As I drew myself across
the high threshold and pulled Margaret after me, from very far away I
heard the cries of men and the reports of rifle and revolver. And,
ere I fainted into the blackness, on my side, staring, my pain gone
so beyond endurance that it had achieved its own anaesthesia, I
glimpsed, dream-like and distant, the sharply silhouetted poop-rail,
dark forms that cut and thrust and smote, and, beyond, the mizzen-
mast brightly lighted by our illuminators.
Well, the mutineers failed to take the poop. My five Asiatics and
two white men had held the citadel while Margaret and I lay
unconscious side by side.
The whole affair was very simple. Modern maritime quarantine demands
that ships shall not carry vermin that are themselves plague-
carriers. In the donkey-engine section of the for'ard house is a
complete fumigating apparatus. The mutineers had merely to lay and
fasten the pipes aft across the coal, to chisel a hole through the
double-deck of steel and wood under the cabin, and to connect up and
begin to pump.
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