Kit rushed madly aft.

"Here they come, sir!" he screamed.

Old Ding-dong sat propped on his corpse, shaving a quid of tobacco.

"Who come?"

"The boats, sir—boarding."

"That's the game, is it?"

He shut his jack-knife deliberately, and arranged his plug in the corner of his jaw.

"Fetch me that ere boardin-pike. Now give me a hike up. Then nip below and pass the word to Mr. Lanyon."

As Kit turned, he heard the rip of the first boat under the counter of the sloop and a sharp command in French, sounding strange and terrible in his ears.

Furiously he sped along the deck. As he bundled down the ladder, he caught a glimpse of the old Commander, braced against the bulwarks, and spitting into his hands.

The boy dropped into hell.

Down there was no order. All was howling chaos. Each gun-captain fought his own gun, regardless of the rest. Billows of smoke drifted to and fro; shadowy forms flitted; guns bounded and bellowed; here and there a red glare lit the fog.

Through the shattering roar of the guns, the rendings of planks, the scream of round-shot, came the voices of men, dim-seen. Jokes, blasphemies, prayers, groans, issued in nightmare medley from that death-fog.

"Chri', kill me!—My God, I sweats!—Pore old Jake's got it!"

On mid-deck a shadow was pirouetting madly. Suddenly it collapsed; and the boy saw it ended at the neck.

A dim figure lolled against an overturned gun. As the lad gazed, it pointed to a puddle beside it.

"That's me," it said with slow and solemn interest.

The boy trod on something in the smoke. A bloody wraith, spread-eagled upon the deck, raised tired eyes to his.

"That's all right, sir," came a whisper. "Don't make no odds. I got all I want."

A hand out of the mist clutched his ankle.

"Stop this racket," gasped a voice, querulous and tearful. "I ain't well." A stump flapped in his face.

A ghost, sitting up against the side close by, began to titter.

"Once I was mother's darling. Mightn't think it to see me now."

A shot, screeching past the boy's nose, took his breath away. He staggered back, and brought up against a gun-captain, his shoulders to the breech of the gun.

The man turned with a grin. It was the Gunner, naked to the waist, and smoke-grimed.

"Sweet mess, ain't it?" he coughed. "How d'ye like your first smell o powder, sir?"

"They're boarding!" panted Kit. "Quick!"

The man leapt up.

"Boardin!" he roared. "Board ME! I'll give em board."

He snatched up a chain-shot, and raced down the deck.

"Up aloft the lot o you!" he howled. "Heaven waits ye there!"

II

As he flamed through the smoke-drift, the crew caught fire from him.

Behind him in roaring flood they poured—black men and bloody, snatching each the weapon nearest to hand.

An aweful joy seemed beating up through mists in their faces. Time and Eternity warred within them. Man, the creature, hideously afraid for his flesh, strove with Man, the Creator, impregnable in his immortality.

Kit, swept off his feet, was borne along with the flood. The fury of enthusiasm, which the splendid drunkard had roused in the hearts of his men, had seized him too.

His body was aflame; and his veins ran fire. Now for the first time he knew what it was to be alive—Life spurting from his finger-tips, making madness in his blood, issuing riotously from his lips. He sang; he yelled; he laughed, battering at the lunatic in front. He caught the blasphemies of his battle-fellows, and echoed them shrilly and with joy. The light in his comrades' eyes revealed to him deeps of being undreamed of before. His spirit was pouring through his flesh, making glory as it went.

Uplifted as a lover, the wine of War drowned his senses. In the glory of doing he had no thought for the thing done. His was the midsummer madness of slaying. In that singing moment how should he remember the bleak and shuddering autumn of pain inevitably to follow?—the winter of clammy death?—the March-wind voices of distant women wailing their mates?

"Jam, ain't it?" yelled a man in his ear, as they raced up the ladder.

"Glory! glory!" sang the boy, beside himself with passion.

III

Aft and alone stood the old Commander, a dead man at his feet.

Another swarmed over the side. The old Commander's boarding-pike met him fair in the face. Back the fellow went into darkness and death.

"Good old Ding-dong!" came the Gunner's rollicking bellow, as he stormed up on deck, swinging his chain-shot like a battle-axe. "That's your sort!—bash em! blast em!—disembowl the —— Turks!"

Behind him, out of the smoke, poured the men, red-hot and roaring, like lava spewed up from the bowels of a volcano.

A stream of boarders, trickling over the bulwarks, raced across the deck to meet them.

"Love and War! O my God, ain't they glory?" howled the Gunner, and plunged into the opposing flood.

One man he felled with his chain-shot; then flung it aside.

"Naked does it!" he roared, and swept up a boarder in his arms. "Ow, the luscious little armful! no good kickin, duckie! You've got to ave it!" He rushed to the side, hugging his man, and screaming fearful laughter.

"Love me and forgive me, pretty tartie!" he roared, and smashed his burthen down over the side.

The fellow crashed into a ladder of boarders, swarming up one behind the other. Back they hurled into the boats, a hurricane of men, one on top of t'other. The boat rocked, crumpled up, and sank.

The tears were rolling down the Gunner's face.

"Quenched their little ardour!" he bellowed, leaping on to the bulwark. "That's the style below there, boys! Go it, ye cripples! Give em the little Tremendous!"

Beneath him the sea was black with boats. From the port-holes of the main-deck the wounded were leaning out, hailing round-shot down into the boats.

