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battled grimly like mastiffs.
"The next time she rolls!" panted Joe Hawkridge as the hawser ripped the skin from his palms.
"Aye, make ready to cut," muttered Jack.
The ship heaved herself high and then listed far down to starboard. Joe slashed at the last strands of the tackles and yelled to Jack to let go the hawser. Instead of discharging the nine-pounder, they were employing the piece itself, and the carriage of oak and iron, as a terrible missile. The moment of launching it was shrewdly chosen. The pirates, still in compact formation as led by Ned Rackham, were directly abreast of this forward gun of the main deck battery. The deck inclined at a steep and giddy pitch. With a grinding roar the gun rolled from its station. It gathered impetus and lunged across the ship as an instrument of fell destruction. It was more to be feared than an assault of armed men.
The warning rumble of the iron wheels as they furrowed the planking was heard by the pirates. They turned from their game of butchery and stood frozen in their tracks for a frightened instant. Then they tried to flee in all directions. Their tarry pigtails fairly stood on end. Well they knew what it meant to have a gun break adrift in a heavy sea. Two or three who had been badly hurt were unable to move fast enough. The gun crunched over them and then seemed to pursue a limping pirate, veering to overtake him as he fled. He was tossed against the bulwark like a bundle of bloody rags.
The gun crashed into the stout timbers of the ship's side and they were splintered like match-wood. It rebounded as the deck sloped sharply in the next wallowing roll, and now this frenzied monster of wood and iron seemed fairly to run amuck. It was inspired with a sinister intelligence, resolved to wreak all the damage possible. The pinnace, the water barrels, the coamings of the cargo hatches, were smashed to fragments as the gun turned this way and that and went plunging in search of victims.
Left to themselves, the seamen of the Plymouth Adventure would have risked their lives to cast ropes about the gun and moor it fast. But now they were quick to see that the tide had been turned in their favor. The pirates were demoralized. Some were in the rigging, others atop the bulwarks, and only the readiest and boldest, with Ned Rackham in the lead, had an eye to the task in hand, which was to regain possession of the ship.
And now the boatswain of the Plymouth Adventure, a rosy giant of a man from South Devon, shouted to his comrades to follow him. They delayed until the runaway cannon crashed into another gun, and then they broke like sprinters from the mark and sped straight for the mainmast, seeking the rack of boarding-pikes. They ran nimbly, as men used to swaying decks, and compassed the distance in a few strides.
Ned Rackham perceived their purpose and tried to intercept but his few staunch followers moved warily, expecting to see that insensate monster of a gun bear down upon them. The swiftest of the merchant sailors laid hands on the pikes and whirled to cover their shipmates, until all hands could be armed. Then the gun came roaring down at them but they ducked behind the mast or stepped watchfully aside. Men condemned to death are not apt to lose their wits in the face of one more peril.
These pikes were ashen shafts with long steel points and the merchant seamen had been trained to use them. And the brawn of these lads made the pike a match for a pirate's cutlass. Ned Rackham bounded forward to swing at the broad, deep-chested boatswain. A wondrous pair of antagonists they were, in the prime of their youth and vigor. The pirate's cutlass bit clean through the pike shaft as the boatswain parried the blow but the apple-cheeked Devonshire man closed in and wrapped his arms around his foe. They went to the deck clutching for each other's throats and the fight trampled over them.
Meanwhile Joe Hawkridge and Jack Cockrell, unwilling to twiddle their thumbs, had rushed aft as fast as their legs could carry them. It was a mutual impulse, to release such of the men passengers as might have a stomach for fighting and also the ship's officers. Into the doorway which led from the waist, the two lads dived and scurried through the main cabin now clear of pirates. Locked doors they smashed with a broadaxe found in the small-arms chest and so entered all the rooms.
The women passengers were almost dead with suffering, what with the turbulence of the storm and the wild riot on deck. The lads pitied them but had no time to console. Several of the men, merchants and planters of some physical hardihood, begged for weapons and Joe Hawkridge bade them help themselves from the spare arms which the pirates had left in the great cabin. In another little room the boys found the mates, steward, surgeon, and gunner of the Plymouth Adventure and you may be sure that they came boiling out with a raging thirst for strife.
"Harkee, Jack," said Joe before they climbed to the poop deck, "if the pirates are driven aft, as I expect, they will make a last stand in this cabin house which is like a fort. These 'fenseless women must be hidden safe from harm. Do you coax 'em into the lazarette."
This was a room on the deck below, in the very stern of the ship where were kept the extra sails and coils of rope and various stores. It was the surest shelter against harm in such stress as this. Alas, Jack's persuasions were vain. The frantic women were in no humor to listen, and so the lads bundled them through the hatch as gently as possible and for company gave them such male passengers as lacked strength or courage to join the battle.
While they were thus engaged, two pirates came flying down the ladder from the poop deck into the main cabin. They revolved like windmills in a jumble of arms and legs. Close behind them, in a manner more orderly came Captain Jonathan Wellsby who had tossed the one and tremendously booted the other. They were the helmsmen whom he had replaced with his own officers at the steering tackles, while his first mate had been left in charge of handling the ship.
The skipper was now free to follow his own desires and he fell upon those two stunned pirates in the cabin and trussed them tight with bits of rope. Then he reloaded with dry powder all the pistols he could find and made a walking arsenal of himself. The two lads who now joined him needed no word of command. At his heels they made for the main deck and the shout which arose from those British sailors, so sorely beset, was mightily heartening.
Blazing away with his pistols, the skipper cleared a path for himself, the pirates being taken aback when they were attacked in the rear. And they were leaderless, for Ned Rackham had been dragged aside with the marks of the boatswain's fingers on his throat and a sheath-knife buried in his side. He was alive but nobody paid heed to his groans.
With the skipper in the thick of it, there was no danger of being penned in the forecastle again. The pirates were crowded aft, step by step, before the play of those wicked boarding-pikes. It would be hard to match a sea fight like this, amid the spray and the washing seas, on a deck that tipsily danced and staggered, with a truant gun smashing a good ship to bits and the wounded screaming as they saw this horror thundering at them. Captain Wellsby's men were at pains to drag their helpless comrades to safety but the pirates were too callous and too hard pressed to care for aught save their own worthless skins. They fought like wolves but they lacked the gristle and endurance of the stalwart sailors. Wheezing for breath, they ceased to curse and reeled back in silence while the sailors huzzaed and seemed to wax the lustier.
As was bound to happen, the stubborn retreat broke into a rout. It was every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. The pirates fled for the after cabin-house, there to take cover behind the timbered walls and use the small port-holes for musketry fire. Thus they could find respite and it would be immensely difficult to dislodge them.
The first mate of the Plymouth Adventure and his own two helmsmen saw what was taking place and they were of no mind to be cut off at the stern of the ship. They footed it along the poop and the cabin roof as the pirates were scampering inside and so gained the waist and were with their comrades. The tiller deserted, the vessel careened into the trough of the sea with a portentous creaking of spars and rending of canvas.
The mainmast had been dealt more than one splintering blow by the fugitive gun. This sudden strain, of a ship broached to and hurled almost on her beam ends, was too much for the damaged mast. It broke short off, a few feet above the deck, and the ragged butt ripped the planks asunder as it was dragged overside by the weight of the towering fabric of yards and canvas. One merciful