The skipper knows best

The Skipper waggled his beard and did not reply. He was leaning out of the sagging wheelhouse. He was hatless, and coatless, and collarless. His face expressed the ultimate of bitterness and dislike.

Chief Engineer McGovern closed his eyes.

“Eighty per centum o’ dried fish,” he pursued. “Assorted stenches, nineteen per cent. Sewage, three-quarters o’ one per cent. An’ attar o’ roses, one-eighth o’ one per cent. We are just passin’ the end o’ the jetty.”

He opened his eyes again to check up. He was correct within the limits of good navigation.

“It would ha’ worked,” said McGovern, and sighed. “But I suppose the Skipper knows best.”

Captain Grover turned and glared ferociously at the Arab steersman. The wheelman spun the wheel in haste and the Kingston heeled around in time to miss the clumsy stern of a two-hundred-ton bagala.

A hundred yards on, Captain Grover reached his hand to the engine room telegraph, but Chief Engineer McGovern had turned his head and now swore down the hole through which his head projected. The engines stopped. The Kingston drifted forward gently. The Skipper’s whiskers waggled. No man moved. The waggling became violent, and his expression of concentrated venom became more pronounced. A deep rumbling noise began deep down in his chest.

“Let go the anchor!” roared McGovern.

The Skipper subsided into his private state of dudgeon as the anchor-chain rolled out. Five-eight fathoms. It stopped its rattling roar and began to ooze gently out, indefinitely.

“Make it fast!” howled McGovern.

The order came as the Skipper was growing apoplectic. An Arab sailor hastened to obey, and the Kingston came to rest in the oily glassy waters while additional and hitherto unsuspected smells from the town floated toward her and enveloped her.

From the town, too, came boats. Boats of all sizes and degrees of unseaworthiness. They clustered about her and the Arab crew explained unintelligible things explicitly and the boatmen swarmed on board to argue the point.

Captain Grover’s beard waggled. He grew purple. A rumbling noise began deep down in his diaphragm. And McGovern said hastily, “I wouldna order them off, Skipper. After all, ye ken, they’ve bought the Kingston. But of course you know best.”

Captain Grover’s purple tint persisted, but the rumbling noise stopped. After a raging, anathematic glare about him, he withdrew his head violently into the wheelhouse. And McGovern sighed, mopped his head, and turned to duck down below again.

As he descended the ladder he saw unusual activity below. He looked in instant alert suspicion. And then with a roar of rage he jumped down the last five steps. His own private tool-kit was open and was being enthusiastically inspected by the engine room crew. As he plunged forward a man staggered into view with an especially large armful of McGovern’s personal possessions from his cabin. Other men were behind him, quarreling angrily over the loot. Somebody else was engaged in squabbling over McGovern’s watch and chain with still another man, and a last touch to McGovern’s wrath was given by the sight of his revolver in the hands of a member of the black gang.

“Scum o’ the earth,” roared McGovern, grabbing a slicebar as he rushed, “I’ll----”

A knife flicked past his ear and with one accord the combined engine room and stokehold crews fell upon him. The slicebar landed once, with a satisfying thud. After that, mutiny had pretty much its way. McGovern, fighting in a berserk wrath, landed blows and took them. Once, rolling on his back with a dozen men clinging to him, he saw a bearded face peering down the ladder he had descended. Then he managed to get both legs free and kicked gloriously, to the accompaniment of anguished howls, until somebody landed on his head with a spanner.

He woke up possibly five minutes later. Hardly more, because men were still sitting on him. One man, in fact, was sitting on his head and McGovern’s first conscious effort was to sink his teeth in him. The man arose with a yell, and McGovern spat.

“Now,” he raged, “go ahead an’ knife me an’ be damned to you!”

He did not know what the mutiny was about. There had been no trouble on the voyage. He and the Skipper were delivering the newly sold Kingston to her new owner, the Sheik Abu Nakhl of Ras-el-Kasr. The Skipper was in the depths of despair at the final fate of his ship. McGovern was hopeful of at last being able to go back to England and marry Molly Grover, the Skipper’s daughter. But this mutiny seemed to suggest that the Sheik Abu Nakhl had other plans for him.

“Why don’t ye knife me?” demanded McGovern, raging. “Go ahead! I’m helpless enough! But if I’d had a gun----”

“Please, sar,” said a plaintive voice. “The Sheik Abu Nakhl he give orders you shall not be kill.”

A woebegone member of the stokehold crew, a man McGovern had noticed before was a Persian and not an Arab like the rest, was spitting blood from where a tooth was missing and interpreting at the apparent order of the bearded man above.

“He did, eh?” said McGovern savagely. “An’ why was he so kind?”

“He intend, sar,” said the woebegone little Persian dismally, “he intend to run this ship as pirate to loot the pearling fleet, sar. He want you alive, sar, to fixe engines if they break.”

“You may tell him,” said McGovern grimly, “to go to hell. What’s that noise up there? A fight?”

“Yes, sar,” said the Persian mournfully. “That are captain, sar. He are still fight.”

An inarticulate bellow arose above the crashing of bodies and thudding of feet above-decks. Bumps, blows, howls and crashings told that the Skipper was putting up a beautiful scrap, but the absence of revolver shots at once explained the length of the battle and foretold its ending.

The ending came suddenly. There was a monstrous crash that suggested that one of the flimsy partitions on the Kingston had given way. A howl of anguish and a roar of rage, and suddenly the scrap stopped.

“Tapped him on the head like they did me,” said McGovern gloomily. “God forgie us, what a mess!”

And he lay still to contemplate the future of a white merchant marine officer held on board a Persian Gulf pirate ship to mend the engines if they broke.

Tied up in his cabin a couple of hours later, McGovern dismally revised his estimate of a phrase Molly Grover had first used.

“The Skipper knows best,” she’d said firmly. “And I won’t marry you unless he says so.”