"Sancho! Rufe! Have done with this play!" she cried, placing herself in front of the blood-hungry horde. "Dogs, fall back! Have ye no memory that ye forget how Dolores strikes?"
Milo had picked up a handspike, and with it across his breast he bore back the scowling rascals, smiling the while himself with quiet contempt. But one, hardier than the rest, ran to the skylight, dashed in the glass with his boot, and cried with outflung arm:
"A plague upon her and her strokes. See yonder, lads—her cunning trick—our sloop comes back empty-handed, as she well knew it would—and here lies to your hands work that the Red Chief had reveled in. Down with her and the big bull! Below is loot fit for bold fellows."
Without moving from where he stood, Milo pivoted around, the heavy handspike—six feet of true ash—rigid as a bar of iron, took the overbold pirate at the base of the skull and spilled his brains into the breach he had made. Growling with fury, a man from Sancho's crew sprang to avenge the stroke with steel, and his blade creased down Milo's sturdy ribs before the giant had recovered from his own swing. And with the hissing slit of ripping skin Milo's debt was paid for him. Dolores, agile as a panther, reached the pirate with her cutlas pointed, and the steel hilt rang against his breast-bone.
But in the momentary pause in her vigilance, a score of Rufe's ruffians burst past her and poured below into the saloon, where renewed sounds of combat told of the ferreting out of the beaten crew.
"Milo, follow me!" cried Dolores, springing down the stairs herself, careless whether her wavering half-dozen followed or stayed. Her whole soul was sickened with the fear that this vessel, the long-wished-for means of her release from what had become a hateful bondage, was in danger of destruction at the red hands of Rufe's undisciplined dogs. And swiftly approaching on the freshening evening breeze her sloop grew momentarily clearer to the eye; it was easy to fancy she could hear the howls of disappointed rage pealing up from her deck; it needed no second sight to determine the side those humiliated pirates would take, when they hove alongside another prey which promised at least a taste of coveted loot.
In the brief time since the pirates' entry the schooner's saloon had become a place of desolation. All the magnificence of unrestricted cost was there; and all the beauty of artistic selection; and over all was the mark of the beast—blood and torn hangings, corpses and splintered panels, chaos and sulfur smoke as the pillage started. Dolores sought out through the smoke a breathing man in the uniform of the yacht, and swiftly placed her lips to his ear, her mind made up to a terrible expedient to save this vessel for herself.
"Tell me quickly—where is the magazine?"
The man opened his agonized eyes, saw that splendid blazing face close to his own, and shook his head loyally. He would give his master's enemies no assistance.
"Speak, fool!" she hissed, shaking him. They were alone by the great table-leg on the red-stained carpet. "I would defeat these sharks! Where is the powder?"