THE REQUITAL.
Three days and nights passed after this without finding us able to
surprise or dislodge the demon who was in possession of the cabin;
without our knowing where the ship was driving or drifting to, and
without a sail appearing. A man-of-war belonging to any country we
should have hailed as a protector; but on the wide waters of the
Southern Atlantic ships are few and far between.
Hislop rallied a little, and was removed into one of the forecastle
berths. He could tell us only that he had been surprised when
asleep, and been stabbed again and again--that he became insensible,
and remembered nothing more. His distress was great when we related
the story of the captain's fate, the death of Will White, and that
their destroyer was still in possession of the ship, and the arbiter
of all our lives.
He writhed on his bed of pain, and sighed bitterly on finding how
stiff and sore, how weak and almost blind he had become by loss of
blood; but a crisis was now at hand with our Cubano.
The evening of the fourth day after we had saved Hislop found the
brig still lying a westerly course; but whether in the latitude of
Cape San Roque or of the Rio Grande, we knew not; and, I suppose, it
was all the same to Antonio.
I was at the wheel. The sunset was gorgeously beautiful. The
_Eugenie_ was running with both tacks aft; and under the arched leech
of her courses I could see the blood-red disk of the sun right ahead
setting in the waves, which shone in all the colors of the dying
dolphin; while against the flaming orb, the black outline of the
masts, the figure-head, and the taper end of the jibboom, with its
cap, guys, and gear, were clearly and distinctly defined.
The waves ahead rose and fell between me and the sun, as slowly and
imperceptibly he sank at the flaming horizon, from a quarter circle
to a segment; then the last vestige of that also disappeared, but the
lingering rays of his glory played upward on the light clouds that
floated above. Even they paled away and died out, and twilight stole
over the silent sea, which changed from gold to a transparent blue.
With the increasing twilight came a change of wind, and before it a
great bank of cloud rolled from the horizon on our starboard bow.
Under its shadow the sea was darkened, and its broken water flecked
with white. The new breeze came first upon our quarter, then rapidly
it was abeam, and three great albatrosses were seen to whip the sea
with their wings, while a whole shoal of brown porpoises surged past
our bows, plunging joyously from wave to wave.
Tacks and braces were instantly manned, and the sails were trimmed
anew for our desultory course.
"Sail ho--to windward!" said one of the crew, in a low but excited
voice, lest the sound might reach the cabin; and as the dense bank of
purple cloud opened, a large bark came out of it, and her form became
more and more defined as she left the vapor astern. She was going
free--that is, with her head further off the wind than
close-hauled--and had a press of snow-white canvas, which shone in
the last light of the west.
"She is four miles off," said Carlton.
"We must signal her," added Lambourne.
"With what?" asked Carlton, in the same sharp but low voice; "every
color is overboard."
"Any thing will do--a blue shirt at the foremast head; quick!--the
sky will be quite dark in ten minutes. Run it up in a ball with a
slipping loop, man-o'-war fashion," said Lambourne in a loud whisper;
"get ready a ship's lantern some of you, for the night darkens so
fast that we shall scarcely be visible when she is abeam of us. Ned,
get into the fore-channel, and wave the light as a signal that we
want a boat."
These orders were rapidly obeyed, and preparations made to throw the
brig in the wind. While one man hastily got the lantern from a
little round house, in which certain stores and tools were kept on
deck, Ned Carlton pulled off his shirt, and was in the act of binding
it to the signal halyards, when the Spaniard, whose quick ears
detected some commotion, sprang on deck, armed as usual.
On seeing Carlton busy with the halyards, he looked round, caught
sight of the ship, which was running with the white foam boiling
under her forefoot, and thus in a moment divined what we were about.
Muttering a terrible imprecation in Spanish, he fired at Carlton, but
missed him as before, and shot dead a poor apprentice who was close
by.
"'Tarnal thunder, flesh and blood can't bear this!" shouted Tom
Lambourne, whose fury was boundless, and who snatched up a
capstan-bar. "Bear down on him all hands: there is neither sea law
nor land law can help us here!"
