that was a good thing. But it wasn't; for as I
scrambled up there he was with both guns at his end, and me with nothing
but my fisties.

"I saw through his dodge now, but it was too late; and in the next few
moments I thought three things:--

"`Shall I sit still like a man and let him shoot me?'

"`Shall I rock the canoe over and let it sink?'

"`Shall I go at him?'

"I hadn't pluck enough to sit still and be shot, Mas'r Harry, for you
know what a cur I always was; and I thought it a pity to sink the canoe
in case you, if you were alive, or Mas'r Landell, might come back to
look for it. So I made up my mind to the last, being bristly, and, with
my monkey up, I dashed at him.

"_Bang_! He got a shot at me, and I felt just as if some one had hit me
a blow with a stick hard enough to make me savage; but it didn't stop me
a bit, for I reached at him such a crack with my double fist just as he
struck his knife into me; and then we were overboard and struggling
together in the sunlit water, making it splash up all around.

"`It's all over with you, Tom!' I said to myself; for as we rose to the
surface after our plunge he got one arm free, his knife was lifted, and
I looked him full in the face as I felt, though I didn't say it--`You
cowardly beggar! why can't you fight like a man with your fists?'

"The next moment he must have struck that knife into me again, when I
never see such a horrible change in my life as come over his face--from
savage joy to fear--for in a flash he let go the knife, shrieked
horribly, and half-forced himself out of the water, leaving me free,
when, with a terrible fear on me that the crockydiles were at him, I
swum for the canoe; and how, I don't know, I managed to get in, with
hundreds of tiny little fish leaping and darting at me like a shoal of
gudgeons, only they nipped pieces out of my hands and feet, which were
bare; and if I hadn't been quick they'd have had me to pieces.

"No sooner was I in the canoe than I turned, for Garcia was shrieking
horribly in a way that nearly drove me mad to hear him, as he beat, and
splashed, and tore about in the water--now down, now up, now fighting
this way, now that--wild with fear and despair, for those tiny fish were
at him by the thousand; his face and hands were streaming with blood,
and I could see that it would be all over with him directly, when,
catching up a paddle, I sent the canoe towards him, to pass close by his
hand just as he sank