ir great
naked feet trampling the dead and writhing bodies of their comrades,
they rivaled the rocky wall itself in the unflinching obstinacy of their
resistance. It was then the battle reached its deadliest stage, more
falling in those terrible minutes than during the whole previous course
of the action. There was no shouting, no cheering, but with clenched
teeth each man held his place and panted for the supreme moment that
should spell either victory or rout. That moment came with the bugle
call to charge, when the whites, rising for the last time, flung
themselves forward with bayonets fixed. On they came, crimson-faced,
mouths open, British and Americans in a pellmell rush like a rally of
boys at football. Even as they did so, Fetuao leaped bolt upright on the
wall, and swinging her carbine round her head, opposed her slender body
to the whole attack. In an instant she was tumbling backward with a
bullet through her throat, and as she lay coughing and strangling in the
mire, Jack ran forward with a cry and caught her in his arms. There she
died, amid the crash and roar of a hand-to-hand fight, jostled and
stumbled on, her little hot hands clinging to his in the convulsive
grasp of dissolution.

Jack sprang up like a madman. He had no thought in his dizzy head but
vengeance--vengeance, sudden, bloody, and swift. He plunged into the
thickest of the fray, cursing and raving as he opened a path with his
brawny shoulders. A seaman tried to drive him through with a bayonet,
but he caught the fellow round the neck and throttled him; he wrenched
away the weapon and stabbed out with it right and left, with a strength,
skill, and ferocity that nothing could withstand. He was fired at
again and again; his ashen face was twenty times a target, once at so
close a range that the powder burned his very skin. As the line swayed
to and fro in that desperate final struggle, there was a hoarse cry
against him, constantly repeated, of, "Shoot that white man!" "Kill the
renegade!" But Jack, seemingly proof against bullet and sword, stood his
ground like a lion and clubbed the butt of his gun into the faces of his
foes; and when the whites, at last losing heart, began to weaken and
fall back, it was Jack that led the Samoan charge, waving a dripping
bayonet, and bellowing like a maniac for the rest to follow him.

[Illustration: "In an instant she was tumbling backward."]

He stopped beside the guns, laughing wildly to see the blue-ja