CHAPTER XXVI.

THE REQUITAL.

Three days and nights passed after this without finding us able to surprise or dislodge the demon who was in possession of the cabin; without our knowing where the ship was driving or drifting to, and without a sail appearing. A man-of-war belonging to any country we should have hailed as a protector; but on the wide waters of the Southern Atlantic ships are few and far between.

Hislop rallied a little, and was removed into one of the forecastle berths. He could tell us only that he had been surprised when asleep, and been stabbed again and again--that he became insensible, and remembered nothing more. His distress was great when we related the story of the captain's fate, the death of Will White, and that their destroyer was still in possession of the ship, and the arbiter of all our lives.

He writhed on his bed of pain, and sighed bitterly on finding how stiff and sore, how weak and almost blind he had become by loss of blood; but a crisis was now at hand with our Cubano.

The evening of the fourth day after we had saved Hislop found the brig still lying a westerly course; but whether in the latitude of Cape San Roque or of the Rio Grande, we knew not; and, I suppose, it was all the same to Antonio.

I was at the wheel. The sunset was gorgeously beautiful. The _Eugenie_ was running with both tacks aft; and under the arched leech of her courses I could see the blood-red disk of the sun right ahead setting in the waves, which shone in all the colors of the dying dolphin; while against the flaming orb, the black outline of the masts, the figure-head, and the taper end of the jibboom, with its cap, guys, and gear, were clearly and distinctly defined.

The waves ahead rose and fell between me and the sun, as slowly and imperceptibly he sank at the flaming horizon, from a quarter circle to a segment; then the last vestige of that also disappeared, but the lingering rays of his glory played upward on the light clouds that floated above. Even they paled away and died out, and twilight stole over the silent sea, which changed from gold to a transparent blue.

With the increasing twilight came a change of wind, and before it a great bank of cloud rolled from the horizon on our starboard bow. Under its shadow the sea was darkened, and its broken water flecked with white. The new breeze came first upon our quarter, then rapidly it was abeam, and three great albatrosses were seen to whip the sea with their wings, while a whole shoal of brown porpoises surged past our bows, plunging joyously from wave to wave.

Tacks and braces were instantly manned, and the sails were trimmed anew for our desultory course.

"Sail ho--to windward!" said one of the crew, in a low but excited voice, lest the sound might reach the cabin; and as the dense bank of purple cloud opened, a large bark came out of it, and her form became more and more defined as she left the vapor astern. She was going free--that is, with her head further off the wind than close-hauled--and had a press of snow-white canvas, which shone in the last light of the west.

"She is four miles off," said Carlton.

"We must signal her," added Lambourne.

"With what?" asked Carlton, in the same sharp but low voice; "every color is overboard."

"Any thing will do--a blue shirt at the foremast head; quick!--the sky will be quite dark in ten minutes. Run it up in a ball with a slipping loop, man-o'-war fashion," said Lambourne in a loud whisper; "get ready a ship's lantern some of you, for the night darkens so fast that we shall scarcely be visible when she is abeam of us. Ned, get into the fore-channel, and wave the light as a signal that we want a boat."

These orders were rapidly obeyed, and preparations made to throw the brig in the wind. While one man hastily got the lantern from a little round house, in which certain stores and tools were kept on deck, Ned Carlton pulled off his shirt, and was in the act of binding it to the signal halyards, when the Spaniard, whose quick ears detected some commotion, sprang on deck, armed as usual.

On seeing Carlton busy with the halyards, he looked round, caught sight of the ship, which was running with the white foam boiling under her forefoot, and thus in a moment divined what we were about.

Muttering a terrible imprecation in Spanish, he fired at Carlton, but missed him as before, and shot dead a poor apprentice who was close by.

"'Tarnal thunder, flesh and blood can't bear this!" shouted Tom Lambourne, whose fury was boundless, and who snatched up a capstan-bar. "Bear down on him all hands: there is neither sea law nor land law can help us here!"

Snatching whatever came nearest to hand, we all rushed upon the Cubano, who stood boldly at bay, and keeping the binnacle between us and him, fired over it five or six shots from his revolver with terrible rapidity; but so unsteady had his hand become in consequence of his free potations below, that every bullet missed, though one cut the knuckles of Tom Lambourne's right hand, and another tore away the rim of my straw hat.

He drew a second revolver from his sash, but Lambourne, by one lucky blow with the capstan-bar, knocked it out of his hand. It went twenty feet into the air, and fell overboard.

Quick as lightning, Antonio placed the other in his breast, drew his knife, stooped his head, and darting through us like an eel, gave Carlton a gash in the thigh as he passed.

He then made for the main-rigging, and sprang on the bulwark, no doubt with the intention of running up aloft to some secure perch, where he might reload his remaining pistol, and shoot us all down at leisure; but he missed his hold of the rattlins, and fell overboard!

There was a shout of furious joy.

"The sea will rob the gallows of its due!" said Carlton; "but he'll be shark's meat, any way."

But Antonio was not gone yet, for in falling he caught one of the lower studding-sail booms, and clutched it with deadly tenacity, for he knew that if once he was fairly launched into the ocean his fate would be sealed.

His face was pale with combined fear and fury; his black eyes blazed with the fire of hatred; the perspiration oozed in drops upon his temples. Tom Lambourne sprang forward to beat off his fingers; but at that moment, the boom, a slender spar, broke from its lashings alongside and swung out at a _right angle_ from the brig, with the wretch at the extreme end of it, dangling over the waves, like a herring at the point of a ramrod.

Again and again he writhed his body upward in wild struggles to get astride the boom, or to reach it with his knees, but in vain!

Instead of exciting pity, his terrible situation drew forth a shout of derision, mingled with expressions of hatred and satisfaction, from the line of avenging faces that surveyed him over the bulwark. He hung thus for fully five minutes, for he was a powerful man, of great strength, muscle, and bulk.

I have no doubt this man was as brave as it is possible for a ruffian to be; but the prospect of an immediate death--a death, too, from which there was no escape--terrified him.

His glance of hate toward us turned to one of wild and earnest entreaty.

"Mercy!--pardon!--in the name and for the love of the Almighty!" he exclaimed in Spanish, in a tone of intense earnestness; but he was heard by us with fierce derision in that moment of just triumph and too long delayed vengeance.

Twice the _Eugenie_ gave a lee lurch, and each time the feet and knees of the wretched Cubano were immersed in the waves.

Beneath him was the abyss of water that rushed past the side of the brig. He panted rather than breathed; and through the dusk we could see how his aching hands turned white as his face; and that the points of his fingers were blood-red. His eyes grew wild and haggard as terror chilled his coward heart and agonized his soul; and yet through the surge the fleet craft flew on!

Every moment increased the weight of his body and the weakness of his hands and wrists.

At last it was evident that his powers of endurance could be no longer taxed; he uttered a half-smothered shriek, and closed his eyes as he clung to that slender spar, and it swayed to and fro while the close-hauled brig flew on!

There was a crash!

The iron hook in the bulwark on which the studding-sail boom was hung, gave way under the double weight of the spar and of his body. There was a shrill cry of despair, like the parting shriek of an evil spirit, on the skirt of the gusty blast, as the boom, and the wretch who clung to it in blind desperation, vanished into the black trough of the sea, and, like a cork or a reed, were swept amid the salt foam to leeward.

The _Eugenie_ rose like a duck upon the water, and, as if freed at that moment from a load of crime, seemed to fly forward with increased speed.

'Twas night now, and the ship which we had first seen upon our weather bow, was a mile astern and to leeward of us.