rear
and flank; few can face surprise; the boarding party, convinced that
they had fallen into a trap, melted away. One moment they were
sweeping forward, vicious and formidable, confident of victory; the
next they were floundering weaponless, scrambling anyhow for safety,
multiplying and transforming, with the quick imagination of panic
terror, these two horses into a troop of mounted men.

This sudden and almost spectral apparition of galloping steeds and
flying carriage, hurled upon the vessel out of the tempest, flung, a
piece of whirling chaos, from the chaotic skies, had almost as
startling an effect upon the defenders. For a moment they paused, with
weapons uplifted, and stared. Where an enemy had been, there was
nothing. So doubtful Greeks or Trojans might have paused and stared
upon the plains of Ilion when some splenetic and fickle deity burst
unannounced and overwhelming into the central clamor of the battle.

But it is in these seconds of pause and doubt that great commanders
assert themselves; it is these electric seconds from which the hero
gathers his vital lightning and forges his mordant bolt. Genius claims
and rules these instants, and the gods are on the side of those who
boldly grasp loose wisdom and bind it into sheaves of judgment.
Cleggett (whom Homer would have loved) was the first to recover his
poise. He came to his decision instantaneously. A lesser man might
have lost all by rushing after his retreating enemies; a lesser man,
carried away by excitement, would have pursued. Cleggett did not relax
his grasp upon the situation, he restrained his ardor.

"Stand firm, men! Do not leave the ship," he shouted. "The day is
ours!"

And then, turning to Captain Abernethy, he cried:

"We have routed them!"

"Look at them crazy horses!" screamed the Captain in reply.

The animals were rearing and struggling among the ruins of the broken
gangplank. As the Captain spoke, they plunged aboard the ship, and the
carriage, bounding after them, overturned on the deck--horses and
carriage came down together in a welter of splintering wheels and
broken harness and crashing wood.

A negro driver, whom Cleggett now noticed for the first time, shot
clear of the mass and landed on the deck in a sitting posture.

For a moment, there he sat, and did nothing more. The pole broke loose
from the carriage, the traces parted, and the two big white horses,
still kicking and plunging, struggled to their f