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Now the tables were turned of a sudden, for three stout sea-dogs from the Tiger, finishing their first opponents, dashed into the fray with a yell, and Daggs, hewing his way to the mast, turned to face the new attack with only two men left on foot to back him. The fight was short and fierce. First one, then the other of the buccaneers went down before the furious assault of Job's seamen.
"Abe, you're talkin' sense," broke in Blaisdell. "An' that's why we're up heah for quick action." "I heerd y'u got Daggs," whispered Meeker, as he peered all around. "Wal, y'u heerd correct," drawled Blaisdell. Meeker muttered strong words into his beard. "Say, was Daggs in thet Jorth outfit?" "He WAS. But he walked right into Jean's forty-four.... An' I reckon his carcass would show some more."
The youngest could eat nothing for thinking of his chum's fate. While his father still spoke hopefully of the possibility that the boy might have found a hiding place which he dared not leave, Jeremy could only remember the frightful, scarred visage of Pharaoh Daggs looming in the torchlight.
A thousand perplexing problems were solved in a second of whirling, revealing thought. "Ellen Jorth, you know your father's in with this Hash Knife Gang of rustlers," thundered Isbel. "Shore," she replied, with the cool, easy, careless defiance of a Texan. "You know he's got this Daggs to lead his faction against the Isbels?" "Shore."
"Girl, what the hell are y'u sayin'?" hoarsely called Jorth, in dark amaze. "Dad, y'u leave this to me," she retorted. Daggs stepped beside Jorth, significantly on his right side. "Let her alone Lee," he advised, coolly. "She's shore got a hunch on Bruce." "Simm Bruce, y'u cast a dirty slur on my name," cried Ellen, passionately.
"Daggs asked me to marry him again and I said he belonged to a bad lot," she replied. Jorth laughed in scorn. "Fool! My God! Ellen, I must have dragged you low that every damned ru er sheepman who comes along thinks he can marry you." At the break in his words, the incompleted meaning, Ellen dropped her eyes. Little things once never noted by her were now come to have a fascinating significance.
Sooner or later the ship that had been given a new name would come to grief and her crew with her. Pharaoh Daggs cast an eye of hatred at Jeremy and growled that "one Jonah was enough to have abroad, without clean drownin' all the luck this way," while the crew looked black and shifted uneasily in their places.
The cool, indolent interest of the crowd vanished at the red color pointed out by Jackson Jorth. Daggs rose in a single springy motion to his lofty height. The face Bruce turned to Jorth was swollen and bruised, with unhealed cuts. Where his right eye should have been showed a puffed dark purple bulge. His other eye, however, gleamed with hard and sullen light.
At length he blew a great cloud of blue smoke toward the deck-beams above and turning to the boy, asked, "Did Daggs or any of the rest ever speak of the place where they were going?" "They never talked about it openly," Bob replied, "but from words dropped now and then by the mulatto mate I figured they were heading down for the Spanish Islands.
Beyond any reasonable doubt, it was a chart. "Solomon Brig's treasure!" he whispered to himself as the tall figure of the man with the broken nose clambered upward through the hatch. Jeremy realized that his life would be in danger if Daggs saw him coming on deck after what had just happened. He lay still, therefore, in spite of his desire to tell Bob what he had seen.
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