Argosy All-Story Weekly, February 4, 1922 — page 120: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

430 before and they flung matting across it. Stink-pots were tossed aboard with their choking, suffocating fumes, and, back of this infernal barrage, every foot of rail had a savage gone amok mounting it. Our sailors emptied their rifles, fired their automatics point-blank and caught up their cleavers, hacking at their foes. The smell of blood came up to us on the bridge where we could no longer fire for fear of shooting friend instead of enemy. I saw Taku lop off the arm of a Dyak and our boatswain slice another’s head apart as neatly as you might divide a mold of spiced beef. With a whoop, O’Rourke went into ac- tion. He, En Sue, and myself reached the deck together and made for the bows where the pirates were getting the best of it. Gradually our men were falling back from the rails, breaking up into little groups of hand-to-hand combat. More stink-pots added their sickening stench, and through the gusts of black, sticky smoke came clouds of arrows, fired upward from the prakus, descending in a deadly rain. Some of them inevitably killed their own, but those still in the boats were too maddened with their inability to get at close quarters to care for anything but the use of their weapons. A shrill whistle came from the bridge where Li Yuen stood and his voice shrilled out like a trumpet. Instantly the Chinamen disengaged themselves, retreating toward the two Lewis guns, separating defenders from besiegers and raking the deck. The diversion gave us time to reload our guns and we poured volley after volley into them. The air was full of howls, blood trickled across the clean decks and gathered in the scuppers. Almost every one fought bare- footed and crimson tracks were everywhere. Now the archers had got to the rail and were sending their arrows to more direct targets, Spears were flying, and the rarer bullets of the Dyaks. The Sulus depended on their more primitive weapons, and, de- spite the swathes that went down before the Lewis guns, more came, ever leaping on with their snaky creeses winking in the sun- light. A Lewis jammed. The gun was rushed, the crew cut down. I found myself in the thick of it, firing my automatic. One pirate, his mouth and teeth stained betel- _ ARGOSY-ALLSTORY° WEEKLY. red, leaped at me with upswung steel, and I stopped his yell with my bullet. It en- tered his throat fairly and broke the back of his neck, but as he fell, he clutched at my legs and nearly had me down. I shat- tered the jaw of another and then my pistot wrist was prisoned. A few feet away a pirate was drawing bow on me. There was the down-flicker of an ax and the arm of ‘the hand that grasped my wrist was severed in half at the elbow. For a few seconds the fingers still clung while the man fell sidewise at the instant that the arrow, intended for me, was let fly. It took him between the shoulders with a thwuck I could hear above all the noise of the fight. O’Rourke, his hatchet-blade clouded with ~ the steamy blood,-hurdled the body, and I followed him, driving the mob away from the machine gun once more. There were dead men all over the deck now, writhing or still. The naked pirates showed ghastly wounds from hatchet-blows or were riddled with bullets, Some of our own had half a dozen arrows in them. The shouting had died down as both sides real- ized the desperation of the fight and the shots punctuated the grunts and panting of tired men. Some one shouted my name. “Ned, come up on ‘the bridge with O’Rourke! Quick!” It was En Sue. His light tunic was a smear of blood, his own, or a foeman’s, and an arrow had grooved his cheek. I called O’Rourke and made him understand. For all his weakness he was fighting with a ferocity that matched the most rabid of his assailants. He had picked up a Malay creese and I saw him draw its keen edge across the tendons of a Dyak’s wrist and then plunge the wavy blade downward into the man’s belly. We backed up the deck toward the bridge ladder. O’Rourke was physically exhaust- ed, but his eyes blazed. ‘Lost my meat-ax,” he gasped. “ Chap’s skull—so damned thick—I couldn’t pull it out! Some—fight! Give me a boost, up the ladder, Kennedy. All right in a min- ute. All in now.” ‘*'We’ve got to get rid of their prahus,” En Sue greeted us. ‘ Here are grenades.” There were four big baskets of the lemon- COMmMiCbMoolks.Com