“You will let me fight by your side?” replied the soldier.
“Not so,” answered the old seaman. “Yours is a sterner duty. Any one can fight when his blood is up, and death sure, whatever happen. I am going to lower the Spanish Don and his daughter into the hold, and your station will be beside them.”
“And do you for a moment think I am going to be shut up like a bandicoot in a hole, while others fight for life and liberty?” indignantly asked the soldier.
Captain Weber grasped Hughes by the hand, looking into his face, and pointing to the schooner as he spoke:
“The crew of yonder pirate are not human beings. They are steeped in murder and crime. Our fate is death, sure and certain death. Maddened by the destruction of their comrades, by their defeat in yonder Bay, no torments will be spared us. It will not be simply walking the plank, but the worst torture those practised villains can invent, which awaits us.”
“Look at her white sails, and tapering spars, how beautiful she is, as she sheers down on us. Is all this possible?”
“More is possible,” replied the master, “Death will be our fate, but not the lady’s. A life-long servitude of the vilest description on board yon floating hell will be her fate!”
Captain Hughes covered his face with his hands, and his tall, sinewy frame shook with emotion. The loud boom of the eighteen-pounder, and the crashing of the shot as it plunged into the brig’s bows, the rending and riving of her timbers, were unnoticed.
“There are ten barrels of powder in the hold; to you, as the man most interested in it, I give the charge of the magazine. The barrels are piled one on another. Yours should be a cool head and a determined hand. When the last hope is over, when the brig is carried, as carried she must be, but then only, fire your pistol into the nearest keg, and rid the seas of yonder miscreant, whose white sails bear him to his doom.”
A rattling peal of thunder came from the dark mass of clouds, while a vivid flash of forked lightning seemed to bury itself in the waves.