"How many are we, Purdy?"
"Thirty and nine, Captain."
"Then do you take ten and scale the starboard cliff and you, Abner, with other ten take the cliff to larboard. I'll bide here wi' the rest and so we'll have 'em—"
"Them cliffs be perilous high, Cap'n!"
"My hook is more perilous, Tom Day! Off wi' you, ye dogs, or I'll show ye a liver yet and be—"
He stopped all at once as, faint at first yet most dreadful to hear, there rose a man's cry, chilling the flesh with horror, a cry that waxed and swelled louder and louder to a hideous screaming that shrilled upon the night and, sinking to an awful bubbling murmur, was gone.
Up sprang Tressady to stare away across Deliverance whence this dreadful cry had come, and I saw his hook tap-tapping at his great chin; then beyond these shining sands was the thunderous roar of a great gun, a furious rattle of small-arms that echoed and re-echoed near and far, and thereafter single shots in rapid succession. Hereupon rose shouts and cries of dismay:
"Lord love us we'm beset! O Cap'n, we be took fore and aft. What shall us do, Cap'n? Yon was a gun. What o' the ship, Cap'n—what o' the ship?"
"Yonder—look yonder! Who comes?" cried Tressady, pointing towards Deliverance Beach with his glittering hook.
Twisting my head as I lay, I looked whither he pointed, and saw one that ran towards us, yet in mighty strange fashion, reeling in wide zig-zags like a drunken man; and sometimes he checked, only to come on again, and sometimes he fell, only to struggle up.