The man-eater writhed around toward him. He caught the jaws, upper and lower, with both hands, and wrenched them apart. Even the terrible potency of the shark's mouth could not withstand the strength of the gorilla and the whole-hearted will to win of Godwin of England. The hinges cracked and the lower jaw hung useless.
Godwin backed off, shoving himself through the encumbering waters, even his spacious lungs straining by now for air; but before he surfaced he meant to finish this brute. He hauled out the iron broadsword from its sheath, advanced once more toward the furiously thrashing white shark, and thrust half a dozen times. Then he swam upward, leaving behind him an ever-expanding blotch of blood and a quivering, twitching, forty-foot piece of dead meat.
The ship was far away. He sheathed the sword and set out to overhaul her where she sailed serenely, dark sail spread, with her cargo of obscene death.
"Even Godwin in his proper form could never have caught her," he thought to himself. "Heraj's baneful magic will win the day for England yet!"
Slowly he crept up on the ship. At last he reached out a paw and touched the slimy wooden hull. He gave a little quiet laugh. Now!
Dripping salt water, he hauled himself up the side. Cautiously his blunt head in its steel helmet poked over the bulwarks.
The vessel was fairly long for a lateen-rigger, with a low poop deck and a high rail, the great triangular sail, with a pair of quite small auxiliary sails, flapping merrily overhead, and the eternal quarrelsome noise of the rats pervading all the air within a quarter mile. The watch, four Mamelukes, were dicing on the poop. At the tiller lazed a tall black Nubian slave, his loins wrapped in a bright orange cloth. Godwin presumed a crew of about six more, who were probably below in a portion of the hold shut off from the rats' quarters. Mufaddal would want a good handful of men for a job like this. He envisaged them loosing the rats in the seaports of England, likely at night, and slipping away on the tide, leaving their gruesome messengers to spread the bubonic plague far and wide. The picture gave him added strength and determination; though God knew he had needed no more than already boiled in his veins!
As silently as he could make the cumbersome body move, he hoisted himself over the rail.
Then he stood erect, all six feet four of gray-black hideous-visaged brute, drew the broadsword from its scabbard, set his thews for quick action, and pounding his naked chest with his left paw, so that a hollow drumming boom-boom drowned for a moment even the racket of the rats, he opened his saber-fanged maw and gave vent to a terrible cataclysm of sound, an utterance wholly at variance with his usual war-cry, which seemed to come not from his human spirit, but from the body of the jungle beast—an ear-shattering, soul-searing mixture of highpitched barks, raging shrieks, deep-bellied howls and half-joyous, half-oddly-sad roars, roars which spoke of peaceful days beneath great sheltering trees now left forever for the crash and thunder of grim yet gratifying war.
Godwin of England had come aboard.