Sybella could be heard though concealed by the tall black men of the mountains who again hurled themselves on the white men who guarded the gateway.
The revolvers were empty. Jack sent his flying into a black face as he gripped the hilt of his cutlass and joined old Brice and the carpenter in the deadly reaping they were doing. Burton having no other weapon than the revolver, threw it aside and seized a club that had dropped from the hands of one of the slain blacks.
The sweep of those old cutlasses in the powerful hands that held them was awful, magnificent; no matter what may have been the history of those old blades they had never been wielded as now. But numbers began to tell and the infuriated negroes fought like fiends, urged on by the old siren Sybella who shrieked out a kind of battle song of the blacks.
How long the four held back the hundreds none can tell, but it seemed an age to the fast wearying men who held the gate. A blow from an ax split McLeod’s head and he fell dead without even a groan. Brice turned as he heard his shipmate fall and received a stunning smash on the temple from a club that felled him like an ox in the shambles.
“He recklessly rushed in front of Burton.”
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—