Jack saw Burton, who was fighting furiously, beset by two savage blacks
armed with axes stuck on long poles. In that supreme moment of peril the
thought of Lucy’s sorrow at loss of her husband, should she be restored
to reason, came to the mind of the great hearted sailor. He recklessly
rushed in front of Burton, severed at a stroke of his sword the arm of
one of Burton’s assailants, and caught the descending ax of the other
when within an inch of the head of the man who had taken the place in
Lucy’s love that he had hoped for.
Jack Dunlap’s cutlass warded off the blow from Burton but the sharp ax
glanced along the blade and was buried in the broad breast of Lucy’s
knight, and he fell across the bodies of his faithful followers, Brice
and McLeod; Jack’s fast deafening ears caught sound of—
“Follow me, lads, give them cold steel. Don’t shoot. You may hit friends!
Charge!”
Tom Maxon’s voice was far from jolly now. There was death in every note
of it as, at the head of a body of United States Blue-jackets, he dashed
in among the black barbarians. When he caught sight of the prostrate,
bleeding form of his old school-fellow he raged like a wounded lion
among Sybella’s savage followers.
As the lieutenant saw that the range of fire was free from his friends,
he cried out, hoarse with passion,
“Fire at will. Give them hell!” and he emptied his own revolver into the
huddled crowd of mountaineers, who still stood, brave to recklessness,
hesitating about what to do against the new adversaries.
The repeating rifles of the Americans soon covered the roadway with dark
corpses. Long lanes were cut by the rapid fire through the black mass.
With howls and yells of mingled terror, rage and disappointment the
mob broke and taking to the jungle disappeared in the darkness of the
adjacent forest.
A sailor kicked aside what he thought was a bundle of rags, and started
back as the torch that he bore revealed the open, fangless mouth and
snake-like, glaring eyes of an old crone of a woman who in death seemed
even more horrible than in life.
A rifle ball, at close range, had shattered Mother Sybella’s skull.