"I rather think we can," said Fullalove, "eh, colonel?" and tapped his
long rifle.
The ship no sooner crossed the schooner's bows than a Malay ran forward
with a linstock. Pop went the colonel's ready carbine, and the Malay
fell over dead, and the linstock flew out of his hand. A tall
Portuguese, with a movement of rage, snatched it up, and darted to the
gun; the Yankee rifle cracked, but a moment too late. Bang! went the
pirate's bow-chaser, and crashed into the _Agra's_ side, and passed
nearly through her.
"Ye missed him! Ye missed him!" cried the rival theorist, joyfully. He
was mistaken: the smoke cleared, and there was the pirate captain leaning
wounded against the mainmast with a Yankee bullet in his shoulder, and
his crew uttering yells of dismay and vengeance. They jumped, and raged,
and brandished their knives and made horrid gesticulations of revenge;
and the white eyeballs of the Malays and Papuans glittered fiendishly;
and the wounded captain raised his sound arm and had a signal hoisted to
his consort, and she bore up in chase, and jamming her fore lateen flat
as a board, lay far nearer the wind than the _Agra_ could, and sailed
three feet to her two besides. On this superiority being made clear, the
situation of the merchant vessel, though not so utterly desperate as
before Monk fired his lucky shot, became pitiable enough. If she ran
before the wind, the fresh pirate would cut her off: if she lay to
windward, she might postpone the inevitable and fatal collision with a
foe as strong as that she had only escaped by a rare piece of luck; but
this would give the crippled pirate time to refit and unite to destroy
her. Add to this the failing ammunition, and the thinned crew!
Dodd cast his eyes all around the horizon for help.
The sea was blank.
The bright sun was hidden now; drops of rain fell, and the wind was
beginning to sing; and the sea to rise a little.
"Gentlemen," said he, "let us kneel down and pray for wisdom, in this
sore strait."
He and his officers kneeled on the quarter-deck. When they rose, Dodd
stood rapt about a minute; his great thoughtful eye saw no more the
enemy, the sea, nor anything external; it was turned inward. His
officers looked at him in silence.
"Sharpe," said he, at last, "there must be a way out of them with such a
breeze as this is now; if we could but see it."
"Ay, _if_," groaned Sharpe.
Dodd mused again.
"About ship!" said he, softly, like an absent man.
"Ay, ay, sir!"
"Steer due north!" said he, still like one whose mind was elsewhere.
While the ship was coming about, he gave minute orders to the mates and
the gunner, to ensure co-operation in the delicate and dangerous
manoeuvres that were sure to be on hand.
The wind was W.N.W.: he was standing north: one pirate lay on his lee
beam stopping a leak between wind and water, and hacking the deck clear
of his broken masts and yards. The other fresh, and thirsting for the
easy prey, came up to weather on him and hang on his quarter, pirate
fashion.
When they were distant about a cable's length, the fresh pirate, to meet
the ship's change of tactics, changed his own, luffed up, and gave the
ship a broadside, well aimed but not destructive, the guns being loaded
with ball.
Dodd, instead of replying immediately, put his helm hard up and ran under
the pirate's stern, while he was jammed up in the wind, and with his five
eighteen-pounders raked him fore and aft, then paying off, gave him three
carronades crammed with grape and canister; the almost simultaneous
discharge of eight guns made the ship tremble, and enveloped her in thick
smoke; loud shrieks and groans were heard from the schooner; the smoke
cleared; the pirate's mainsail hung on deck, his jib-boom was cut off
like a carrot and the sail struggling; his foresail looked lace, lanes of
dead and wounded lay still or writhing on his deck and his lee scuppers
ran blood into the sea. Dodd squared his yards and bore away.
