And their butchers had no mercy. They could think only of their past wrongs, and of satiating the thirst for vengeance, which had grown to a madness by previous restraint.
"There's for thirteen years of misery," cries one, driving his spike into the heart of one. "Take that for hanging of my brother," screams a second, cleaving a Moor's skull with his hatchet. "Quits for turning an honest lad into a devil," calls a third, drawing his knife across the throat of a shrieking wretch, and so forth, till not one of all the crowd was left to murder.
Then still devoured by their lust for blood, they swarmed over the side of the galley to finish this massacre--Groves leading with a shout of "No quarter," and all echoing these words with a roar of joy. But here they were met with some sort of resistance, for the Moors aboard, seeing the fate of their comrades, forewarning them of theirs, had turned their swivel gun about and now fired--the ball carrying off the head of Joe Groves, the best man of all that crew, if one were better than another. But this only served to incense the rest the more, and so they went at their cruel work again, and ceased not till the last of their enemies was dead. Then, with a wild hurrah, they signal their triumph, and one fellow, holding up his bloody hands, smears them over his face with a devilish scream of laughter.
And now, caring no more for us or what might befall us, than for the Turks who lay all mangled on our deck, one cuts away the tackle that lashes their galley to us, while the rest haul up the sail, and so they go their way, leaving us to shift for ourselves.
CHAPTER XLI.
How Dawson counts himself an unlucky man who were best dead; and so he quits us, and I, the reader.
The galley bent over to the wind and sped away, and I watched her go without regret, not thinking of our own hapless condition, but only of the brutal ferocity of that mad crew aboard her.
Their shouts of joy and diabolical laughter died away, and there was no sound but the lapping of the waves against the felucca's side. They had done their work thoroughly; not a moan arose from the heaps of butchered men, not a limb moved, but all were rigid, some lying in grotesque postures as the death agony had drawn them. And after the tumult that had prevailed this stillness of death was terrific. From looking over this ghastly picture I turned and clutched at Dawson's hand for some comforting sense of life and humanity.
We were startled at this moment by a light laugh from the cabin, whither Mr. Godwin had carried Moll, fainting with the horror of this bloody business, and going in there we found her now lying in a little crib, light-headed,--clean out of her wits indeed, for she fancied herself on the dusty road to Valencia, taking her first lesson in the fandango from Don Sanchez. Mr. Godwin knelt by the cot side, with his arm supporting her head, and soothing her the best he could. We found a little cask of water and a cup, that he might give her drink, and then, seeing we could be of no further service, Dawson and I went from the cabin, our thoughts awaking now to the peril of our position, without sail in mid-sea.
And first we cast our eyes all round about the sea, but we could descry no sail save the galley (and that at a great distance), nor any sign of land. Next, casting our eyes upon the deck, we perceived that the thick stream of blood that lay along that side bent over by the broken mast, was greatly spread, and not so black, but redder, which was only to be explained by the mingling of water; and this was our first notice that the felucca was filling and we going down.