"Aye, make ready to cut," muttered Jack.
The ship heaved herself high and then listed far down to starboard. Joe slashed at the last strands of the tackles and yelled to Jack to let go the hawser. Instead of discharging the nine-pounder, they were employing the piece itself, and the carriage of oak and iron, as a terrible missile. The moment of launching it was shrewdly chosen. The pirates, still in compact formation as led by Ned Rackham, were directly abreast of this forward gun of the main deck battery. The deck inclined at a steep and giddy pitch. With a grinding roar the gun rolled from its station. It gathered impetus and lunged across the ship as an instrument of fell destruction. It was more to be feared than an assault of armed men.
The warning rumble of the iron wheels as they furrowed the planking was heard by the pirates. They turned from their game of butchery and stood frozen in their tracks for a frightened instant. Then they tried to flee in all directions. Their tarry pigtails fairly stood on end. Well they knew what it meant to have a gun break adrift in a heavy sea. Two or three who had been badly hurt were unable to move fast enough. The gun crunched over them and then seemed to pursue a limping pirate, veering to overtake him as he fled. He was tossed against the bulwark like a bundle of bloody rags.
The gun crashed into the stout timbers of the ship's side and they were splintered like match-wood. It rebounded as the deck sloped sharply in the next wallowing roll, and now this frenzied monster of wood and iron seemed fairly to run amuck. It was inspired with a sinister intelligence, resolved to wreak all the damage possible. The pinnace, the water barrels, the coamings of the cargo hatches, were smashed to fragments as the gun turned this way and that and went plunging in search of victims.
Left to themselves, the seamen of the Plymouth Adventure would have risked their lives to cast ropes about the gun and moor it fast. But now they were quick to see that the tide had been turned in their favor. The pirates were demoralized. Some were in the rigging, others atop the bulwarks, and only the readiest and boldest, with Ned Rackham in the lead, had an eye to the task in hand, which was to regain possession of the ship.
And now the boatswain of the Plymouth Adventure, a rosy giant of a man from South Devon, shouted to his comrades to follow him. They delayed until the runaway cannon crashed into another gun, and then they broke like sprinters from the mark and sped straight for the mainmast, seeking the rack of boarding-pikes. They ran nimbly, as men used to swaying decks, and compassed the distance in a few strides.
THE BRAWN OF THESE LADS MADE THE PIKE A MATCH FOR A PIRATE'S CUTLASS
Ned Rackham perceived their purpose and tried to intercept but his few staunch followers moved warily, expecting to see that insensate monster of a gun bear down upon them. The swiftest of the merchant sailors laid hands on the pikes and whirled to cover their shipmates, until all hands could be armed. Then the gun came roaring down at them but they ducked behind the mast or stepped watchfully aside. Men condemned to death are not apt to lose their wits in the face of one more peril.
These pikes were ashen shafts with long steel points and the merchant seamen had been trained to use them. And the brawn of these lads made the pike a match for a pirate's cutlass. Ned Rackham bounded forward to swing at the broad, deep-chested boatswain. A wondrous pair of antagonists they were, in the prime of their youth and vigor. The pirate's cutlass bit clean through the pike shaft as the boatswain parried the blow but the apple-cheeked Devonshire man closed in and wrapped his arms around his foe. They went to the deck clutching for each other's throats and the fight trampled over them.