Just under the saloon was the magazine, and when the worst should come to the worst, and the savage foe burst through the outer barrier with yells and howls of victory, his child, he determined, should not be torn from his grasp, to suffer cruelty unspeakable at the hands of the foe. He would fire the magazine!
“My friends,” said Halcott, a morning or two after this, as he stood talking to his garrison of five, “the enemy is advancing in even greater force than on any previous occasion. I have but little more to say to you. Let us bid each other ‘good-bye’ just before the fight begins, and die with our swords in our hands—
“‘Like true-born British sailors.’”
The time came at last—and the enemy too.
It was one of the brightest days the Crusoes had ever witnessed on this Isle of Misfortune. Even from the cliff-top, or over the barricade, the distant islands could be seen, like emeralds afloat between sea and sky. The volcanic mountain—so clear was the air—appeared almost within gunshot of the camp.
For hours and hours there had not been a sound heard anywhere. The monster pile of brushwood, behind which those dusky, fiendish warriors hid, had been advanced to within seventy yards of the palisade, but all was silence there. Even the sea-birds had ceased their screaming. All nature was ominously hushed; the bare and blackened country around the camp lay sweltering in the noon-day heat; and the ensign on Observatory Hill had drooped, till it appeared only as a thin, red line against the upper end of the pole.
No one spoke save in a whisper.
But with a little more excitement than usual, Halcott advanced to the place where Tandy stood, rifle in hand, his pistols in his belt, waiting like the others for the inevitable.
Halcott did not even speak. He simply took his friend by the arm and pointed westward.