“Me go other boat,” said Ah Moy, starting to drag his bag away across the deck.

“Cast off,” Captain Doane commanded.

Scraps, the big Newfoundland puppy, who had played and pranced about through all the excitement, seeing so many of the Mary Turner’s humans in the boat alongside, sprang over the rail, low and close to the water, and landed sprawling on the mass of sea-bags and goods cases.

The boot rocked, and Nishikanta, his automatic in his hand, cried out: 

“Back with him!  Throw him on board!”

The sailors obeyed, and the astounded Scraps, after a brief flight through the air, found himself arriving on his back on the Mary Turner’s deck.  At any rate, he took it for no more than a rough joke, and rolled about ecstatically, squirming vermicularly, in anticipation of what new delights of play were to be visited upon him.  He reached out, with an enticing growl of good fellowship, for Michael, who was now free on deck, and received in return a forbidding and crusty snarl.

“Guess we’ll have to add him to our collection, eh, sir?” Daughtry observed, sparing a moment to pat reassurance on the big puppy’s head and being rewarded with a caressing lick on his hand from the puppy’s blissful tongue.

No first-class ship’s steward can exist without possessing a more than average measure of executive ability.  Dag Daughtry was a first-class ship’s steward.  Placing the Ancient Mariner in a nook of safety, and setting Big John to unlashing the remaining boat and hooking on the falls, he sent Kwaque into the hold to fill kegs of water from the scant remnant of supply, and Ah Moy to clear out the food in the galley.

The starboard boat, cluttered with men, provisions, and property and being rapidly rowed away from the danger centre, which was the Mary Turner, was scarcely a hundred yards away, when the whale, missing the schooner clean, turned at full speed and close range, churning the water, and all but collided with the boat.  So near did she come that the rowers on the side next to her pulled in their oars.  The surge she raised, heeled the loaded boat gunwale under, so that a degree of water was shipped ere it righted.  Nishikanta, automatic still in hand, standing up in the sternsheets by the comfortable seat he had selected for himself, was staggered by the lurch of the boat.  In his instinctive, spasmodic effort to maintain balance, he relaxed his clutch on the pistol, which fell into the sea.

“Ha-ah!” Daughtry girded.  “What price Nishikanta?  I got his number, and he’s lost you fellows’ goats.  He’s your meat now.  Easy meat?  I should say!  And when it comes to the eating, eat him first.  Sure, he’s a skunk, and will taste like one, but many’s the honest man that’s eaten skunk and pulled through a tight place.  But you’d better soak ’im all night in salt water, first.”

Grimshaw, whose seat in the sternsheets was none of the best, grasped the situation simultaneously with Daughtry, and, with a quick upstanding, and hooking out-reach of hand, caught the fat pawnbroker around the back of the neck, and with anything but gentle suasion jerked him half into the air and flung him face downward on the bottom boards.