As the mucker rushed upward toward him Mallory had all the advantage of position and preparedness, and had he done what Billy Byrne would have done under like circumstances he would have planted a kick in the midst of the mucker's facial beauties with all the power and weight and energy at his command; but Billy Mallory could no more have perpetrated a cowardly trick such as this than he could have struck a woman.
Instead, he waited, and as the mucker came on an even footing with him Mallory swung a vicious right for the man's jaw.Byrne ducked beneath the blow, came up inside Mallory's guard, and struck him three times with trip-hammer velocity and pile-driver effectiveness--once upon the jaw and twice--below the belt!
The girl, clinging to the rail, riveted by the paralysis of fright, saw her champion stagger back and half crumple to the deck.Then she saw him make a brave and desperate rally, as, though torn with agony, he lurched forward in an endeavor to clinch with the brute before him.Again the mucker struck his victim--quick choppy hooks that rocked Mallory's head from side to side, and again the brutal blow below the belt;but with the tenacity of a bulldog the man fought for a hold upon his foe, and at last, notwithstanding Byrne's best efforts, he succeeded in closing with the mucker and dragging him to the deck.
Here the two men rolled and tumbled, Byrne biting, gouging, and kicking while Mallory devoted all of his fast-waning strength to an effort to close his fingers upon the throat of his antagonist.But the terrible punishment which the mucker had inflicted upon him overcame him at last, and as Byrne felt the man's efforts weakening he partially disengaged himself and raising himself upon one arm dealt his now almost unconscious enemy a half-dozen frightful blows upon the face.
With a shriek Barbara Harding turned from the awful sight as Billy Mallory's bloody and swollen eyes rolled up and set, while the mucker threw the inert form roughly from him.
Quick to the girl's memory sprang Mallory's recent declaration, which she had thought at the time but the empty, and vainglorious boasting of the man in love--"Why I'd die for you, Barbara, and welcome the chance!""Poor boy! How soon, and how terribly has the chance come!" moaned the girl.
Then a rough hand fell upon her arm.
"Here, youse," a coarse voice yelled in her ear."Come out o' de trance," and at the same time she was jerked roughly toward the companionway.
Instinctively the girl held back, and then the mucker, true to his training, true to himself, gave her arm a sudden twist that wrenched a scream of agony from her white lips.
"Den come along," growled Billy Byrne, "an' quit dis monkey business, or I'll sure twist yer flipper clean off'n yeh."With an oath, Anthony Harding sprang forward to protect his daughter; but the butt of Ward's pistol brought him unconscious to the deck.
"Go easy there, Byrne," shouted Skipper Simms; "there ain't no call to injure the hussy--a corpse won't be worth nothing to us."In mute terror the girl now permitted herself to be led to the deck below.Quickly she was lowered into a waiting boat.
Then Skipper Simms ordered Ward to search the yacht and remove all firearms, after which he was to engage himself to navigate the vessel with her own crew under armed guard of half a dozen of the Halfmoon's cutthroats.
These things attended to, Skipper Simms with the balance of his own crew and six of the crew of the Lotus to take the places upon the brigantine of those left as a prize crew aboard the yacht returned with the girl to the Halfmoon.
The sailing vessel's sails were soon hoisted and trimmed, and in half an hour, followed by the Lotus, she was scudding briskly southward.For forty-eight hours this course was held until Simms felt assured that they were well out of the lane of regular trans-Pacific traffic.
During this time Barbara Harding had been kept below, locked in a small, untidy cabin.She had seen no one other than a great Negro who brought her meals to her three times daily--meals that she returned scarcely touched.
Now the Halfmoon was brought up into the wind where she lay with flapping canvas while Skipper Simms returned to the Lotus with the six men of the yacht's crew that he had brought aboard the brigantine with him two days before, and as many more of his own men.
Once aboard the Lotus the men were put to work with those already on the yacht.The boat's rudder was unshipped and dropped into the ocean; her fires were put out; her engines were attacked with sledges until they were little better than so much junk, and to make the slender chances of pursuit that remained to her entirely nil every ounce of coal upon her was shoveled into the Pacific.Her extra masts and spare sails followed the way of the coal and the rudder, so that when Skipper Simms and First Officer Ward left her with their own men that had been aboard her she was little better than a drifting derelict.
From her cabin window Barbara Harding had witnessed the wanton wrecking of her father's yacht, and when it was over and the crew of the brigantine had returned to their own ship she presently felt the movement of the vessel as it got under way, and soon the Lotus dropped to the stern and beyond the range of her tiny port.With a moan of hopelessness and terror the girl sank prostrate across the hard berth that spanned one end of her prison cell.
How long she lay there she did not know, but finally she was aroused by the opening of her cabin door.As she sprang to her feet ready to defend herself against what she felt might easily be some new form of danger her eyes went wide in astonishment as they rested on the face of the man who stood framed in the doorway of her cabin.
"You?" she cried.
