This must have settled the colonel if it had fallen on his uncovered head. Fortunately though, dropping quickly the colonel’s arm, I fended off the blow with the revolver I held in my hand, while at the same time I gave the scoundrel a drive in the face that must have astonished his black lordship a good deal, for my clenched fist met him square on the mouth and shook his teeth, making them rattle, as well as disarranging the twist of his crinkly moustache!
He came at me with a snarl like an angry tiger, and then, hugging me tight, with his hideous black face thrust close against mine, and his muscular arms pressed tightly around my ribs, he squeezed every ounce of breath out of my body.
I thought my last hour had come.
But help came to my aid from a most unlooked-for quarter.
“Ah! you blackguard,” cried a voice that sounded dimly in my ears, my head at the time seeming to be whirling round like the arms of a windmill from the sense of suffocation and the rush of blood to the brain. “Coward! miscreant! you are here again.”
Breathless though I was, I was so surprised, and indeed frightened at the voice and accent of the speaker, which I immediately recognised, that I at once came to myself and opened wide my half-closed eyes.
Good heavens! Shall I ever forget the sight? Yes; it was Captain Alphonse, whom I had last seen only half an hour or so previously in the skipper’s cot on board the Star of the North, when Garry O’Neil said he would probably never wake to consciousness again in this life, or move out of the skipper’s state room!
Here he was though, all the same, looking like an apparition from the dead, wild, ghastly, awful, but quite sufficiently in his senses to recognise his terrible enemy, the pseudo “marquis.”
It is a scene I shall never forget, as I remarked before.
Like poor Ivan, and with equal ferocity, the Frenchman sprang at the ugly villain’s throat, the whole lot of us tumbling headlong on the deck together, which caused the wretch to release me in order to protect himself from Captain Alphonse, who, kneeling on the top of him, hammered him against the bulwarks as though trying to beat the life out of him.