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Updated: June 17, 2025
The whole chaotic mass was lifted; it writhed in the air a moment, and then it came crashing down, partly on the deck and partly in the seething waters of the canal, where it lay and whipped ship and water with lashing tentacles of wreckage. But still the unusual Jasper B. had not moved from her position. Cleggett's men had had warning enough to save themselves.
The King begged Cleggett's pardon with a becoming sincerity, and was about to withdraw. Cleggett, who liked him immensely, was sudden smitten with a regret that it had been so impossible to oblige him. "Your Majesty," he cried impulsively, "I BEG of you not to get the idea that there is anything personal in this refusal." "I respect principle," said the King gravely.
"Clement," she said with agitation, "do not fight this man!" "I must," he said simply. It cut him to the heart to refuse the first request that she had asked of him since his avowal of his love for her and her tacit acceptance. But, to a man of Cleggett's ideas, there was no choice. "Clement," she said in a low tone, "you have told me that you love me." "Agatha!" he murmured brokenly.
In the center of Cleggett's line stood the three detectives shoulder to shoulder. Their three swords rose and fell as one. They cut and lunged and guarded with a machine-like regularity, advancing, giving ground, advancing again, with a rhythmic unanimity which was baffling to their opponents. On either flank of the detectives fought one of the gigantic negroes.
Then he ran as if the devil were after him, and was almost out of pistol shot before he got a bullet in the calf of his leg. The blaze caught the wood and spread. In two minutes the east verandah was in flames. Loge and his men attempted to pour water on the blaze from above. But Cleggett's party directed so hot a fire upon the windows that the defenders were forced to retire.
When George and Kuroki and Cap'n Abernethy had tumbled into the hold they had been afraid to shoot for fear of hitting Cleggett; they had reached him, guided by his voice, just as he went down under his assailant's pistol. They had not subdued the youth until he had suffered severely from George's dagger. Later they learned that one of Cleggett's bullets had also found him.
And he secreted not merely one, but two, of Cleggett's daggers about his body, in addition to the revolver given him. As George had already possessed a dagger or two and an automatic pistol, it was now almost impossible for him to lay his hand casually on any part of his person without its coming into contact with a deadly weapon ready for instant use.
Loge, whose last maneuver had taken him within a yard of the hatchway opening into the hold, grasped Cleggett's blade in his left hand, and at the same instant flung his own sword, hilt first, full in Cleggett's face. As Cleggett, struck in the mouth with the pommel, staggered back, Loge plunged feet foremost into the hold.
He spoke out of the left corner of his mouth in a hoarse voice, without moving the right side of his face at all, and he seemed to feel that the responsibility of the situation was Cleggett's. "But, don't you know her? Didn't you come here with her?" The squat young man appeared to debate some moral issue inwardly for a moment.
He sighted along the barrel with an eager, anticipatory smile upon his face; Pierre would, no doubt, have preferred to see a man boiled in oil rather than merely shot, but shooting was something, and Pierre evidently intended to get all the delight possible out of the situation. Cleggett's own pistol was within an inch of Loge's stomach.
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