Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/352

 a warning finger. "We 're captured man, can't you see?"

Then he said something to the wheelsman which the pirates on board the Greyhound could not hear. But they saw the wheelsman nod his head, slowly and dejectedly. He, too, they hoped, was going to take his medicine like a man.

Then the wheelsman went forward, still wagging his head, and slipped his bow-line off the pile to which he had tied. The next minute the pirates heard the sharp "cling-cling" of the engine-room signal-bell.

"Now you 've got us, boys, go ahead!"

It was the old engineer speaking, with his oily head stuck out of his little blackened doorway.

Even as he spoke his hand went up to the lever, and a moment later the screw of the Lone Star was threshing the water and she was swinging briskly out to midstream.

The pirate crew stood in petrified amazement. Then they came slowly to their senses, and tried in vain to cast off the chain that held them. In vain they wielded their hatchets on the heavy links of iron. In vain