leapt up and forward, and hurled their grapnels
across the chasm. Of the four they flung, two reached the Frenchman's
decks, and fastened there. Swift as thought itself, was then the action
of those sturdy, experienced buccaneers. Unhesitatingly all threw
themselves upon the chain of one of those grapnels, neglecting the
other, and heaved upon it with all their might to warp the ships
together. Blood, watching from his own quarter-deck, sent out his voice
in a clarion call:

"Musketeers to the prow!"

The musketeers, at their station at the waist, obeyed him with the speed
of men who know that in obedience is the only hope of life. Fifty of
them dashed forward instantly, and from the ruins of the forecastle they
blazed over the heads of Hayton's men, mowing down the French soldiers
who, unable to dislodge the irons, firmly held where they had deeply
bitten into the timbers of the Victorieuse, were themselves preparing to
fire upon the grapnel crew.

Starboard to starboard the two ships swung against each other with a
jarring thud. By then Blood was down in the waist, judging and acting
with the hurricane speed the occasion demanded. Sail had been lowered
by slashing away the ropes that held the yards. The advance guard of
boarders, a hundred strong, was ordered to the poop, and his grapnel-men
were posted, and prompt to obey his command at the very moment of
impact. As a result, the foundering Arabella was literally kept afloat
by the half-dozen grapnels that in an instant moored her firmly to the
Victorieuse.

Willoughby and van der Kuylen on the poop had watched in breathless
amazement the speed and precision with which Blood and his desperate
crew had gone to work. And now he came racing up, his bugler sounding
the charge, the main host of the buccaneers following him, whilst the
vanguard, led by the gunner Ogle, who had been driven from his guns by
water in the gun-deck, leapt shouting to the prow of the Victorieuse, to
whose level the high poop of the water-logged Arabella had sunk. Led now
by Blood himself, they launched themselves upon the French like hounds
upon the stag they have brought to bay. After them went others, until
all had gone, and none but Willoughby and the Dutchman were left to
watch the fight from the quarter-deck of the abandoned Arabella.

For fully half-an-hour that battle raged aboard the Frenchman. Beginning
in the prow, it surged through the forecastle to the waist, where it
reached a