Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/267

 outraged. He caught up the leather-covered bridge-telescope. He swung it circlingly back, above his head, as a blacksmith swings a sledge. He would have brought that poised cylinder of glass and steel blindly down on the other man's skull, had the ship's mate not caught the end of the telescope and stopped the murderous blow.

"You coward!" said Ganley, without moving. The two ship's officers still stood there, automatically and blindly and grotesquely contending for the cylinder of leather-covered steel.

"Not that way," cried the mate. "Don't kill him!"

"Yes, I'll kill him!" raged the captain. "I'll kill him any way he wants!"

"Then fight it out on deck—fight it out like men!"

"Fight it out!" echoed a half-caste deck-hand, shrilly, carried away by his feelings, as the crowd surged out into the open spaces of the star-lit deck.

"Yes, fight it out, by God!" bellowed the infuriated and unreasoning ship's captain, peeling off his coat and waving back the circle of onlookers. "Fight it out, like men!"

Heilig, the chief-engineer, pushed through the protesting crowd.

"Captain," he said in his slow and gloomy