“And if they do not, sir?”
“Then God help the ship, Larry—she will not be afloat a week.”
McShanus interposed to say that they were between the devil and the deep sea, surely. I found him wonderfully serious. It is odd to think how many cheery fellows, who write gaily of life and death in the newspaper, have never seen a gun fired in earnest or looked unflinchingly upon the face of death.
“’Tis a coward I was,” said he, “and not ashamed of it. This very minute I tremble like a woman—though ’tis often of kindness a woman trembles and not of fear. Look yonder at the smoke lifting from off the face of the ship. What lies under it, my friends?—God Almighty, what are those feeling and thinking and suffering now that they are going to their Maker. ’Tis as though I, myself, had been called this instant to remember that I shall be as they—who knows when, who knows how? A cruel torment of a thought—God help me for it.”
Here was a McShanus mood to be laughed off, and that it would have been but for the panorama suddenly disclosed by the soaring smoke which gradually lifted from the face of the hidden ship. Nor was it clear in a twinkling that the seamen (as I supposed would be the case) had obtained the upper hand, and were become the masters of the vessel.
We could see them by our glasses running hither and thither, from the fo’castle to the poop, in and out of the companion hatch; now up, now down, sometimes in single combat with one or other of the vanquished; again slashing in a glut of mad desire at a prostrate figure or an enemy already dead. What weapons they had, I found it quite impossible to say. From time to time, it is true, a pistol was discharged as though it were at some lurking or hidden foe; but in the main, I believe they must just have used common marline-spikes or had gone to it with their clasp-knives in their hands. And their anger, however it had been provoked, defied all words to measure. As beasts to the carcase, so they returned again and again to the bodies of those whom they had destroyed. We espied victors in all the attitudes of bravado and defiance, dancing, leaping, even striking at each other. And this endured so great a while that I began to say the holocaust would go on to the end and hardly a man of them live to tell the tale.
This fearful encounter ceased finally about four o’clock of the afternoon watch. Ironically enough, I heard them strike eight bells just as though it had been upon a ship in good order at sea; and as the sounds came floating over the water to us, I reflected upon the amazing force of habit which governs a sailor even in the most terrible of situations.
“Larry,” I said. “They would change the watch even if the sea dried up. What’s to be done now? what, in God’s name, can we do? I’d go aboard if it were not criminal to take the risk. That’s not to be thought of—a man would be safer in a lion’s den at present. And yet think of what it must be over there——”
“I’ve been trying not to think of it all along, sir. Whatever’s happened, it’s over now. They’re putting the dead overboard—and, what’s more, launching a boat. I shouldn’t wonder if they came alongside, sir.”
“Alongside us, Larry? That would be something new. Do you really mean it?”