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Updated: June 7, 2025
Hill water, I expect." The lines were surged and made fast again, and the Barang's people resumed their silent vigil. But the absence of alarms worked against true vigilance. Profiting by the example of their officers, the little brown men coiled themselves away in corners and dozed, ready for a call, truly, but willing to wait for it.
Then he suddenly recognized the skipper and stood up with incredible alertness. "Hullo, Captain Barry," he rumbled, sticking out a hand like a ham. Barry slipped his message into it at the same instant as he grasped it, and swiftly followed his greeting with a statement of the Barang's situation. Meanwhile Houten read his message by the light of the setting sun. "So!" he chuckled at length.
Looking up and down stream, he stifled an exclamation of surprise; for, not a hundred yards away, down stream, stood the rickety old wharf, and alongside lay his ship, while at his feet a dugout canoe squatted nose-up on the muddy foreshore of the river. Just astern of his own ship the Padang had hauled in, and a knot of excited men, white and native, were milling about the Barang's gangway.
He wasn't sure the threads led anywhere; but Barry discouraged conversation, and the volatile ex-salesman could not exist without either talking, surmising, or planning things. So they arrived in silence at the wharf, and neither raised his head to notice their whereabouts until Little tumbled over the Barang's breast line. Then both looked up.
As they neared the dark shape of the vessel, two market boats left her shadow, and voices came across the water, signifying the correct tally of sundry stores. Then the Barang's anchor came up again immediately her new skipper set his foot on deck, the topsail yard, lowered to the cap on anchoring, was jerked aloft, and the brigantine stood silently out of the roadstead.
A bullet from Rolfe passed through the head of the leader, and out of a whizzing shower of lead from the Barang's men another white went down. Then the native guards broke and ran, flinging guns away in their panic.
Miss Sheldon hovered nervously about them, struggling hard with some emotion within her, gazing searchingly from face to face as if to find there an answer to the problem that troubled her. The Barang's men certainly looked anything but the rascals she had been told they were; she had never seen sailors more utterly peaceable in their demeanor.
Den we run for dat man, an' in one hour two, mebbe we come here. I t'ink dat ribber he twist, sar." Then, so swiftly that it shocked, out of the forest stumbled another of the Barang's seamen, panting, thorn-slashed, and frightened. "Oh, sar!" he gasped, "Cap'n Barry an' Misser Li'l, an' all mans dey pris'ner in de woods, an' de gol' washers dey all kill, sar!"
Me, I t'ink dot schmell was joongle, by Gott!" "Haul in all lines!" roared Barry. "Rolfe, hustle up all the spare junk and sand. Lads, keep under cover until I call you out." All around the ship the water glared with Satanic fires. The blazing oil roared and leaped hungrily at the Barang's tarred sides.
Natalie Sheldon, at liberty on board Leyden's schooner, happy and comfortable, yet being visited at midnight by Mrs. Goring, friend of Leyden's fiercest foe, and wishing the Barang's skipper success and happiness! Barry plunged straight along for the stockade gate.
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