A great outcry arose.
It was repeated with anguish, as the careering continued as if a giant hand was rolling her over. Then the black faces of the stokers and engineer were seen as they came climbing up on deck to add themselves to the no less terrified crew. The steamer's deck was at a slope of forty-five, everybody clinging to the uppermost gunwale, save the unlucky ones who had rolled to the down scuppers, in among the rubbish which a Mexican captain allows to encumber his upper planks. The swaying cannon above threatened to break loose and crush these struggling wretches to marmalade, whilst their vis-à-vis, bursting the port lids, ran out to the carriages and kissed the agitated water. Poor Maria Josefa, grasping a sailor round the body whilst he hung on the taut guy of the reeling smoke pipe, hovered over the knot of writhing, fighting men trying to get a footing on a surface every moment changing its centre of gravity.
At that direful instant the boat of Gladsden was slightly pulled down on the opposite side to the steamer, and two dark heads succeeded two pair of red arms, abruptly seizing the gunwale by chin and hands. In the mouths of both were the formidable navajas, "gapped" by recent rough usage and pointless.
"You, Diego? And young Diego?" cried the captain, assisting them on board.
"Yes; you see um steamer go down, and you see um pirates go up pretty soon dam quick! Old Diego and young Diego play swordfish—we scuttle the steamer, see?"
In fact an ominous hissing seemed to indicate that the water rising within the steamer, well on her side now, was menacing a blow up of the boilers. The engineer and his mate fully foresaw this, and were scrambling into a boat, jammed of its fall in the blocks.
"Heaven guard us!" was the shout on the ill-fated steamer. Some forty men were seen preparing to launch the boats, or even leap into the water, when a louder scream, though from one pair of lungs, was audible over the clamour. Doña Maria Josefa, with the sailor on whom she would not relax her grasp, had rolled like a ball across the perpendicular decks, bounded over the bulwarks, now washed by the water, and splashed out of sight.
As if her plunge had been arranged for the eliciting of a salute, pistol shots from the rock islet announced that the pirates and Benito were at firing range.
There was chaos.
The hissing steam, the splitting vessel, the straining yards and masts, the knocking about of everything loose within the half-flooded hull, the exclamations of the men in the water, some of whom mounted on the drift, shouted out "shark!" no pen can do justice to, and to the critical situation which doña Maria was the most prominent object, the centre, the feminine hub of a wheel of frantic men.