time worked havoc among their assailants; but as the fight became more general they were forced apart and drawn into the crowd, whereupon the combatants split up into groups, milling about like frightened cattle. Men broke out from these struggling clusters to nurse their injuries or beat a retreat, only to be overrun and swallowed up again in a new commotion.
Emerson saw the big, barefooted fisherman in the red underclothes, armed with a sledge-hammer, go through the ranks of his enemies like a tornado, only to be struck by some missile hurled from a distance. With a shout of rage the fellow turned and flung his own weapon at his assailant, felling him like an ox, then he in turn was blotted out by a surge of rioters. But there was little time for observation, as the scene was changing with kaleidoscopic rapidity and there was the ever-present necessity of self-protection. Seeing Clyde's helpless condition, Emerson shouted:
"Come on! I'll help you aboard the ship." He found a hardwood club beneath his feet—one of those cudgels that are used in pounding rope-slings and hawsers—and with it cleared a pathway for Clyde and himself. But while still at a distance from the ship's gangway, he suddenly spied the man in the gray suit, who had climbed upon one of the freight-piles, whence he was scanning the crowd. The man likewise recognized Emerson, and pointed him out, crying something unintelligible in the tumult, then leaped down from his vantage-point. The next instant Boyd saw him approaching, followed by several others. He endeavored to hustle Clyde to the big doors ahead of the oncomers, but being intercepted, backed against the shed wall barely in time to beat off the foremost.
His nearest assailant had armed himself with an iron bar and endeavored to guard the first blow with this instrument, but it flew from his grasp, and he sustained the main force of the impact on his forearm. Then, though Boyd fell back farther, the others rushed in and he found himself hard beset. What happened thereafter neither he nor Alton Clyde, who was half-dazed to begin with, ever clearly remembered, for in such over-charged instants the mental photograph is wont to be either unusually distinct or else fogged to such a blur that only the high-lights stand out clearly in retrospect.
Before he had recognized the personal nature of the assault, Emerson found himself engaged in a furious hand-to-hand struggle where a want of room hampered the free use of his cudgel, and he was forced to rely mainly upon his fists. Blows were rained upon him from unguarded quarters, he was kicked, battered, and flung about, his blind instinct finally leading him to clinch with whomsoever his hands encountered. Then a sudden blackness swallowed him up, after which he found himself upon his knees, his arms loosely encircling a pair of legs, and realized that he had been half-stunned by a blow from behind. The legs he was clutching tried to kick him loose, at which he summoned all his strength, knowing that he must go down no further; but as he struggled upward, something smote him in the side with sickening force, and he went to his knees again.
Close beside him he saw the club he had dropped, and endeavored to reach it; but before he could do so, a hand snatched it away and he heard a voice cursing above him. A second time he tried to rise, but his shocked nerves failed to transmit the impulse to his muscles; he could only raise his shoulder and fling an arm weakly above his head in anticipation of the crushing blow he knew was coming. But it did not descend, Instead, he heard a gun shot—that sound for which his ears had been strained from the first—and then for an instant he wondered if it had been directed at himself. A weight sank across his calves, the legs he had been holding broke away from his grasp; then, with a final effort, he pulled himself free and staggered to his feet, his head rocking, his knees sagging. He saw a man's figure facing him, and lunged at it, to bring up in the arms of "Fingerless" Fraser, who cried sharply:
"Are you hurt, Bo?"
Too dazed to answer, he turned and beheld the body of a man stretched face downward on the floor. Beyond, the fellow in the gray suit was disappearing into the crowd. Even yet Boyd did not realize whence the shot had come, although the smell of powder was sharp in his nostrils. Then he saw a gleam of blue metal in Fraser's hands.