I could see little of what was going on. The seas were breaking over us now with tremendous volume, and it seemed only a question of a few minutes before the schooner must go down, anyhow, for she couldn't lie on her beam ends very long without something giving way.
The work of getting at those Chinks appeared to me now a useless labor. We would all be where there was no caste, no coolies, in a short time. And yet such is the habit of a seaman, he works on against certain failure at times, when ordinary folk would accept the verdict and quit.
I held Komuri until my arms were nearly paralyzed, and I was fainting with exertion and lack of air. The first thing I knew of what he had done was when a Chink came climbing monkey fashion up one of the lines, followed by another and another, their yellow faces pasty and drawn, and their pigtails streaming after them. They clung along the weather side, and lashed themselves fast to whatever they could find. I saw the dark figures of a couple fade away in the smother to leeward, and knew they had gone to where all Chinks go sooner or later, but the rest came up and clung for life there in the strident breath of the typhoon, and the booming roar drowned out even their shrieks and yelps.
I tried to haul Komuri up again, but could not. I howled for Slade to help me, but he was separated by a row of Chinks, and couldn't reach me. I hammered the nearest Chinaman over the head in frantic desperation to make him haul line and save the little Jap, but the fellow only ducked the blows, which were too weak to hurt much.
Komuri, exhausted, could not climb back. He could no longer help himself; and he was trusting to me to get him up from the white smother beneath that was drowning him. The madness of my weakness came over me. I had been a bucko mate with ready hand, and could take them by and large as they came from the dock to the forecastle, but here I was weakening, holding to a line at the end of which was the bravest little man I had even seen, the gamest little fighter—Komuri, son of Samurai, the fighting class of the Japanese.
And Komuri was going to his death because I couldn't help him. On and on I struggled with the line, bellowing curses, but I could get little or no line over the pin, and I was growing surely weaker and weaker.
Then I stopped, and tried to see if there was any chance to help, any chance to save the little hero. I saw Komuri dangling in the foam, his face upturned to me, and a smile upon his yellow, wrinkled visage. He waved feebly to me, and I knew he was signaling for me to haul him up—and was wondering why I didn't.
"Oh, my God, you poor little devil!" I howled. "It's too bad—too bad!"
A gigantic sea crashed over the schooner, a mountain of water. I passed the line about my waist, and snatched a turn to keep from being washed away. That was the last I remembered for some time.
When I regained my senses I was lying on the deck, and Slade was dragging me by the arm toward the cabin doors. The roar of the hurricane still boomed over us—the wild rush of the sea—but it came from aft now, and I knew they had at last got her off the wind, and were running her either to hell or safety.