Captain Weber was turning away. “Phillips,” he said, as he did so, “you have a wife and children over yonder—what do you think they will say when they hear of your being hung as a mutineer?”
The taunt was too much for him. With a howl of rage, the drunken sailor raised his pistol, and the muzzle was within a foot of the old seaman’s head, as he pulled the trigger. Standing tall and erect, with a smile of withering scorn on his features as the report rang out, Captain Weber seemed for a moment unhurt; then, with a reel like that of a drunken man, he fell, close to the spot where Hughes lay, Isabel kneeling beside him. The ball had struck him on the temple, and he was dead before he touched the planks, his head hanging over the side, and his long white hair washing to and fro in the sea as the raft rose on the swell.
Uttering a wild savage shout, the drunken sailor sprang over the corpse, followed by his comrades in crime. The rubicon of blood was indeed past. Another instant, and the scanty band, now greatly reduced in numbers, would be swept from the raft. The shouts and execrations of the seamen, maddened as they were with fiery spirit, rang over the calm, quiet sea, as, swinging his clubbed musket round his head, Mr Lowe, now the senior officer present, met the mutineers half way. Phillips, with a deep oath, again fired, as the mate struck the ruffian with all the power rage could give to a muscular arm, knocking him off the raft with the force of the blow. Once more the swish of the water was heard, as the sea around boiled into foam. The senseless body was tossed to and fro like a cork, half a dozen huge fins appearing above the water. Suddenly it was drawn down, reappeared, and then the wave was red with blood, as the sharks tore their prey piecemeal.
“Come on, ye ruffians, and meet your doom!” yelled the triumphant mate; but hardly had the words passed his lips when a dull heavy report came booming over the ocean.
A deep dead silence ensued, then a wild cheer burst from the mate’s breast.
“Hurrah!” he shouted. “We are saved, my lads,—saved at last!” as he drew back from his exposed situation, and joined the rest.
A distant flash was now seen, and then once more the boom of the gun came over the ocean, this time replied to by the successive reports of the guns and pistols of the mate’s little party, fired one after another into the air, sending each a spirt of flame into the darkness of the night, while far away a small fiery star rose and fell to the motion of the waves, the same which had so engaged Hughes’s attention at the moment he received the treacherous blow from the mutineer Gough. It was a whaler’s light.
The men, now frightened and partially sobered, attempted no further violence. They seemed thoroughly cowed, saying not a word, even when the mate walked unarmed among them, and commenced throwing overboard deliberately, one after another, bottle after bottle of the fiery spirit they had stolen, and which had caused all the mischief. Without it, the pernicious counsels of the man Gough, and his almost as black hearted ally, Phillips, had never been listened to.
“I say, Mr Lowe, you’ll let us poor beggars down mild, won’t you? It was that damned rum did it all,” said one of the now humbled seamen.
The mate spoke never a word, but pointed silently to the body of the captain, as it lay on the planking, the long white hair moving in the wash of the sea, and the blood slowly welling from the shattered forehead. It was a ghastly sight, as the faint starlight revealed it to the sobered crew.