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The Scarlet Queen has been at sea for 15 days, and approaching a small island that had been used as a staging point during the war, ship master Philip Carney decides to pull into harbor for some resupplying.
Navigating the channel was tricky, but once ashore there is little sign of life. Their welcoming party is a cantankerous man who warns them off at the point of a rifle. A woman who claims to be the drunken man’s wife comes out to break the tension. She tells about others on the island who are stranded. The others weren’t nearly as good at navigating the channel.
The stranded crew make like they want to be passengers on the Scarlet Queen, but bicker, and just make themselves seem suspicious. Is the overbearing captain planning on stealing the Scarlet Queen? Gallager goes back to the ship and warns the men to arm themselves, just in case.
Despite Carney’s willingness to fight, and his eagerness to leave, he is taken off guard by a dark figure in the night. It’s the woman making an appeal to take her off the island. As she pours on the charm, Carney isn’t going for it. She leaves, but later another intruder jumps Carney and knocks him out. He wakens in daylight with one of the desperate crew members, the Irish doctor he met earlier. The doctor tells about the plan to kill him, and how the doctor himself held back on giving the leathal overdose of chloroform that would have killed him. Still it’s too late, the Scarlet Queen has made sail, and is gone.
The pirates are still stuck on the island, but it was the woman who got away. Suddenly, a typhoon sweeps through and attention is shifted to just surviving the storm. The enemies become allies. Tense moments of danger arise through the storm as at least one man is killed, and in trying to find shelter.
Now enemies once again, Carney fights with the pirate in a life or death struggle. Carney still has some fight left in him when he thinks that Gallager double crossed him, but as usual Gallager shares his side of the story and the revealed truth calms Carney down.
With the story in the open, there’s only one thing left to do, shove off and set sail.
But when the storm blows over, Carney discovers that the Scarlet Queen had to take shelter back in the harbor.
