ily-charged gun was answered by a shrill yell of defiance from
two hundred throats.

"Then," said Maru, "the captain go below and say good-bye to women and
girls, and shut and lock cabin door."

Returning to the deck, the brave old man and his second mate and two men
picked up their muskets and began to fire at the black mass of boats and
men that were now well within range. As they fired, the boy Maru loaded
spare muskets for them as fast as his trembling hands would permit.

Once only, as the brigantine swung to the current, the captain brought
the gun on the port side to bear on them again, and fired; and again
there came back the same appalling yell of defiance, for the shower
of bullets only made a wide slat of foam a hundred yards short of the
leading boat.

By the time the gun was reloaded the brigantine had swung round head
to shore again; and then, as the despairing but courageous seamen were
trying to drag it forward again, Deschard and his savages in the leading
boat had gained the ship, and the wild figure of the all but naked
beachcomber sprang on deck, followed by his own crew and nearly two
hundred other fiends well-nigh as bloodthirsty and cruel as himself.
Some two or three of them had been killed by the musketry fire from the
ship, and their fellows needed no incentive from their white leaders to
slay and spare not.

Abandoning the gun, the captain and his three men and the boy Maru
succeeded in fighting their way through Deschard's savages and reaching
one of the cabin doors, which, situated under the break of the high
poop, opened to the main deck. Ere they could all gain the shelter of
the cabin and secure the door the second mate and one of the seamen were
cut down and ruthlessly slaughtered, and of the three that did, one--the
remaining seaman--was mortally wounded and dying fast.

Even at such a moment as this, hardened and merciless as were their
natures and blood-stained their past, it cannot be thought that had
Deschard and his co-pirates known that white women were on board the
brigantine they would have perpetrated their last dreadful deed. In his
recital of the final scene in the cabin Maru spoke of the white woman
and the two girls coming out of their state-room and kneeling down and
praying with their arms clasped around each other's waists. Surely the
sound of their dying prayers could never have been heard by Deschard
when, in the native tongue, he called out for one of the guns t