"Captain," cried the voice of the dejected mulatto, as the door of the pen flew open and the bandit-looking stranger appeared with the lamp, "there's a white man here going to kill you. I've taken his knife from him and saved your life. It's a rebellion, captain!"
"Help! Patty! Joe!" cried the man, with a loud voice, as Jimmy Phœbus threw himself upon him and extinguished the lamp, and the two powerful men rolled on the floor together in a grip of mortal combat.
Phœbus was a man of great power, but his antagonist was strong and slippery, too, and a spirited rough-and-tumble fighter.
The pungy captain was on top, the bandit man locked him fast in his arms and legs, and tried to stab him in the side, as Phœbus felt the handle of a clasp-knife, which seemed slow to obey its spring, strike him repeatedly all round the groin, in strokes that would have killed, inflicted by the blade.
Phœbus attempted to drag the man to the hatchway and force him down it, while the two negro assistants of Phœbus beat down the negro traitor with their chains, and searched him vainly for the knife he had filched.
At last Phœbus prevailed, and his antagonist rolled down the open hatchway, seven feet or more, still keeping his desperate hold on Phœbus, and dragging him along; and both might have cracked their skulls but for a woman just in the act of hurrying up the ladder, against whom their two bodies pitched and were cushioned upon her.
The shock, however, stunned both of them, and when Phœbus recollected himself he was tied hand and foot and lying on the garret floor again, and over him stood Joe Johnson, flourishing a cowhide.
The bandages had again been torn from Phœbus's face, and he was bleeding at the flesh-wound in his cheek, and breathless from his conflict. A woman had dashed a vessel of water into his face, and this had revived him.
The other man, called "captain," had, meantime, by the aid of this woman—the same Phœbus had seen down-stairs—subdued and tied the black insurgents, and both of them were flourishing their whips over the backs and heads of the prisoners, big and little, so that the garret was no slight reflection of the place of eternal torment, as the shadows of the monsters, under the weak light, whipped and danced against the beams and shingles, and shrieks and shouts of "Mercy!" blended in hideous dissonance.
The woman now turned her lamp on the sailor's rough, swarthy, injured countenance, and looked him over out of her dark, bold eyes: