The deck was luridly lit by the lamp light. Just before Clay lay the naked body of a dying red man; his big brown eyes looking up into Clay from that big round face, from under a mop of straight black hair. The eyes did not yet belong to a dead man. The man was still alive, and seemed to harbor no anger at all for Clay. Pity rather, seemed to shine from those dark eyes. Clay had to look away, but did so apologetically.

At the stern Fat Sam was covering the squirming body of the crazy white man who The Captain had promised protection to. Meanwhile Jonah Heel was being run through by the crooked sword—a large knife really—of the remaining red man, a short, tireless, muscle-rippling menace, who moved in slow hypnotic ways.

The man seemed as if a shadow before the lantern lit stern from Clay’s vantage at midship. The red man, standing over the prostrate form of the ship's purser—their third captain to go to death in the space of a half an hour—looked at Sam, who was now utterly exhausted, and pointed the sword at the white man. Sam was too tired to speak. He did, with eyes bugging out white in the night, shake his head "no." The swordsman then took a step toward Sam, but was stopped by the feral bark of Mickey Durst, “Not with M-Durst aboard ya don’t!”

The red man turned and faced Mickey as he danced out from the gunwale with two oak belaying pins in his white-ape hands. He clapped the foot-long pins together like the devil's own drumsticks and began to skip and danced like a devil. He was dressed in his tattered britches, and not a shred of anything else, his freckled body burned to a mottled tan under the sun after a month at sea. His rat-tailed blonde hair was greasy to the point of brown. Ugly he was, and dance he did.

Clay sat mesmerized by the bizarre ritual. The red man came on in silence and slashed with his sword. A pin struck the blade and another the elbow.

The sword arm now hung limp and crooked, but still the man had no quit. He reached across his body with his other hand and grabbed the sword as Mickey danced around him like the very Devil must dance in Hell. His voice was raspy and cruel, “So, to the end, Old Penny?”

The man then lunged forward desperately in an attempt to run Mickey through. But the wild ‘gutter-rat’ of Baltimore danced aside and clubbed the sword arm twice with the heavy oak pins, breaking the limb all to pieces. The red man sprawled forward on chest and face, grimacing with determination as his gaze caught Clay’s. Clay cringed against the gunwale in horror at the deadly determination in those eyes.

Mickey leaped over the red man, kicked the sword away, and bounced out in front of him.

“You done through, Old Penny?” came the raspy voice of the feral youth.

Sam was attending to Jonah above, an attending that was not going too well. Mickey took this in, and being the sort that could not imagine being misunderstood by an alien person, shouted, “So, Old Penny, ya 'ave done in my paymaster. A favor that was—him being a prickly sort. Do you have a favor to ask of me?” he said humorously, as he clapped the pins together and tossed them aside.

The red man brought his knees up under him, got doggedly to his feet, bared his teeth, and charged Mickey, intent it seemed on biting his tormentor to death. Mickey stood to and unleashed a short terrific punch—the punch he used to use to knockdown old Jewel Crawford’s cows when he got drunk. The sound of a great bone being snapped echoed across the deck as Mickey’s hard fist sunk into the chest of the dogged little red man, who, tireless and fierce though he was, seemed to be twice as old as the man who hit him.