The growl that had begun to rise against Briggs died away.
“Mr. Crevay,” he commanded, striding aft, “livelier there with those pigs! They’re not doin’ half a trick o’ work!” Angrily he gestured at the sweat-bathed, panting men. “You, Lumbard, fetch me up a fathom o’ rope. I’ll give ’em a taste o’ medicine that’ll make ’em dig! And you, Mr. Bevans—how’s the gun? All loaded with junk?”
“All ready, sir!”
Briggs turned to it. Out over the water he squinted, laying careful aim at the canoe where Scurlock and the boy had died.
The canoe had already begun retreating from the place now marked by a worrying swirl of waters where the gathering sharks held revel. Back towards the main fleet it was circling as the paddlemen—their naked, brown bodies gleaming with sunlight on the oil that would make them slippery as eels in case of close fighting—bent to their labor.
On the proa and the other sailing-canoes the mat sails had already been hauled up again. The proa was slowly lagging forward; and with it the battle-line, wide-flung.
Briggs once more assured his aim. He seized the lanyard, stepped back, and with a shout of: “Take this, you black scum!” jerked the cord.
The rusty old four-inch leaped against its lashings as it vomited half a bushel of heavy nuts, bolts, brass and iron junk in a roaring burst of smoke and flame.
Fortune favored. The canoe buckled, jumped half out of the water, and, broken fair in two, dissolved in a scattering flurry of débris. Screams echoed with horrible yells from the on-drawing fleet. Dark, moving things, the heads of swimmers already doomed by the fast-gathering sharks, jostled floating things that but a second before had been living men. The whole region near the canoe became a white-foaming thrash of struggle and of death.
“Come on, all o’ you!” howled Briggs with the laughter of a blood-crazed devil. “We’re ready, you surkabutchas! Ready for you all!”