potentate is granted from these men of sea-pirate stock. Even Brigham noticed it and cursed their deference, cursed the white lace jackets they wore, their fantastic millinery and baggy trousers. They constantly spat betel-juice from mouths like casualties. But when the Annie Laurie ran into a storm and was driven like a hunted thing through heaving black waters, the Malays shed their bodices and pants and without waiting for commands accomplished the tight-lashing of everything on board with incredible speed.
It was a bad storm. Brigham and his friends crept cursingly to their berths. Tai Hoong remained on deck, evidently enjoying the hurricane, the howling of wind devils between the islands. But McTeague was alarmed for his ship; his stout heart sank when, in spite of seamanship and expert piloting in darkness as tangible as black wool, the Annie Laurie was lifted on a boiling maelstrom and dropped on an out-jutting obstacle which the violence of the storm had uncovered. Simultaneously with the crash came the screech of engines running free and jangle of signal bells.
"Broken propeller," the lips of Tai Hoong shaped mutely.
Storm demons shrieked anathemas, called down murrains on puny humans daring to intrude their pallid faces in these islands of dark-blooded inconquerables. The blackness was profound. The anchors reached no ledge of sea-floor to which their flukes might cling. Brigham appeared under the cabin light, his rain-soaked pajamas quivering with fat fear until McTeague ordered him below and reinforced his command with two Malays stripped to loin-rags and shining oiled skins, to shut him in his berth.
A few rags of canvas and a sea-anchor were rigged to give steerage way. With their garments rain-molded to their bodies, McTeague and Tai Hoong worked with the crew to fight the Annie Laurie off those shores where in a sudden lightening of the torrential downpour a light flickered. The wind had somewhat abated. The gleam on shore wavered up and down, then rested.
"I'm going below for guns, Doctor," said McTeague. "Have you a reliable shooter, and can you use one?"
He was aware that his crew did not wish to be driven on those shores at any cost, and the sweep of wind and tide between islands invisible in darkness was carrying them toward that gleam of light. Also he was aware that high cliff walls broke the force of the wind and battering waves.
As he strapped on big navy revolvers, Captain McTeague saw by the clock in his berth that it was near dawn, although the storm clouds had prevented a rift of gray daybreak showing. A screech from the deck took him aloft three steps at a time, to a scene of confusion on which the deck lanterns shed lurid stabbing color splashed on heaving tumult of black men in frenzied slaughter.
A fusillade of shots warned him. His guns spat as he came from shelter. Then blackness struck as something crashed on his skull. Captain McTeague felt himself rolling and bumping, then slipping into deeper darkness than in the storm.
When McTeague's eyes opened, Tai Hoong was bending over him with abstracted impersonal attention. He sat on the side of the berth to wrap lengths of white gauze about the captain's wrist. McTeague cursed, partly from pain, partly in recalling the fight on deck and his own elimination in the first of the fray.
"Natives boarded us," explained Tai Hoong, "for loot. They took all that was not fastened. Then they tried to cut the steam pipes. Your steam pressure, Captain McTeague, was excellent. If you had seen how they were cooked alive it would have repaid you for your hand. Not even a savage can fight steam."
