"Manuel Gautier," cried he to the chief mate, "cast loose that gun in the weather-bow!"
Manuel, a smart and handsome young fellow, with the surgeon and two others, soon cast loose the lashings of the gun, and in a twinkling it was loaded, not with round shot, but with some thirty or forty ball cartridges.
"Now, forward with it to the coaming of the hatchway," ordered the captain.
"But the bottom of the ship?" urged Gautier.
"Blow these rascals through it!" was the stern answer.
"Madre de Dios and all the saints keep us!" implored Fra Anselmo, crossing himself; "senor, you do not mean to destroy them thus?"
"Yes—like rats, padre mio," replied the Spanish captain. "Depress the muzzle, hombres—up with the breech; clap a handspike under it, Gautier. Ready the fuse—a lucifer match or any thing will do."
"Miserecordia—O miserecordia!" cried one fellow, looking up the hatchway with hands clasped, for the aspect of the round muzzle of the depressed cannon filled them all with terror, and made the miserable Lascars scream like children.
"Have mercy on us, senores!" howled the Spaniards in chorus, again and again.
"And what then?" asked Manuel Gautier, who was preparing a gun-match, as coolly as he might have made a paper cigarito.