With a loud-yelled command, he leaped to the slippery deck of the submersible, and at his heels came his hardy crew.
With a quick side-step and ducking low beneath his outstretched arms, I eluded him; and as he turned to come back at me, I landed a blow upon his chin which sent him spinning toward the edge of the deck. I saw his wild endeavors to regain his equilibrium; I saw him reel drunkenly for an instant upon the brink of eternity and then, with a loud scream, slip into the sea.
This god on the deck beside him was more like a black.
Jerry had just remembered his grief and was starting a rush across the deck to the rail to gaze at Meringe growing smaller every second in the distance, when a gust of the South-east Trade smote the sails and pressed the Arangi down.
Momentarily stunned, Gahan's fingers slipped from their hold upon the cordage and the man shot downward through the thin air of dying Mars toward the ground three thousand feet beneath, while upon the
deck of the rolling Vanator his faithful warriors clung to their lashings all unconscious of the fate of their beloved leader; nor was it until more than an hour later, after the storm had materially subsided, that they realized he was lost, or knew the self-sacrificing heroism of the act that had sealed his doom.
By degrees they were thus distributed about the
deck, and all with weapons.
Should Matai Shang die before I reached the
deck my chances of ever reaching it would be slender indeed, for the black dator need but cut the rope above me to be freed from me forever, for the vessel had drifted across the brink of a chasm into whose yawning depths my body would drop to be crushed to a shapeless pulp should Thurid reach the rope now.
When I emerged on
deck it seemed that the end of everything had come.
The nearer moon had passed below the horizon, but the clear effulgence of the further satellite bathed the
deck of the cruiser, bringing into sharp relief the bodies of six or eight black men sprawled about in sleep.
Michael missed his calf as he uprose, but tore the other leg of the trousers to shreds and received a kick that lifted him a yard above the
deck in a half-somersault and landed him on his back on
deck.
Now the cog's head was turned Francewards, and the shipman walked the
deck, a peaceful master-mariner once more.
I should, I think, have had nothing left me to desire but for the eyes of the coxswain as they followed me derisively about the
deck and the odd smile that appeared continually on his face.
I remain on
deck, of course, night and day, and the nights and the days wheel over us in succession, whether long or short, who can say?
They were standing on
deck at a point which was temporarily deserted, and as Tarzan came upon them they were in heated argument with a woman.
Fifty-odd boys signed on and were billeted in the main-hold, with the freedom of the
deck, of course.
