sponging and ramming home in the
first fury of hatred, the carpenter jumped out under the battle-lanthorn
at the main hatch, crying in a wild voice that the old eighteens had
burst, killing half their crews and blowing up the gundeck above them.
At this many of our men broke and ran for the hatches.

"Back, back to your quarters! The first man to desert will be shot
down!"

It was the same strange voice that had quelled the mutiny on the John,
that had awed the men of Kirkcudbright. The tackles were seized and the
guns run out once more, and fired, and served again in an agony of haste.
In the darkness shot shrieked hither and thither about us like demons,
striking everywhere, sometimes sending casks of salt water over the
nettings. Incessantly the quartermaster walked to and fro scattering
sand over the black pools that kept running, running together as the
minutes were tolled out, and the red flashes from the guns revealed faces
in a hideous contortion. One little fellow, with whom I had had many a
lively word at mess, had his arm taken off at the shoulder as he went
skipping past me with the charge under his coat, and I have but to listen
now to hear the patter of the blood on the boards as they carried him
away to the cockpit below. Out of the main hatch, from that charnel
house, rose one continuous cry. It was an odd trick of the mind or soul
that put a hymn on my lips in that dreadful hour of carnage and human
misery, when men were calling the name of their Maker in vain. But as
I ran from crew to crew, I sang over and over again a long-forgotten
Christmas carol, and with it came a fleeting memory of my mother on the
stairs at Carvel Hall, and of the negroes gathered on the lawn without.

Suddenly, glancing up at the dim cloud of sails above, I saw that we were
aback and making sternway. We might have tossed a biscuit aboard the big
Serapis as she glided ahead of us. The broadsides thundered, and great
ragged scantlings brake from our bulwarks and flew as high as the
mizzen-top; and the shrieks and groans redoubled. Involuntarily my eyes
sought the poop, and I gave a sigh of relief at the sight of the
commanding figure in the midst of the whirling smoke. We shotted our
guns with double-headed, manned our lee braces, and gathered headway.

"Stand by to board!"

The boatswains' whistles trilled through the ship, pikes were seized, and
pistol and cutlass buckled on. But even as we waited with set teeth, our
bows