t the
wheel, as the schooner rebounded from the chain; "let fly your starboard
braces! Gigs and quarter-boats away! Mr Courtenay, have the goodness
to take the gig and silence that battery on the north side of the
channel; Mr Fidd, go you in the quarter-boat and do the same with the
battery on the south side. Take a hammer and a bag of nails each, and
spike the guns before you leave them. Flatten in, forward there, the
larboard sheets, and help her head to pay round; we must go outside
again and seek a passage elsewhere."

The men, fully realising the peril of the situation in which we now
found ourselves, sprang like wild-cats to execute the orders I had
given; and in an incredibly short time both boats were in the water,
with their crews in them, fully armed.

They were in the very act of shoving off when the sound of a sudden
commotion in the cabin reached me, quickly followed by cries for help
from Sanderson; and, before I had time to reach the sky-light to see
what was amiss, up through the companion dashed poor O'Flaherty closely
followed by the doctor, the former naked as when he was born, his hair
bristling, his eyes aflame with fever, his teeth clenched, and the blood
streaming from the disarranged bandages about his right shoulder. He
glared round the deck for an instant, a single horrible unearthly cry
escaped from between his clenched teeth, and then--before any of us had
sufficiently recovered from our astonishment to lay a preventing hand
upon him--with one bound he reached the rail, sprang upon it, and,
steadying himself with his left hand by grasping the main-topmast back-
stay, waved his bleeding right arm frantically to Courtenay, who by this
time was a hundred yards away. At this moment the hidden battery on the
north side of the channel again opened fire, this time with round shot.
We felt a jar which told us that the schooner had been hulled; and, at
the same moment, heard a sickening thud and saw poor O'Flaherty's body,
doubled-up like a pair of compasses, dashed lifeless and bloody to the
deck by one of the shot, which had struck him fair in the stomach and
cut him almost in two. It was a ghastly sight; but there was no time
just then to inquire of Sanderson what the sudden escapade meant, or
even to have the body removed, for the schooner was at that moment head
to wind, and I was most anxious to get her round, which in that cramped
channel was no very easy matter. We managed to box her