Snatching whatever came nearest to hand, we all rushed upon the
Cubano, who stood boldly at bay, and keeping the binnacle between us
and him, fired over it five or six shots from his revolver with
terrible rapidity; but so unsteady had his hand become in consequence
of his free potations below, that every bullet missed, though one cut
the knuckles of Tom Lambourne's right hand, and another tore away the
rim of my straw hat.
He drew a second revolver from his sash, but Lambourne, by one lucky
blow with the capstan-bar, knocked it out of his hand. It went
twenty feet into the air, and fell overboard.
Quick as lightning, Antonio placed the other in his breast, drew his
knife, stooped his head, and darting through us like an eel, gave
Carlton a gash in the thigh as he passed.
He then made for the main-rigging, and sprang on the bulwark, no
doubt with the intention of running up aloft to some secure perch,
where he might reload his remaining pistol, and shoot us all down at
leisure; but he missed his hold of the rattlins, and fell overboard!
There was a shout of furious joy.
"The sea will rob the gallows of its due!" said Carlton; "but he'll
be shark's meat, any way."
But Antonio was not gone yet, for in falling he caught one of the
lower studding-sail booms, and clutched it with deadly tenacity, for
he knew that if once he was fairly launched into the ocean his fate
would be sealed.
His face was pale with combined fear and fury; his black eyes blazed
with the fire of hatred; the perspiration oozed in drops upon his
temples. Tom Lambourne sprang forward to beat off his fingers; but
at that moment, the boom, a slender spar, broke from its lashings
alongside and swung out at a _right angle_ from the brig, with the
wretch at the extreme end of it, dangling over the waves, like a
herring at the point of a ramrod.
Again and again he writhed his body upward in wild struggles to get
astride the boom, or to reach it with his knees, but in vain!
Instead of exciting pity, his terrible situation drew forth a shout
of derision, mingled with expressions of hatred and satisfaction,
from the line of avenging faces that surveyed him over the bulwark.
He hung thus for fully five minutes, for he was a powerful man, of
great strength, muscle, and bulk.
I have no doubt this man was as brave as it is possible for a ruffian
to be; but the prospect of an immediate death--a death, too, from
which there was no escape--terrified him.
His glance of hate toward us turned to one of wild and earnest
entreaty.
"Mercy!--pardon!--in the name and for the love of the Almighty!" he
exclaimed in Spanish, in a tone of intense earnestness; but he was
heard by us with fierce derision in that moment of just triumph and
too long delayed vengeance.
Twice the _Eugenie_ gave a lee lurch, and each time the feet and
knees of the wretched Cubano were immersed in the waves.
Beneath him was the abyss of water that rushed past the side of the
brig. He panted rather than breathed; and through the dusk we could
see how his aching hands turned white as his face; and that the
points of his fingers were blood-red. His eyes grew wild and haggard
as terror chilled his coward heart and agonized his soul; and yet
through the surge the fleet craft flew on!
Every moment increased the weight of his body and the weakness of his
hands and wrists.
At last it was evident that his powers of endurance could be no
longer taxed; he uttered a half-smothered shriek, and closed his eyes
as he clung to that slender spar, and it swayed to and fro while the
close-hauled brig flew on!
There was a crash!
The iron hook in the bulwark on which the studding-sail boom was
hung, gave way under the double weight of the spar and of his body.
There was a shrill cry of despair, like the parting shriek of an evil
spirit, on the skirt of the gusty blast, as the boom, and the wretch
who clung to it in blind desperation, vanished into the black trough
of the sea, and, like a cork or a reed, were swept amid the salt foam
to leeward.
The _Eugenie_ rose like a duck upon the water, and, as if freed at
that moment from a load of crime, seemed to fly forward with
increased speed.
'Twas night now, and the ship which we had first seen upon our
weather bow, was a mile astern and to leeward of us.