lf against him, an arm struck a sweeping blow, and he felt the
knife rip through his flannel shirt and graze his shoulder near his
neck.

He went reeling backward, his foot tripped on a ring-bolt in the deck,
and he fell heavily. His head struck with stunning force against a
bulwark stanchion.

The collision scattered his wits, and Martin lay in the scuppers,
blinking at the dancing lights before his eyes. In his ears was a
great humming. Then, after a moment, the humming broke into parts and
became a babel of shouts.

He heard a harsh chatter--voices crying out in a foreign tongue. He
heard a great booming voice that stirred memory. He heard a
pistol-shot. He heard Ruth's voice, raised in a sharp, terror-stricken
cry:

"Martin--Billy--Martin! Oh, help!"

The scream galvanized Martin to action. _She_ was calling him!

He struggled to arise, got upon his knees, reached upward and grasped a
belaying-pin in the rail above. Clutching the pin, he drew himself
erect.

He swayed drunkenly for a moment, still dizzied by his fall. The
pandemonium of a moment agone was stilled. Ruth did not cry out again,
but voices came from aft. The belaying-pin he grasped was loose in its
hole and unencumbered by rope. Quite without reasoning, Martin drew it
out, and, grasping it clublike, lurched aft.

Twice during his headlong flight toward the cabin, hands reached out of
the darkness to stay him. And twice the stout, oaken club he wielded
impacted against human skulls, and men dropped in their tracks.

Martin burst out of the gloom into the small half-circle of half light
that came from the now open alleyway door. He rushed through, into the
cabin.

He had time but for a glimpse of the scene in the cabin. One whirling
glance that took in the scattered company--the bedraggled Japanese,
Captain Dabney lying face down across the threshold of his room, his
white hair bloodied, Wild Bob Carew lifting a startled face. And Carew
was holding a squirming, fighting Ruth in his arms!

Martin hardly checked the stride of his entrance. He flung himself
toward the man who held his woman, and his club cracked upon another
skull.

A man hurtled against him and drove him against the wall. He saw Carew
fall, and Ruth spill free of the encircling arms.

Then a hand took him by the throat, long, supple, muscular fingers
stopping his wind. He saw a face upraised to his--an expressionless
yellow face, with glittering, slanti