"I can imagine," Scott said grimly. "Can you stand?"
Bryant rubbed his wrists vigorously, then his ankles. His face was streaked with caked blood and his shirt was stuck to his back. He winced when Scott helped him up. "They beat the hell out of me last night. Did—did Dorcas get to the ship?"
Scott nodded. "She told us how to find you."
"Good girl! She must have been gone quite awhile before they discovered she was missing." He turned to Russell. "Dorcas is safe."
"Thank God for that!" Russell exclaimed, his thin, sensitive face working suddenly. "I went through the tortures of the damned when they separated us and kept her apart... and again when I learned she had escaped."
"She's all right," Scott assured him, "but upset because she left the lot of you behind. She did the only smart thing in making for the ship; she would have been recaptured if she'd tried to free you, too." He paused, studying all the freed captives, who now were moving about painfully. "We'd better start making for the Caroline ourselves. I don't want those fellows we scattered to rally and ambush us. Word of this morning's business is well on the way to Quallah Battoo now, I'm certain."
"Scott!"
He turned in surprise to look at Bryant, who had been gingerly trying to unstick his shirt from his welted back.
"Scott, the pirates weren't from Quallah Battoo. They were from Stallapoo."
"Stallapoo? . . . Pa Mahmud?"
"Aye. He wasn't with them when they took the ship and he hasn't been here, but that fellow in the yellow cap was his son."
Scott whistled in amazement.
"Pa' Mahmud himself is on the coast somewhere," Bryant went on quickly. "The plunder from the Sally Culbreath is not here, neither pepper nor money nor anything else."
The mental picture of an attack on the Charleston brig became vivid in Scott's mind. "Can you walk now?" he demanded.
"Of course I can walk. What are we standing here for, man?"
"All hands!" Scott shouted. "All hands!"
Scott went into the short-lived fight weary and he came out of it near exhaustion, but the suggestion of very real danger to the Caroline charged his system with adrenalin. It also fired his men and the freed captives, who could easily envision being stranded in Sumatra to rot or be hunted down. Taking stock quickly, Scott found that he had lost none of his own men and only one of the Malay auxiliaries,
"We've got to hurry, Captain Rogers!" Russell said in an anguished voice. "Got to!"
Scott understood his fear for Dorcas. He felt it himself, and he knew Bryant did, too.
"Arm yourself and your men with anything you can pick up, Zenas," he said. "And you, Hurst, see if you can find any loose gunpowder and lead in camp."
In a few minutes Scott set out briskly for the coast on the path leading to Quallah Battoo. He didn't slow his pace for the weak or the weary, and he observed approvingly that Russell kept up doggedly.
"We're going right through the damned town," Scott told Bryant and Hurst as they neared Quallah Battoo. "We haven't got time to cut through the jungle. I hope Darus will stay with us awhile, Hurst."
" 'E will," Hurst said, grinning crookedly. "Th' pickin's in that camp was pore, but winnin' so handily has got ol' Darus to feelin' like th' cock o' th' walk. Besides which, 'e's got proas in th' river, you know."
Bryant, who was limping from his beating, squared his shoulders determinedly and spoke admiringly. "I wish to God I had your aggressiveness, Scott. Maybe I would've been able to fight off the pirates when they boarded the poor old Sally C." He hesitated. "Is she still there—the Sally, I mean?"
"She'll be where she is a long time, I'm thinking," Scott told him. "Just what did happen the other night?"
"I had Miss Russell and her father in the ship for dinner," Bryant said slowly. "I was sort of putting on some fine touches for her—you know, real chinaware and suchlike. Quite awhile after dinner the squall hit all of a sudden and the anchor chain parted. Weak link, I guess. Anyway, we were aground almost before we knew what had hit us."
"You weren't paying much attention to the weather up until the squall struck, I take it."
"No, I wasn't. It's a fool's admission, coming from a shipmaster, but the weather was the furthest thing from my mind that night. Anyway, we stood to quarters as soon as I realized we were stuck close inshore. The weather had calmed down and so had we when the attack came. It was pitch-black dark, and they sneaked up to the sides of the ship before we knew it. They boarded us in a rush when somebody raised the alarm. We tried to put up a fight, but—well, we didn't make much of a showing, I'm afraid. The plain truth is, there were a hell of a lot of Malays and they beat the starch out of us. They sort of enveloped us; smothered all resistance, you might say." He paused. "I've lived the fight over a hundred times since, Scott, wondering what I should've done that I didn't. And I've gone damn' near crazy worrying about Dorcas. Thank God, she's safe!"
Scott tried to cheer him up. "She's safe, her father's safe, and you and your crew are safe... for the time being, anyway. It all adds up to something."
Bryant brightened momentarily. "At least, I didn't tell the brown bastards anything. Unless they've dismantled my ship, there's still silver money in her. I had some of it well hidden."
Scott was relieved to reach Quallah Battoo without being sniped at, and he was even more relieved to see the Caroline riding at anchor in the roadstead. Bryant looked sorrowfully at the canted-over Sally Culbreath; her sailing days were over, and he knew it. They marched boldly into the town, meeting no opposition from scores of glowering Malays watching their passage.
"They'd love to pounce on us, cap'n," Hurst observed quietly, "but they ain't got what it takes. Not yet, anyway."
His eyes on the Charleston brig, seeking signs of anything amiss, Scott nodded agreement. More than anything else he wanted to board the ship and find things as he had left them. The scornful hostility of the town Malays angered him, but he could afford to overlook it; the important thing was to regain the comparative safety of the Caroline.
"They don't want to start anything until they're sure of winnin'," Hurst went on softly. "They ain't sure now, which is good."
The captain agreed with that, too. Looking at his ship, he felt an uneasiness for her safety, even though everything appeared all right from a distance. If only I had a glass, he thought. Then I could see if she really is all right.
Suddenly a loud cry in English startled them all.
"Help!"
Scott stopped dead in his tracks and the men with him, white and brown, froze into apprehensive stillness. "That was Kimbrell's voice!"
"Aye," Hurst said, "so it was." He turned to Bryant. "Our bosun."
"Help!"
The Quallah Battoo people gripped more tightly their weapons and their scowls deepened. But none of their rajahs was with them, a fact Scott now noticed, and without their leaders they were a mob fearful of taking the offensive.
"Kimbrell!" Scott shouted. "Where are you, Kimbrell?"
"Here, sir!" came the reply. "Here, in—" His voice was chopped off abruptly.
" 'E's in a house close by, sir," Hurst said, cocking his rifle. The clicking sound was ominous in the tense silence.
Scott knew there could be no faltering now. There are twenty-four of us, not counting Darus and his Malays, he thought. Any show of weakness or indecision and we're finished right here and now. He drew a pistol and cocked it, then unsheathed his cutlass.
"That was Kimbrell, bosun of the Caroline, who hollered," he said quietly to his nervous men. "If there's going to be any fighting, well let it begin now."