The Argus Pheasant

"It shall be as you say, Lkath," he said. "Give me a pilot and let me go."

"He awaits you on the beach," Lkath replied. With this curt dismissal, Peter Gross was forced to go.

The failure of his mission weighed heavily upon Peter Gross, and he said little all that day. Paddy could see that his chief was wholly unable to account for Lkath's change of sentiment. Several times he heard the resident murmur: "If only Koyala had stayed."

Shortly before sundown, while their proa was making slow headway against an unfavorable breeze Paddy noticed his chief standing on the raised afterdeck, watching another proa that had sailed out of a jungle-hid creek-mouth shortly before and was now following in their wake. He cocked an eye at the vessel himself and remarked:

"Is that soap-dish faster than ours, or are we gaining?"

"That is precisely what I am trying to decide," Peter Gross answered gravely.

Paddy observed the note of concern in the resident's voice.

"She isn't a pirate, is she?" he asked quickly.

"I am very much afraid she is." Peter Gross spoke calmly, but Paddy noticed a tremor in his voice.

"Then we'll have to fight for it?" he exclaimed.

Peter Gross avoided a direct reply. "I'm wondering why she can stay so close inshore and outsail us," he said. "The wind is offshore, those high hills should cut her off from what little breeze we're getting, yet she neither gains nor loses an inch on us."

"Why doesn't she come out where she can get the breeze?"

"Ay, why doesn't she?" Peter Gross echoed. "If she were an honest trader she would. But keeping that course enables her to intercept us in case we should try to make shore."

Paddy did not appear greatly disturbed at the prospect of a brush with pirates. In fact, there was something like a sparkle of anticipation in his eyes. But seeing his chief so concerned, he suggested soberly:

"Can't we beat out to sea and lose them during the night?"

"Not if this is the ship I fear it is," the resident answered gravely.

"What ship?" The question was frankly curious.

"Did you hear something like a muffled motor exhaust a little while ago?"

Paddy looked up in surprise. "That's just what I thought it was, only I thought I must be crazy, imagining such a thing here."

Peter Gross sighed. "I thought so," he said with gentle resignation. "It must be her."

"Who? What?" There was no escaping the lad's eager curiosity.

"The ghost proa. She's a pirate – Ah Sing's own ship, if reports be true. I've never seen her; few white men have; but there are stories enough about her, God knows. She's equipped with a big marine engine imported from New York, I've heard; and built like a launch, though she's got the trimmings of a proa. She can outrun any ship, steam or sail, this side of Hong Kong, and she's manned by a crew of fiends that never left a man, woman or child alive yet on any ship they've taken."

Paddy's face whitened a little, and he looked earnestly at the ship. Presently he started and caught Peter Gross's arm.

"There," he exclaimed. "The motor again! Did you hear it?"

"Ay," Peter Gross replied. "We had gained a few hundred yards on them, and they've made it up."

Paddy noted the furtive glances cast at them by the crew of their own proa, mostly Bugis and Bajaus, the sea-rovers and the sea-wash, with a slight sprinkling of Dyaks. He called Peter Gross's attention to it.

"They know the proa," the resident said. "They'll neither fight nor run. The fight is ours, Paddy. You'd better get some rifles on deck."

"We're going to fight?" Rouse asked eagerly.

"Ay," Peter Gross answered soberly. "We'll fight to the end." He placed a hand on his protégé's shoulder.

"I shouldn't have brought you here, my lad," he said. There was anguish in his voice. "I should have thought of this – "

"I'll take my chances," Paddy interrupted gruffly, turning away. He dove into their tiny cubicle, a boxlike contrivance between decks, to secure rifles and cartridges. They carried revolvers. When he came up the sun was almost touching the rim of the horizon. The pursuing proa, he noticed had approached much nearer, almost within hailing distance.

"They don't intend to lose us in the dark," he remarked cheerfully.

"The moon rises early to-night," Peter Gross replied.

A few minutes later, as the sun was beginning to make its thunderclap tropic descent, the juragan, or captain of the proa issued a sharp order. The crew leaped to the ropes and began hauling in sail. Peter Gross swung his rifle to his shoulder and covered the navigator.

"Tell your crew to keep away from those sails," he said with deadly intentness.

The juragan hesitated a moment, glanced over his shoulder at the pursuing proa, and then reversed his orders. As the crew scrambled down they found themselves under Paddy's rifle.

"Get below, every man of you," Peter Gross barked in the lingua franca of the islands. "Repeat that order, juragan!"

The latter did so sullenly, and the crew dropped hastily below, apparently well content at keeping out of the impending hostilities.

These happenings were plainly visible from the deck of the pursuing proa. The sharp chug-chug of a motor suddenly sounded, and the disguised launch darted forward like a hawk swooping down on a chicken. Casting aside all pretense, her crew showed themselves above the rail. There were at least fifty of them, mostly Chinese and Malays, fierce, wicked-looking men, big and powerful, some of them nearly as large, physically, as the resident himself. They were armed with magazine rifles and revolvers and long-bladed krisses. A rapid-firer was mounted on the forward deck.

Paddy turned to his chief with a whimsical smile. "Pretty big contract," he remarked with unimpaired cheerfulness.

Peter Gross's face was white. He knew what Paddy did not know, the fiendish tortures the pirates inflicted on their hapless victims. He was debating whether it were more merciful to shoot the lad and then himself or to make a vain stand and take the chance of being rendered helpless by a wound.

The launch was only a hundred yards away now – twenty yards. A cabin door on her aft deck opened and Peter Gross saw the face of Ah Sing, aglow in the dying rays of the sun with a fiendish malignancy and satisfaction. Lifting his rifle, he took quick aim.

Four things happened almost simultaneously as his rifle cracked. One was Ah Sing staggering forward, another was a light footfall on the deck behind him and a terrific crash on his head that filled the western heavens from horizon to zenith with a blaze of glory, the third was the roaring of a revolver in his ear and Paddy's voice trailing into the dim distance:

"I got you, damn you."

When he awoke he found himself in a vile, evil-smelling hole, in utter darkness. He had a peculiar sensation in the pit of his stomach, and his lips and tongue were dry and brittle as cork. His head felt the size of a barrel. He groaned unconsciously.

"Waking up, governor?" a cheerful voice asked. It was Paddy.

By this time Peter Gross was aware, from the rolling motion, that they were at sea. After a confused moment he picked up the thread of memory where it had been broken off.

"They got us, did they?" he asked.

"They sure did," Paddy chirruped, as though it was quite a lark.

"We haven't landed yet?"