“Wretches! Know that we lack neither men nor weapons. If you attack, we will defend ourselves and fight till the victory is ours.”
The corsairs’ reply was only a jeering laugh.
Then there was a great bustle on board the Myoparian. The mast was raised, hoisting a yard consisting of two pieces, from which hung a large dark object bearing a certain resemblance to a dolphin, for it was distaff-shaped, thickest in the middle and lessening at both ends. This object was evidently very heavy; the mast creaked and strained and the yard bent perceptibly under its weight.
The pirate-ship again approached the merchantman and lay alongside. A man with an evil, almost animal face, wearing a red Phrygian cap on his head, climbed up the yard far enough to be able to look down on the Samian’s deck.
“Too late to yield now!” he shouted. “Now you must all die.”
At these words some of the young slaves burst into loud lamentations; but above every other sound echoed from the tent a frightened child’s sobbing and wailing, which would not be silenced, no matter how tenderly it was hushed.
“What a horrible bawler!” cried the man with the Phrygian cap. “Just wait! When the dolphin comes, he’ll stop his mouth.”
Then, swinging himself over among the rigging that supported the mast, he called to the men below: “Heave!”
The pirates, with a quick swing, brought the yard over the great ship. The man in the red cap pulled with all his might at a rope he held in his hand, and the missile suspended from the yard—the so-called “dolphin,” a leaden mass of immense weight, plunged down upon the tent just as Charicleia came out of it, holding the crying child by the hand. There was a terrible, deafening crash, the ship trembled from masthead to keel as though every seam was separating; almost at the same moment there was heard—this time under the deck—a similar crash, accompanied by a violent jarring and a strange, gurgling, rippling noise like the bubbling of a spring.
The tent was dragged down and partly covered a yawning hole in the deck, from which rose splinters yards long. Charicleia had felt little Callias’ hand torn from hers by some terrible, resistless power, and at the same moment, while half buried under the folds of the tent, a warm, sticky stream had spurted over her foot. Though she had not seen it, she well knew what it was.