"'Tarnal thunder, flesh and blood can't bear this!" shouted Tom Lambourne, whose fury was boundless, and who snatched up a capstan-bar. "Bear down on him all hands: there is neither sea law nor land law can help us here!"
Snatching whatever came nearest to hand, we all rushed upon the Cubano, who stood boldly at bay, and keeping the binnacle between us and him, fired over it five or six shots from his revolver with terrible rapidity; but so unsteady had his hand become in consequence of his free potations below, that every bullet missed, though one cut the knuckles of Tom Lambourne's right hand, and another tore away the rim of my straw hat.
He drew a second revolver from his sash, but Lambourne, by one lucky blow with the capstan-bar, knocked it out of his hand. It went twenty feet into the air, and fell overboard.
Quick as lightning, Antonio placed the other in his breast, drew his knife, stooped his head, and darting through us like an eel, gave Carlton a gash in the thigh as he passed.
He then made for the main-rigging, and sprang on the bulwark, no doubt with the intention of running up aloft to some secure perch, where he might reload his remaining pistol, and shoot us all down at leisure; but he missed his hold of the rattlins, and fell overboard!
There was a shout of furious joy.
"The sea will rob the gallows of its due!" said Carlton; "but he'll be shark's meat, any way."
But Antonio was not gone yet, for in falling he caught one of the lower studding-sail booms, and clutched it with deadly tenacity, for he knew that if once he was fairly launched into the ocean his fate would be sealed.
His face was pale with combined fear and fury; his black eyes blazed with the fire of hatred; the perspiration oozed in drops upon his temples. Tom Lambourne sprang forward to beat off his fingers; but at that moment, the boom, a slender spar, broke from its lashings alongside and swung out at a right angle from the brig, with the wretch at the extreme end of it, dangling over the waves, like a herring at the point of a ramrod.
Again and again he writhed his body upward in wild struggles to get astride the boom, or to reach it with his knees, but in vain!