r the Frenchman, following every twist he made, and eager only
for the leap at his throat, our little ship began to roll in a sickly
fashion as she had never done before, and men looked into one another's
faces with fears in their eyes beyond any all the Frenchmen in the world
could put there. And the carpenter, who had been on deck with the rest,
bursting for the fight, tumbled hastily below, and came up in a moment with
a face like putty.

"She's going!" he cried, and it was his last word. One of those devilish
six feet of whirling bars scattered him and three others into fragments and
then shore its way through the bulwarks behind. And the winged _Swallow_
began to roll under our feet in the way that makes a seaman's heart grow
sick.

The Frenchman never ceased firing on us. No matter. It was only a choice of
deaths. Not a man among us would have asked his life from him, even if the
chance had been given, and it was not.

My last look at the Frenchman showed him coming straight for us. I saw the
great forecastle gun belch its cloud of smoke. The water was spouting up in
white jets through our scuppers. It came foaming green and white through
our gun ports. Then, in solid green sheets, it leaped up over the bulwarks,
and for a moment the long flush deck was a boiling cauldron with a bloody
scum, in which twirled and twisted dead men and living, and fragments of
the ship and rigging.

When I came up through the roaring green water I found myself within arm's
length of the foretopsailyard, to which a strip of ragged sail still hung.
I hooked my arm over it and looked round for my comrades. About a score of
heads floated in the belching bubbles of the sunken ship, but even as I
looked the number lessened, for the Island men of those days were no
swimmers. A burly body swung past me. I grabbed it, dragged it to the spar
and hoisted its arm over it. It was John Ozanne, and presently he recovered
sufficiently to get his other arm up and draw himself chest-high to look
about him. The light spar would not support us both, and I let myself sink
into the water, with only a grip on a hanging rope's end to keep in tow
with it.

John Ozanne gazed wildly round for a minute, and then raised his right arm
and volubly cursed the Frenchman, who was coming right down on us.

"Oh, you devils! You devils! May--" and then to my horror, for with the
wash of the waves in my ears I could hear nothing, a small round hole bored
itself sud