nce
by the sudden lurch of the ship under her feet, Miss Bishop hurtled
violently against Lord Julian, who kept his feet only by clutching
the rail on which he had been leaning. Billowing clouds of smoke to
starboard blotted out everything, and its acrid odour, taking them
presently in the throat, set them gasping and coughing.

From the grim confusion and turmoil in the waist below arose a clamour
of fierce Spanish blasphemies and the screams of maimed men. The
Milagrosa staggered slowly ahead, a gaping rent in her bulwarks; her
foremast was shattered, fragments of the yards hanging in the netting
spread below. Her beak-head was in splinters, and a shot had smashed
through into the great cabin, reducing it to wreckage.

Don Miguel was bawling orders wildly, and peering ever and anon through
the curtain of smoke that was drifting slowly astern, in his anxiety to
ascertain how it might have fared with the Hidalga.

Suddenly, and ghostly at first through that lifting haze, loomed the
outline of a ship; gradually the lines of her red hull became more and
more sharply defined as she swept nearer with poles all bare save for
the spread of canvas on her sprit.

Instead of holding to her course as Don Miguel had expected she would,
the Arabella had gone about under cover of the smoke, and sailing now
in the same direction as the Milagrosa, was converging sharply upon her
across the wind, so sharply that almost before the frenzied Don Miguel
had realized the situation, his vessel staggered under the rending
impact with which the other came hurtling alongside. There was a rattle
and clank of metal as a dozen grapnels fell, and tore and caught in the
timbers of the Milagrosa, and the Spaniard was firmly gripped in the
tentacles of the English ship.

Beyond her and now well astern the veil of smoke was rent at last and
the Hidalga was revealed in desperate case. She was bilging fast, with
an ominous list to larboard, and it could be no more than a question of
moments before she settled down. The attention of her hands was being
entirely given to a desperate endeavour to launch the boats in time.

Of this Don Miguel's anguished eyes had no more than a fleeting but
comprehensive glimpse before his own decks were invaded by a wild,
yelling swarm of boarders from the grappling ship. Never was confidence
so quickly changed into despair, never was hunter more swiftly converted
into helpless prey. For helpless the Spaniards were. T