The ship rushed down the wind, leaving the schooner staggered and all
abroad. But not for long; the pirate wore and fired his bow chasers at
the now flying _Agra_, split one of the carronades in two, and killed a
Lascar, and made a hole in the foresail; this done, he hoisted his
mainsail again in a trice, sent his wounded below, flung his dead
overboard, to the horror of their foes, and came after the flying ship,
yawning and firing his bow chasers. The ship was silent. She had no
shot to throw away. Not only did she take these blows like a coward, but
all signs of life disappeared on her, except two men at the wheel, and
the captain on the main gangway.
Dodd had ordered the crew out of the rigging, armed them with cutlasses,
and laid them flat on the forecastle. He also compelled Kenealy and
Fullalove to come down out of harm's way, no wiser on the smooth-bore
question than they went up.
The great patient ship ran environed by her foes; one destroyer right in
her course, another in her wake, following her with yells of vengeance,
and pounding away at her--but no reply.
Suddenly the yells of the pirates on both sides ceased, and there was a
moment of dead silence on the sea.
Yet nothing fresh had happened.
Yes, this had happened: the pirates to windward, and the pirates to
leeward, of the _Agra_, had found out, at one and the same moment, that
the merchant captain they had lashed, and bullied, and tortured, was a
patient but tremendous man. It was not only to rake the fresh schooner
he had put his ship before the wind, but also by a double, daring,
master-stroke to hurl his monster ship bodily on the other. Without a
foresail she could never get out of his way. Her crew had stopped the
leak, and cut away and unshipped the broken foremast, and were stepping a
new one, when they saw the huge ship bearing down in full sail. Nothing
easier than to slip out of her way could they get the foresail to draw;
but the time was short, the deadly intention manifest, the coming
destruction swift. After that solemn silence came a storm of cries and
curses, as their seamen went to work to fit the yard and raise the sail;
while their fighting men seized their matchlocks and trained the guns.
They were well commanded by an heroic able villian. Astern the consort
thundered; but the _Agra's_ response was a dead silence more awful than
broadsides.
For then was seen with what majesty the enduring Anglo-Saxon fights.
One of the indomitable race on the gangway, one at the foremast, two at
the wheel, conned and steered the great ship down on a hundred
matchlocks, and a grinning broadside, just as they would have conned and
steered her into a British harbor.
"Starboard!" said Dodd, in a deep calm voice, with a motion of his hand.
"Starboard it is."
The pirate wriggled ahead a little. The man forward made a silent signal
to Dodd.
"Port!" said Dodd, quietly.
"Port it is."
But at this critical moment the pirate astern sent a mischievous shot,
and knocked one of the men to atoms at the helm.
Dodd waved his hand without a word, and another man rose from the deck,
and took his place in silence, and laid his unshaking hand on the wheel
stained with that man's warm blood whose place he took.
The high ship was now scarce sixty yards distant: _she seemed to know_:
she reared her lofty figurehead with great awful shoots into the air.
But now the panting pirates got their new foresail hoisted with a joyful
shout: it drew, the schooner gathered way, and their furious consort
close on the _Agra's_ heels just then scourged her deck with grape.
"Port!" said Dodd, calmly.
"Port it is."
The giant prow darted at the escaping pirate. That acre of coming canvas
took the wind out of the swift schooner's foresail; it flapped: oh, then
she was doomed! . . . CRASH! the Indiaman's cut-water in thick smoke beat
in the schooner's broadside: down went her masts to leeward like
fishing-rods whipping the water; there was a horrible shrieking yell;
wild forms leaped off on the _Agra_, and were hacked to pieces almost ere
they reached the deck--a surge, a chasm in the ear, filled with an
instant rush of engulfing waves, a long, awful, grating, grinding noise,
never to be forgotten in this world, all along under the ship's keel--and
the fearful majestic monster passed on over the blank she had made, with
a pale crew standing silent and awestruck on her deck; a cluster of wild
heads and staring eyeballs bobbing like corks in her foaming wake, sole
relic of the blotted-out _Destroyer_; and a wounded man staggering on the
gangway, with hands uplifted and staring eyes.