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With the shock of the partial collision as the assailing craft raked along the sides of their ship, and the sudden jerk as she was brought up by the quickly-thrown grapples, the pirate captain, with a fierce shout of defiance, cleared, at a single bound, the intervening rails, and landed, with brandished sword, upon their fore-deck.
Only you who fish can understand what great restraint I was obliged to exercise here; as I painted on the fore-deck a grand fish rose in the stream that comes in beside us, within casting distance of our bow, and with the surge of a thirty pound salmon! And yet I went on painting! I confess I very nearly did not.
He knew, by the slowly diminishing sounds, that he was drifting further and further away from Tankred and his crowded fore-deck. But he was still within the area of that ever-betraying searchlight. Some time, he knew, he must drift beyond it. But until that moment came he dare make no move to keep himself afloat.
The steamer's outline grew more distinct. On she came, pitching and rolling, until knots of people could be seen on the fore-deck. The majority of the passengers, excepting a few Frenchmen and other foreigners, were heartily glad to be at home again, after sojourns of various lengths on the Continent.
Tied up on the other side of the fore-deck they had been whisking their tails into the other door of the galley. These cows were not for Almayer, however; they were invoiced to Abdullah bin Selim, his enemy. Almayer's disregard of my requirements was complete. "If I were you I would try to find out where he's gone," I insisted. "Hadn't you better call your men together or something?
At dinner, yarns on the fore-deck, big beetles humming out of the night against our lamp, and the Captain telling us deep-sea yarns how he signed articles as a cabin boy, and of the times before the annexation of Upper Burmah, when the white man skipper was of necessity something of a diplomatist and a soldier. Some sailors can't spin yarns, but those who can how well they do it!
On the fore-deck below the bridge, steeply roofed with the white slopes of the awnings, a young lascar seaman had clambered outside the rail. He adjusted quickly a broad band of sail canvas under his armpits, and throwing his chest against it, leaned out far over the water.
It was about three bells in the next day's forenoon watch when the look-out man first sighted the pirate brigantine. I disliked the looks of her from the first, and, after piping all hands to quarters, had the brass carronade on the fore-deck crammed with grape to the muzzle. This proved a wise precaution.
I had brought along a number of pocket hymn-books and in the afternoon we lay out on the high fore-deck and sang and talked, unworried by callers and the thousand interruptions of the land.
On Saturday the 27th August, whilst the deeply laden stern gunboat "Zafir" with giassas in tow alongside was coming up the river, she suddenly commenced to sink. The water rushed over her fore-deck, and the officers, soldiers and crew were unable to beach her on the east bank before she went down. Indeed there was a scurry to get into the giassas and cut them loose lest they also should be lost.
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