gone.

"Captain," cried the voice of the dejected mulatto, as the door of the
pen flew open and the bandit-looking stranger appeared with the lamp,
"there's a white man here going to kill you. I've taken his knife from
him and saved your life. It's a rebellion, captain!"

"Help! Patty! Joe!" cried the man, with a loud voice, as Jimmy Phoebus
threw himself upon him and extinguished the lamp, and the two powerful
men rolled on the floor together in a grip of mortal combat.

Phoebus was a man of great power, but his antagonist was strong and
slippery, too, and a spirited rough-and-tumble fighter.

The pungy captain was on top, the bandit man locked him fast in his arms
and legs, and tried to stab him in the side, as Phoebus felt the
handle of a clasp-knife, which seemed slow to obey its spring, strike
him repeatedly all round the groin, in strokes that would have killed,
inflicted by the blade.

Phoebus attempted to drag the man to the hatchway and force him down
it, while the two negro assistants of Phoebus beat down the negro
traitor with their chains, and searched him vainly for the knife he had
filched.

At last Phoebus prevailed, and his antagonist rolled down the open
hatchway, seven feet or more, still keeping his desperate hold on
Phoebus, and dragging him along; and both might have cracked their
skulls but for a woman just in the act of hurrying up the ladder,
against whom their two bodies pitched and were cushioned upon her.

The shock, however, stunned both of them, and when Phoebus recollected
himself he was tied hand and foot and lying on the garret floor again,
and over him stood Joe Johnson, flourishing a cowhide.

The bandages had again been torn from Phoebus's face, and he was
bleeding at the flesh-wound in his cheek, and breathless from his
conflict. A woman had dashed a vessel of water into his face, and this
had revived him.

The other man, called "captain," had, meantime, by the aid of this
woman--the same Phoebus had seen down-stairs--subdued and tied the
black insurgents, and both of them were flourishing their whips over the
backs and heads of the prisoners, big and little, so that the garret was
no slight reflection of the place of eternal torment, as the shadows of
the monsters, under the weak light, whipped and danced against the beams
and shingles, and shrieks and shouts of "Mercy!" blended in hideous
dissonance.

The woman now turned her lamp on the sailor's rough, swarthy, injured