from a blow. The confusion had now become suddenly
stilled, and upon the group before the barricade had fallen that
mysterious silence which had perplexed the inmates of the prison.

They were not perplexed for long. The two soldiers who, with the
assistance of Pine, had forced-to the door of the prison, rapidly
unbolted that trap-door in the barricade, of which mention has been made
in a previous chapter, and, at a signal from Vickers, three men ran the
loaded howitzer from its sinister shelter near the break of the barrack
berths, and, training the deadly muzzle to a level with the opening in
the barricade, stood ready to fire.

"Surrender!" cried Vickers, in a voice from which all "humanity" had
vanished. "Surrender, and give up your ringleaders, or I'll blow you to
pieces!"

There was no tremor in his voice, and though he stood, with Pine by his
side, at the very mouth of the levelled cannon, the mutineers perceived,
with that acuteness which imminent danger brings to the most stolid
of brains, that, did they hesitate an instant, he would keep his word.
There was an awful moment of silence, broken only by a skurrying noise
in the prison, as though a family of rats, disturbed at a flour cask,
were scampering to the ship's side for shelter. This skurrying noise was
made by the convicts rushing to their berths to escape the threatened
shower of grape; to the twenty desperadoes cowering before the muzzle of
the howitzer it spoke more eloquently than words. The charm was broken;
their comrades would refuse to join them. The position of affairs at
this crisis was a strange one. From the opened trap-door came a sort of
subdued murmur, like that which sounds within the folds of a sea-shell,
but, in the oblong block of darkness which it framed, nothing was
visible. The trap-door might have been a window looking into a tunnel.
On each side of this horrible window, almost pushed before it by the
pressure of one upon the other, stood Pine, Vickers, and the guard. In
front of the little group lay the corpse of the miserable boy whom Sarah
Purfoy had led to ruin; and forced close upon, yet shrinking back from
the trampled and bloody mass, crouched in mingled terror and rage, the
twenty mutineers. Behind the mutineers, withdrawn from the patch of
light thrown by the open hatchway, the mouth of the howitzer threatened
destruction; and behind the howitzer, backed up by an array of brown
musket barrels, suddenly glowed the tiny fi