They were leaping through the edge of the jungle now, howling black devils, and if you believe that even the worst of young women has charms, you are in error. As I fled for the boat, I saw the man who had been on guard spin round with an arrow in his shoulder; before he could regain his feet three of them were on him, and while two held him down, throat and ankle, the third carefully pulled up his shirt, and with the utmost delicacy disembowelled him with her machete. Then I was at the boat, a needle gun was in my hands, and I was firing at another who was leaping across the clearing; she went cartwheeling into the river, and then Spring was beside me, dashing down his empty gun and drawing his cutlass.
"Shove off!" he bawled, and I made a leap for the thwart, missed, and came down in the shallows. Spring jumped over me, and I felt someone drag me upright; it was Comber. For a moment we were shoulder to shoulder, and then an Amazon was on us. Her spear was back to thrust into my breast, and in that split second I saw it was my white-turbanned wench of the fly whisk, her teeth bared in a ghastly grin. And you may think me fanciful, but I'll swear she recognised me, for she hesitated an instant, swung her point away from me, and drove it to the haft into Comber's side. And as I threw myself headlong over the gunwale the ridiculous thought flashed through my mind: bonny black cavalry whiskers, they can't resist 'em.
"D—nation!" Spring was roaring. "I lost that confounded slut!" And as the boat shot away from the bank he seized a needle gun, almost crying with rage, and blazed away. I pulled myself up by the thwart, and the first thing I saw was a bloody hand gripping the edge of the boat. It was Comber, clinging on for dear life as we wallowed out into the stream, with the dark red blood staining the water around him. For a second I wondered whether I should try to haul him in or bash his fingers loose, for he was encumbering our way, but then Spring had leaned over and with one titanic heave had dragged him over the thwart.
We were ten yards from the bank, and it was lined with shrieking black women, hurling their spears, bending their bows, leaping up and down in a frenzy of rage. Why none of them took to the water after us I don't know, unless it was fear of crocodiles; we cowered down to escape their missiles, and then a voice was screaming from the bank:
"Help, cap'n! Cap'n, don't leave me — for Jesus' sake, cap'n! Save me!"
It was Kirk; he was in the shallows, being dragged back by half a dozen of those black witches. They hauled him on to the bank, screaming and laughing, while we drifted out into midstream. Some bold idiot had seized a sweep, and Comber, bleeding like a butchered calf, was crying:
"Help him, sir! We must turn back! We must save him!"
Spring thrust him away, threw himself on to the sweep with the sailor, and in spite of the arrows that whistled over the boat, the two of them managed to drive us still farther away towards the opposite mangrove shore. We were beyond the spears now, and presently the arrows began to fall short, although one of the last to reach the boat struck clean through the hand of the seaman at the oar, pinning him to the timber. Spring wrenched it clear and the fellow writhed away, clutching his wound. And then Holy Joe Comber was at it again:
"Turn back, sir! We can't leave Kirk behind!"
"Can't we, by G-d?" growls Spring. "You just watch me, mister. If the b––-d can't run, that's his look-out!"
Spoken like a man, captain, thinks I; give me a leader you can trust, any day. And even Comber, his face contorted with pain, could see it was no go; they were swarming on the bank, and had Kirk spreadeagled; we could see them wrenching his clothes off, squealing with laughter, while close by a couple of them had even started kindling a fire. They were smart housewifely lasses those, all right.
Kirk was yelling blue murder, and as we watched, my girl in the white turban knelt down beside him, and suddenly his voice rose into a horrible, blood-chilling shriek. Several of the Amazons prancing on the bank indicated to us, by obscene gestures, what she was doing to him; Comber groaned, and began to spew, and Spring, swearing like a lunatic, was fumbling to load one of the needle guns. He bawled to the rest of us to follow suit, and we banged away at them for a moment, but it was too dangerous to linger, and with Kirk's screams, and the gloating shrieks of those she-d—-ls, drifting downstream after us, we manned the sweeps and rowed for all we were worth. With the current to help us we drove along hard, and I was finally able to choke down my panic and thank my stars for another delivery. Of the half dozen of us in the boat, I was the only one without even a scratch; Spring had a machete cut on his left arm, but not a deep one, and the others' wounds were mild enough, except for Comber's. But if Spring was only slightly injured in the flesh, his ambition had taken a nasty jar. He d––d Gezo's eyes for a treacherous hound, and called the Amazons things that would have made a marine blush, but his chief fury, voiced over and over again as we rowed downstream was:
"I lost that black slut. All these years, and I lost the sow! Even that single one — she would have done! My G-d, I could have used that woman!"
I was pondering that I could have used my white-turbanned Hebe, for a different and less academic purpose-but then I thought of Kirk, and discovered that any tendre I might have cherished for the lady had died. And as I think back now, strapping lass though she was, I can't say that the old flame rekindles. She was a shrew if ever I saw one.
4
With the danger safely past, I was soon in good fettle again. As I've said before, there's nothing so cheering as surviving a peril in which companions have perished, and our losses had been heavy. Five men had died in our hasty retreat from Apokoto; apart from Kinnie, Kirk, and the guard on the boat, two others had been cut down by Amazons on the path, and of course the cabin boy had been left behind deliberately by Spring, not that he was any great loss. (It will give you some notion of the kind of men who manned the Coast slavers, when I tell you that not a word of protest was said about this; nobody had liked the little sneak anyway.)
For the rest, it looked as though Comber was a goner. My wench had shovelled her spear well in under his short ribs, leaving a hole like a hatchway; Murphy the surgeon, when he had sobered up, announced that there was nothing he could do but clean and stitch it, which he did, "but for what may have come adrift inside," says he, "I can't answer." So they put Comber in his berth, half-dead, with Mrs Spring to nurse him — "that'll carry the poor s-d off, even if his wound doesn't," says Murphy.
Then we went to work. There were upwards of a thousand niggers in the barracoons on the morning after our Apokoto exploit, and Spring was in a sweat to get our cargo loaded and away. It was the possibility of naval patrols sniffing us out that worried him; Sullivan's suggestion, that Gezo might take it into his head to come down and make a clean sweep of us, he dismissed out of hand. As Spring saw it, the Amazons and not Gezo had been responsible for the attack; now they had rescued their six wenches, and Gezo still had his pistols, he wouldn't want to offend us further. He was right; Sanchez, who was an astonishing good plucked 'un, for a Dago, actually went up to talk to Gezo a day later, to see that all was well, and found the black rascal full of alarm in case Spring was going to wash his hands of the Dahomey trade. Sanchez reassured him, and dropped a hint that if Gezo would even now part with an Amazon it would make for friendly relations, but Gezo was too windy of provoking his bodyguard. He just clutched his case of pistols and begged Sanchez to tell Spring that he was still his friend, sawa sawa, and hoped they would continue to do good business together — all this, mark you, while Kirk and one of the men who'd been caught on the path were strung up in front of the death house, with those black shefiends working on them before a cheering crowd. They were still alive, Sanchez said, but you wouldn't have known they were human beings.