ssed nothing with those eagle eyes of his as he returned along
the poop. Nobody was to be seen on the main deck. Even the lookout had
deserted the forecastle-head, and the _Elsinore_, steered by Margaret,
slipped a lazy two knots through the quiet sea. Mr. Pike was
apprehensive of a shot from ambush, and it was not until after a scrutiny
of several minutes that he put his pistol into his side coat-pocket and
snarled for'ard:

"Come out, you rats! Show your ugly faces! I want to talk with you!"

Guido Bombini, gesticulating peaceable intentions and evidently thrust
out by Bert Rhine, was the first to appear. When it was observed that
Mr. Pike did not fire, the rest began to dribble into view. This
continued till all were there save the cook, the two sail-makers, and the
second mate. The last to come out were Tom Spink, the boy Buckwheat, and
Herman Lunkenheimer, the good-natured but simple-minded German; and these
three came out only after repeated threats from Bert Rhine, who, with
Nosey Murphy and Kid Twist, was patently in charge. Also, like a
faithful dog, Guido Bombini fawned close to him.

"That will do--stop where you are," Mr. Pike commanded, when the crew was
scattered abreast, to starboard and to port, of Number Three hatch.

It was a striking scene. _Mutiny on the high seas_! That phrase,
learned in boyhood from my Marryatt and Cooper, recrudesced in my brain.
This was it--mutiny on the high seas in the year nineteen thirteen--and I
was part of it, a perishing blond whose lot was cast with the perishing
but lordly blonds, and I had already killed a man.

Mr. Pike, in the high place, aged and indomitable; leaned his arm on the
rail at the break of the poop and gazed down at the mutineers, the like
of which I'll wager had never been assembled in mutiny before. There
were the three gangsters and ex-jailbirds, anything but seamen, yet in
control of this affair that was peculiarly an affair of the sea. With
them was the Italian hound, Bombini, and beside them were such strangely
assorted men as Anton Sorensen, Lars Jacobsen, Frank Fitzgibbon, and
Richard Giller--also Arthur Deacon the white slaver, John Hackey the San
Francisco hoodlum, the Maltese Cockney, and Tony the suicidal Greek.

I noticed the three strange ones, shouldering together and standing apart
from the others as they swayed to the lazy roll and dreamed with their
pale, topaz eyes. And there was the Faun, stone deaf but observant,