"You, Karl, Williams—are you coming out now, for me to flog you; or will you swing at New York?"
I could see their whole performance in shadow, as they heard the hail. One of them cocked a pistol, and the rest huddled more closely together.
"Very well," continued the skipper, ironically deliberate. "You've got a couple of planks between you and eternity. I'm going to fire through that galley."
He raised his rifle at the word, and let go straight at the corner of the light wood erection. A dull groan followed, and by the shadow on the deck I saw one man fall forward amongst the others, who held him up with their shoulders; but his blood ran in a thick stream out to the top of the hatchway, and then ran back as the ship heaved to the seas.
For the fifth time the skipper hailed them.
"There's one down amongst you," he said; "and that's the beginning of it; I'm going to blow that shanty to hell, and you with it."
He raised his rifle, but as he did so one of them answered for the first time with his revolver, and the bullet sang above our heads. The skipper's shot was quick in reply; and the wood of the shanty flew in splinters as the bullet shivered it. A second man sprang to his feet with a shout, and then fell across the deck, lying full to be seen in the moonlight.
"That's two of you," continued the skipper, as calm as ever he was in Portsmouth harbour; "we'll make it three for luck." But at the suggestion they all made a run forward, and lay flat right out by the cable. There we could hear them blubbering like children.
The skipper was of a mind to end the thing there and then. He sprang down the ladder to the deck, and we followed him. They fired three shots as we rushed on them; but the butt ends of the two muskets did the rest. Three of them went down straight as felled poplars. The others fell upon their knees and implored mercy; and they got it, but not until the skipper, who now seemed roused to all the fury of great anger, set to kicking them lustily, and with no discrimination—for they all had their full share of it.
We had the other hands up by this, and, despite the tragedy and horror of the thing, a smile came to me as the true men set to binding the others at the skipper's order; for Piping Jack and Planks, and the whole ten of them, fell into such a train of swearing as would have done your heart good to hear. They got them below at the first break of dawn, and the dead they covered; while Paolo, who lay groaning, we carried to a cabin in the saloon, and did for his broken head that which our elementary knowledge of surgery permitted us.