mmon stamp of a wild-beast ferocity. Rasping up on either side,
with oars trailing to save them from snapping, they poured in a
living torrent with horrid yell and shrill whoop upon the defenceless
merchantman.

But wilder yet was the cry, and shriller still the scream, when there
rose up from the shadow of those silent bulwarks the long lines of
the English bowmen, and the arrows whizzed in a deadly sleet among the
unprepared masses upon the pirate decks. From the higher sides of the
cog the bowmen could shoot straight down, at a range which was so short
as to enable a cloth-yard shaft to pierce through mail-coats or to
transfix a shield, though it were an inch thick of toughened wood.
One moment Alleyne saw the galley's poop crowded with rushing figures,
waving arms, exultant faces; the next it was a blood-smeared shambles,
with bodies piled three deep upon each other, the living cowering behind
the dead to shelter themselves from that sudden storm-blast of death.
On either side the seamen whom Sir Nigel had chosen for the purpose
had cast their anchors over the side of the galleys, so that the three
vessels, locked in an iron grip, lurched heavily forward upon the swell.

And now set in a fell and fierce fight, one of a thousand of which no
chronicler has spoken and no poet sung. Through all the centuries and
over all those southern waters nameless men have fought in nameless
places, their sole monuments a protected coast and an unravaged
country-side.

Fore and aft the archers had cleared the galleys' decks, but from either
side the rovers had poured down into the waist, where the seamen and
bowmen were pushed back and so mingled with their foes that it was
impossible for their comrades above to draw string to help them. It
was a wild chaos where axe and sword rose and fell, while Englishman,
Norman, and Italian staggered and reeled on a deck which was cumbered
with bodies and slippery with blood. The clang of blows, the cries of
the stricken, the short, deep shout of the islanders, and the fierce
whoops of the rovers, rose together in a deafening tumult, while the
breath of the panting men went up in the wintry air like the smoke from
a furnace. The giant Tete-noire, towering above his fellows and clad
from head to foot in plate of proof, led on his boarders, waving a
huge mace in the air, with which he struck to the deck every man who
approached him. On the other side, Spade-beard, a dwarf in height, but
of gre