as the encircling
darkness. Only the area in which the battle was fought showed any light,
but here the flashes of the firing were continuous and intense. The crash
of the rifles never ceased. Now and then it rose to greater volume and
then fell again, but rising or falling it always went on, while over it
boomed the big guns answering one another in defiant notes of thunder.

The schooner was the most formidable obstacle to the passage. It lay full
length across the narrow bayou and, even if the boats of the supply fleet
should reach it, there was little room to pass on either side. From its
decks the nine pounders were fired fast and often with precision, and the
majority of the Spaniard's desperate band found shelter there also, firing
with rifles, muskets, and pistols. Others sent bullets, also, from the
comparative security of port holes. The possession of the schooner gave
them a great advantage and they did not neglect it. Now and then they sent
up fierce yells, the war-cries of the West Indian pirates, and their
Indian allies answered them with their own long-drawn, high pitched whoop,
so full of ferocity and menace. Both looked forward to nothing less than
complete triumph.

The space between the combatants was lighted up by the incessant flash of
the firing. Little jets of water where a missent bullet struck were
continually spouting up, and then would come a bigger one when a cannon
ball plunged into the depths of the bayou.

Paul suddenly heard a heavy impact, a crash, as of ripping wood, and a
cry. A canoe near them had been struck by a cannon ball, and practically
broken in half. It sank in an instant, and one of the men in it, wounded
in the arm, and crippled, was sinking a second time, when Paul sprang
into the water and helped him into their own boat. But not all the wounded
were so fortunate. Some sank, to stay, and the dark night battle, far more
deadly than that of the night before, reeled to and fro.

The combat at first had been more of a spectacle than anything else to
Paul. The extraordinary play of light and darkness, the innumerable
shadows and flashes on the surface of the bayou, the black tracery of the
forest on either bank, the red beads of flame from the rifle fire
appearing and re-appearing, made of it all a vast panorama for him. There
were the sounds, too, the piratical shout, hoarse and menacing, the Indian
whoop, shriller and with more of the wild beast's whine in it, the fierce,
s