"Plug em! ply em!" roared the Gunner. "Red ot shot—cannister—case! anything ye like only give em slaughter for eaven's sweet sake!"
He was back in the thick of it, raving up and down the deck, sowing death broadcast, his great voice everywhere.
Not a man on board but seemed to have caught something of his heroic fury. The purser's steward, primmest of Methodists, who was said to pass his time in action converting the cook, came tripping out of the galley, a black-jack of boiling water in his hand.
"Glory for you!" he screamed, and flung the contents in the face of a boarder.
"There's the proper Christian!" gasped the Gunner, slammed up against the main-mast. "Propagate the Gospel ow ye can!—bilin bilge!—buckets o filth!—spit in his face if ye can't do no better."
A tall Frenchman pistoled the little steward.
The ship's cook, a flabby great flat-footed man, all in white, and snorting strangely, bundled up with a poll-axe, and cleft the Frenchman's skull.
"It a chap your own size!" he yelled, and felled from behind, went down himself.
IV
Up and down the deck the battle raged: here a scrimmage; there a single fight; men at hand-grips; men hurling round-shot. They swayed, they staggered about in each other's arms; they shocked, parted, came together again. Dead men lay in the scuppers; wounded men crawled the deck; and up and down among them the living reeled. One man, turned cur, crouched under the bulwark with ghastly face uplifted, and met his death, whimpering. Another, strangely quiet amid the dance of devils, stood against the foremast, nursing a broken arm. Nobody heeded him. They were too busy.