stretching his great arms. "Give me a
five-finger drink, Rainey, afore I clean up. Some scrap. Hell popping on
deck, and a dead man in the cabin! And the gal! Did you see the gal,
Rainey?"

Out of the bloody mask of his face his agate eyes twinkled at Rainey
with a sort of good-natured malice. Rainey did not answer as he poured
the liquor.

"Make it four finger," exclaimed Lund. "Deming's goin' to faint. One for
Doc Tamada."

The Japanese excused himself, helping Deming, worn out with pain and
consumed by baffled hate, forward through the galley corridor. Then he
came back with warm water in a basin--and towels.

"After this cheery little fracas," said Lund, mopping at his face,
"we'll mebbe have a nice, quiet, genteel sort of ship. My gun went
overboard, didn't it? Better let me have that one you've got, Rainey."

He stretched out his hand for it. Rainey delivered it, reluctantly.
There was nothing else to do, but he felt more than ever that the
_Karluk_ was henceforth to be a one-man ship, run at the will of Lund.

But the girl, too, had a weapon. He hugged that thought. She carried it
for her own protection, and she would not hesitate to use it. What a
girl she was! What a woman rather! A woman who would _mate_--not marry
for the quiet safety of a home. Rainey thought of her as one does of a
pool that one plumbs with a stone, thinking to find it fairly shallow,
only to discover it a gulf with unknown depth and currents, capable of
smiling placidness or sudden storm.

CHAPTER XIII

THE RIFLE CARTRIDGES

The girl did not appear for the evening meal. She had refused Tamada's
suggestions through the door. Lund drank heavily, but without any
effect, save to sink him in comparative silence, as he and Rainey sat
together, after the Japanese had cleared the table. In contrast to the
excitement of the fight, their moods had changed, sobered by the thought
of the girl sitting up with her dead in the captain's room.

Rainey was bruised and stiffened, and Lund moved with less of his usual
ease. The flesh of his face had been so pounded that it was turning dull
purple in great patches, giving him a diabolical appearance against his
naming beard.

"We've got to git hold of those cartridges," he said, after a
long-pause. "Carlsen had 'em planted somewhere, an' it's likely in his
room. Best thing to do is to chuck 'em overboard. Cheaper to dump the
cartridges an' shells than the rifles an' shotguns.

"You se