For just a moment Rainey's spirit sagged, his own strength was spent,
his will sapped, his lungs flattened. For a moment he wanted to lie
there--to quit.

Then the hunter's body tautened for action, and, at the feel, Rainey's
ebbing pride came surging back, and he heaved and twisted, clubbing the
other over his kidneys until the roll of the schooner sent them
twisting, tumbling over to the lee once more.

He felt as if he had been fighting for an hour, yet it had all taken
place during the leap of the _Karluk_ between two long swells that she
had negotiated with a sidelong lurch to the cross seas and wind.

Rainey came up uppermost. The hunter's head struck the rail heavily. His
shoulder was free, but he could see ravelings of his coat in the other's
teeth. The pain in his shoulder was evident enough, and the sight of the
woolly fragments maddened him. The tactics of boyish fights came back
to him, and he broke loose from the arms that hugged him, hitched
forward until he sat on the hunter's chest, set a knee on either bicep
and battered at the other's face as it twisted from side to side
helplessly, making a pulp of it, keen to efface all semblance of
humanity, a brute like the rest of them, intent upon bruising, on
blood-letting, on beating all resistance down to a quivering,
spirit-broken mass.

The hunter lay still beneath him at last, his nerve centers shattered by
some blow that had short-circuited them, and Rainey got wearily to his
feet. The hunter's thumbs had pressed deep on each side of his neck, and
his head felt like wood for heaviness, but shot with pain. The vigor was
out of him. He knew he could not endure another hand-to-hand battle with
one of the crowd still raging about Lund, who was on his feet again.

Rainey saw his face, one red mask of blood and hair, with his agate eyes
flaring up with the glory of the fight. He roared no longer, saving his
breath. Hands clutched for him and fists fell, a man was tugging at each
knee of his legs, set far apart, sturdy as the masts themselves.

Lund's arm came up, lifting a hunter clean from the deck, shook him off
somehow, and crashed down. One of the men tackling his legs dropped
senseless from the buffet he got on the side of his skull, and Lund's
kick sent him scudding across the deck, limp, out of the fight that
could not last much longer.

All this came as Rainey, still dazed, helped himself by the skylight
toward the companion, going as fast as