Chapter Seventeen.
Recounts the wild, fierce, and in some Respects peculiar Incidents of a Bush Fight.
Although the pirates were taken aback by this unexpected advance of the Rajah’s gun-boat to within pistol-shot of their very doors, they were by no means cowed. Malays are brave as a race, and peculiarly regardless of their lives. They manned their guns, and stood to them with unflinching courage, but they were opposed by men of the same mettle, who had the great advantage of being better armed, and led by a man of consummate coolness and skill, whose motto was—“Conquer or die!”
We do not say that the captain of the gun-boat professed to hold that motto, for he was not a boaster, but it was clearly written in the fire of his eye, and stamped upon the bridge of his nose!
The pirate-guns were soon dismounted, their stockade was battered down, and when a party at last landed, with the captain at their head, and Edgar with his diving friends close at his heels, they were driven out of their fortification into the woods.
Previously to this, however, all the women and children had been sent further into the bush, so that the attacking party met none but fighting-men. Turning round a bend in a little path among the bushes, Edgar, who had become a little separated from his friends, came upon a half-naked Malay, who glared at him from behind a long shield. The pirate’s style of fighting was that of the Malay race in general, and had something ludicrous, as well as dangerous, about it. He did not stand up and come on like a man, but, with his long legs wide apart and bent at the knees, he bounded hither and thither like a monkey, always keeping his body well under cover of the shield, and peering round its edges or over, or even under it, according to fancy, while his right hand held a light spear, ready to be launched at the first favourable moment into the unprotected body of his adversary.
Edgar at once rushed upon him, snapping his revolver as he ran; but, all the chambers having been already emptied, no shot followed. Brandishing his cutlass, he uttered an involuntary shout.
The shout was unexpectedly replied to by another shout of “Aileen, to the rescue!” which not only arrested him in his career, but seemed to perplex the pirate greatly.
At that moment the bushes behind the latter opened; a man in ragged shirt-sleeves and torn trousers sprang through, whirled a mighty club in the air, and smote the pirate’s uplifted shield with such violence as to crush it down on its owner’s head, and lay him flat and senseless on the ground.