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Dodd, instead of replying immediately, put his helm hard up and ran under the pirate's stern, while he was jammed up in the wind, and with his five eighteen-pounders raked him fore and aft, then paying off, gave him three carronades crammed with grape and canister; the almost simultaneous discharge of eight guns made the ship tremble, and enveloped her in thick smoke; loud shrieks and groans were heard from the schooner; the smoke cleared; the pirate's mainsail hung on deck, his jib-boom was cut off like a carrot and the sail struggling; his foresail looked lace, lanes of dead and wounded lay still or writhing on his deck and his lee scuppers ran blood into the sea.
The sailors in the waist only saved themselves by rushing into the rigging during the moment in which the breaker hung suspended. Nothing could be done; the vessel must lift herself from this state of submergence; and so she did, slowly and tremulously, like a sick man rising from his bed. But while the ocean within was still running out of her scuppers, the ocean without assaulted her anew.
In half a minute he had reached the port scuppers, and picked out of a coil of rope a long knife, or rather a short dirk, discolored to the hilt with blood. He looked upon it for a moment, thrusting forth his under jaw, tried the point upon his hand, and then hastily concealing it in the bosom of his jacket, trundled back again into his old place against the bulwark.
By this time all hands were on deck; the boat alongside had been swamped by the cold shot that had been hove crashing through her bottom, when down came a shower from the surcharged clouds, or waterspout call it which you will that absolutely deluged the decks, the scuppers being utterly unable to carry off the water.
"She might have carried another on the main hatch, I won't deny," admitted Nares; "but I can't see what she wanted with it, unless it was for the old man to go out and play the accordion in, on moonlight nights." "It can't much matter, anyway," I reflected. "O, I don't suppose it does," said he, glancing over his shoulder at the spouting of the scuppers.
The posture of the ice inclined the schooner's starboard bow to the billows; and in a very short time she was trembling in every bone to the blows of the surges which rolled boiling over the ice there and struck her, flinging dim clouds of spume in the air, which soon set the scuppers gushing.
Any other ship would have made no account of a sea like this; but with this heavy craft there was a danger of sinking by the bow, for the deck was filled at every lurch, and the sheet of water not being able to escape quickly by the scuppers, might submerge the ship.
Dundas accordingly went down himself, with as many people as he could prevail upon to follow him: and the lower-deck ports were opened, the scuppers plugged, the main and fore-hatches secured, the cocks turned, and water drawn in at the ports, and the pumps kept going by the people who came down, as long as they could stand at them.
It is no matter what one English do, the other absolve for gold. A buccaneer, a stealer of women no, it is no matter! All English all together! But I am French I am the dirt I am for the scuppers. Bah! I will have the same as Bucklaw you see?" "You will have the irons, fellow!" Phips roared. A knife flashed in the air, and Bucklaw's pistol was out at the same instant.
As the thin sheets of water curled over the lee scuppers of the boat, the right hand which held Sam's left never trembled nor tightened its hold; and when the clergyman, sitting by Miss Denby, asked her if she felt at all afraid, she cheerily replied: "'Not with the gilded idol and the king conch-shell both on board no, not I!
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