"She's going!" he cried, and it was his last word. One of those devilish six feet of whirling bars scattered him and three others into fragments and then shore its way through the bulwarks behind. And the winged Swallow began to roll under our feet in the way that makes a seaman's heart grow sick.
The Frenchman never ceased firing on us. No matter. It was only a choice of deaths. Not a man among us would have asked his life from him, even if the chance had been given, and it was not.
My last look at the Frenchman showed him coming straight for us. I saw the great forecastle gun belch its cloud of smoke. The water was spouting up in white jets through our scuppers. It came foaming green and white through our gun ports. Then, in solid green sheets, it leaped up over the bulwarks, and for a moment the long flush deck was a boiling cauldron with a bloody scum, in which twirled and twisted dead men and living, and fragments of the ship and rigging.
When I came up through the roaring green water I found myself within arm's length of the foretopsailyard, to which a strip of ragged sail still hung. I hooked my arm over it and looked round for my comrades. About a score of heads floated in the belching bubbles of the sunken ship, but even as I looked the number lessened, for the Island men of those days were no swimmers. A burly body swung past me. I grabbed it, dragged it to the spar and hoisted its arm over it. It was John Ozanne, and presently he recovered sufficiently to get his other arm up and draw himself chest-high to look about him. The light spar would not support us both, and I let myself sink into the water, with only a grip on a hanging rope's end to keep in tow with it.
John Ozanne gazed wildly round for a minute, and then raised his right arm and volubly cursed the Frenchman, who was coming right down on us.
"Oh, you devils! You devils! May—" and then to my horror, for with the wash of the waves in my ears I could hear nothing, a small round hole bored itself suddenly in his broad forehead, just where the brown and the white met, and he threw up his arms and dropped back into the water.
I made a grab for him, but he was gone, and even as I did so the meaning of that hideous little round hole in his forehead came plain to me. The Frenchman was shooting at every head he could see.
I dragged the spar over me, and floated under the strip of sail with no more than my nose showing between it and the wood, and the long black hull, with its red streak glistening as though but just new dipped in blood, swept past me so close that I could have touched it. Through the opening between my sail and the spar I could see grim faces looking over the side, and the flash and smoke of muskets as the poor strugglers beyond were shot down one by one.
I lay there—in fear and trembling, I confess, for against cold-blooded brutality such as this no man's courage may avail—till the last shots had long died away. And when at last I ventured to raise my head and look about me, the Frenchman was stretching away to the north-east and the Indiaman was pressing to the north, and both were far away. The sun sank like a ball of fire dipped in blood as I watched. The long red trail faded off the waters, and the soft colours out of the sky. The sea was a chill waste of tumbling waves. The sky was a cast-iron shutter. The manhood went out of me, and I sank with a sob on to my frail spar, for of all our company which had sailed so gallantly out of Peter Port five days before, I was the only one left, and the rest had all been done to death in most foul and cruel fashion.