From the galley, the cook came running with blazing coals on a shovel. He had been watching the gun. The pirate missed her mark. She came up in stays, just as the “Spencer” got again on the wind. The bows of the robber-craft were almost in touch with the brig.
Adam saw that the cannon would fail to sweep the pirate’s decks—that the shot would be practically wasted, if it went at the gun’s present elevation. With a sudden impulse he leaped astride its smooth, brass nose and bore it down, depressing the muzzle toward the water, just as the crazy cook turned his shovel upside down on the primed vent.
There was suddenly a deafening roar. The concussion shook every man’s feet from under him. The gun leaped backward, like a bucking horse, and Rust went sprawling on the decks, for he had been left abruptly, with no support beneath him.
The shot tore a hole in the pirate the size of a hogshead, squarely on her water-line, in her starboard bow. She came about in the wind and the sea rushed into her hold in a torrent.
A dreadful silence ensued when the air was clear of the detonation. Then a moan from a dying wretch on the “Spencer’s” deck seemed to touch into being a chorus of yells from the doomed pirate, where the murderous crew found themselves armed to the teeth and yet sinking, defenseless, into the very jaws of death. Their sails slackened again and shook with a sound as of funeral shrouds.
The “Spencer” scudded away into the boulevard of silver which the moon was paving with its light. The sinking pirate gathered the cannon’s smoke about her and settled swiftly, but not in silence, into the grave that fitted so snugly about its body.
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE GLINT OF TREASURE.
The brig “Captain Spencer,” came duly to her goal at the green Bahamas. What with wounds received from the pirates, who had called so unceremoniously, and from sea-sickness, which they always had, the beef-eaters were glad of the sight of land. Phipps and Rust were filled with rejoicings by reason of the dreams they had of thrusting a naked arm apiece into the sea and fetching up handfuls of gold with which to return to two sweet women in Boston.
All hands were presently doomed to disappointment. Phipps learned that his treasure-ship was indeed a fact, but that she was small, both in tonnage and her burden of Spanish coins, that she lay in many fathoms of water and that, indeed, she was scarcely worth serious attention.