r forlorn
hope. But he had his arm about the lady's shoulders, and was speaking
urgently into her ear. My thought was of a place to hide. I ran
towards the cabin alleyway. I had no intention of going out on that
dangerous deck, my object was to see if the inner door to the
sail-locker was unlocked. In the sail-locker, I thought, we could
hide, the three of us, until the fight died down.

But my design was frustrated. Before I reached the sail-locker, the
door to the deck, at the end of the alleyway, burst open, and the
tradesman, Morton, pitched headlong over the base-board. He scrambled
to his hands and knees and scuttled towards me. There was a whistling
thud near my head. I leaped back into the cabin, out of range, so
quickly I tripped and sat down hard upon the deck. For a shot fired
after the fleeting Morton had just missed my skull.

Morton crawled into the saloon, and looked at me with a stupid wonder
in his face. He was wounded; he nursed his shoulder, and there was a
spreading stain upon his white shirt.

"They have guns--in the rigging," says he. Then he grunted, and
collapsed, unconscious.

The heavy roar of shotguns, for which my ear was cocked, did not come.
There were two pistols in action overhead, and pistol shots rattled
forward, and I could tell from the sounds that a free fight was raging
somewhere on the main deck. But the heavier discharges did not come.
For an instant I thought--aye, and hoped!--that the tradesmen had been
cut off from the roundhouse.

Suddenly the saloon grew bright with a reflected glare. I was on my
feet again, and I peered into the alleyway, looking out through the
door Morton had opened. The roundhouse cut off any view of the main
deck, but I could see that the whole deck, aye, the whole ship, was
alight with a growing glare, a dazzling greenish-white light.

Then I knew what Captain Swope meant when he screamed for "flares."
Distress flares, signal flares, such as a ship in trouble might use.
He had stocked the roundhouse with them.

Cunning, aye, deadly cunning. This was something Boston and Blackie
had not dreamed of. A flare thrown on deck when the men came aft--and
slaughter made easy for the defenders of the roundhouse!

Something of this I spoke aloud to Newman. There was no answer, and I
became conscious he was not behind me. I wheeled about. Newman, with
the lady's assistance, was hobbling up the ladder to the deck above. I
swore my ama