the hilt in his neck striking downwards
just over the collar bone, and he fell, the blood spurting from his
mouth upon the deck. At the same time our men, falling upon the
janizaries, did most horrid battle--nay, 'twas no battle, but sheer
butchery; for these men, being taken so suddenly, had no time to draw
their weapons, and could only fly to the fore end of the boat for
escape, where, by reason of their number and the narrow confines of the
deck, they were so packed and huddled together that none could raise his
hand to ward a blow even, and so stood, a writhing, shrieking mass of
humanity, to be hacked and stabbed and ripped and cut down to their
death.

And their butchers had no mercy. They could think only of their past
wrongs, and of satiating the thirst for vengeance, which had grown to a
madness by previous restraint.

"There's for thirteen years of misery," cries one, driving his spike
into the heart of one. "Take that for hanging of my brother," screams a
second, cleaving a Moor's skull with his hatchet. "Quits for turning an
honest lad into a devil," calls a third, drawing his knife across the
throat of a shrieking wretch, and so forth, till not one of all the
crowd was left to murder.

Then still devoured by their lust for blood, they swarmed over the side
of the galley to finish this massacre--Groves leading with a shout of
"No quarter," and all echoing these words with a roar of joy. But here
they were met with some sort of resistance, for the Moors aboard, seeing
the fate of their comrades, forewarning them of theirs, had turned their
swivel gun about and now fired--the ball carrying off the head of Joe
Groves, the best man of all that crew, if one were better than another.
But this only served to incense the rest the more, and so they went at
their cruel work again, and ceased not till the last of their enemies
was dead. Then, with a wild hurrah, they signal their triumph, and one
fellow, holding up his bloody hands, smears them over his face with a
devilish scream of laughter.

And now, caring no more for us or what might befall us, than for the
Turks who lay all mangled on our deck, one cuts away the tackle that
lashes their galley to us, while the rest haul up the sail, and so they
go their way, leaving us to shift for ourselves.

CHAPTER XLI.

_How Dawson counts himself an unlucky man who were best dead; and so he
quits us, and I, the reader._

The galley bent over to the wind and