"Plug em! ply em!" roared the Gunner. "Red ot shot—cannister—case! anything ye like only give em slaughter for eaven's sweet sake!"

He was back in the thick of it, raving up and down the deck, sowing death broadcast, his great voice everywhere.

Not a man on board but seemed to have caught something of his heroic fury. The purser's steward, primmest of Methodists, who was said to pass his time in action converting the cook, came tripping out of the galley, a black-jack of boiling water in his hand.

"Glory for you!" he screamed, and flung the contents in the face of a boarder.

"There's the proper Christian!" gasped the Gunner, slammed up against the main-mast. "Propagate the Gospel ow ye can!—bilin bilge!—buckets o filth!—spit in his face if ye can't do no better."

A tall Frenchman pistoled the little steward.

The ship's cook, a flabby great flat-footed man, all in white, and snorting strangely, bundled up with a poll-axe, and cleft the Frenchman's skull.

"It a chap your own size!" he yelled, and felled from behind, went down himself.

IV

Up and down the deck the battle raged: here a scrimmage; there a single fight; men at hand-grips; men hurling round-shot. They swayed, they staggered about in each other's arms; they shocked, parted, came together again. Dead men lay in the scuppers; wounded men crawled the deck; and up and down among them the living reeled. One man, turned cur, crouched under the bulwark with ghastly face uplifted, and met his death, whimpering. Another, strangely quiet amid the dance of devils, stood against the foremast, nursing a broken arm. Nobody heeded him. They were too busy.

To Kit a sudden madness seemed to have possessed the world. The deck danced before him. He was bumped; he was battered; he was hurled to and fro—a twig in a torrent.

All was dreadful; all was dizzy. Strange faces with appalling eyes rose before him; men breathing terribly flitted past. There was a smell of blood and sweat in his nostrils; a sound of panting and blasphemies in his ears.

This then was a battle—not much like the stories! All the same he wished they wouldn't tread on his toes so.

Blindly the boy slashed about him. Whether he killed them, or they killed him, he hardly knew, and didn't greatly care. A sort of instinct told him the men to stab at—the dirty beasts in shirts who showed their teeth. The naked men were his own lot.

Once he heard a voice beside him.

"Go it, little un! you're almost a man!"

Then the Gunner staggered by, all black eyes and straining face, his arms about a huge boarder, his teeth deep in the fellow's shoulder.

"Rip this ——'s backside up!" came a gurgling voice.

His hand went up automatically; automatically his dirk came down.
A mountain fell on top of him….

As he crept out a voice panted hard by,

"Old man's down."

Dizzily he saw the old Commander sprawling to a fall, a man on top of him. The boy heard him grunt as he fell. That grunt angered him.

"I'm coming, sir!" he cried, and ran wrathfully with bloody dirk. "Beast!" he yelled. "Leave him alone!"

There was no need for him to cry.

The old man had done his own work from underneath with the jack-knife. Out poked his badger-grey head from under his man, much as the boy had often seen a ferret from beneath the body of a disembowelled rabbit.

"So fur so good," grunted the old man, crawling out on hands and knees, the scent-bottle between his teeth. "How's things forrad?"

Forward the deck was all but clear.

The remnant of the boarders, jammed up in the bows, were being hammered to death. A last fellow in a red night-cap, swarming out on the bowsprit, plumped into the sea.

The Gunner leapt on to the bulwark.

"Cleared, be God! alow and aloft!" he roared, swinging his chain-shot about his head. "Ats off all!—

God save h'our gracious King."

A bandaged head poked out of the hatchway.

"They're swarmin in through the port-holes!" came a husky scream.

Old Ding-dong lifted on his elbows.

"Leave the quarter-deck to me and the boy!" he roared. "Clear the main-deck."

"Ay, ay, sir," answered the Gunner, racing for the ladder. "Back to hell, the leetle beetches!"

The old man looked up.

"Any more for us, Mr. Caryll?"

A boat swept under the stern.

"Here's another of them, sir!"

The boy staggered to the side. A grappling iron swung from beneath almost struck him in the face.

He seized the cook's poll-axe, and hacked away at the bulwark. Then he put his shoulder to a carronade and shoved.

"H'all together eave!" whispered the dying cook, and lent a feeble hand.

Over went the carronade with spinning wheels. It caught the boat fair amidships, and broke it up like matchwood.

The boy leaned over. Beneath him in the green and sucking waters amid a litter of wreckage one or two heads showed, swimming faintly.

Pale and panting, he turned.

"I think that's the last, sir," languidly.

The old Commander removed the plug from his mouth.

"There's two things go to make a British seaman," he growled—"guts and gumption. Maybe you've got both, as your father had afoor you. We're like to see e'er the day's out."

He wiped his jack-knife on his breeches, and began to carve his plug again.

"Now run below and see how things are going with Mr. Lanyon."

The boy went. His passion had long passed. He was sick and weary.
Head and heart ached.

With shaking knees, he tottered below. Had a party of jabbering
Frenchmen met him, he wouldn't have minded. He was too spent.

But no.

All below was calm now and silence; smoke-drift and dying men.

The Gunner was standing at an open port, directing operations.

His passion too had passed. The giant-hero of a few minutes' back seemed almost small now. And a strange figure he made.

The sweat had coursed through the rouge on his cheeks; and the dye on his whiskers had run, dripping on to neck and shoulders. He was naked still, save for his trousers, but wearing his cocked hat a-rake.

The man at his side heaved a French corpse through the port.

"That's the lot," said the Gunner, picking his teeth, and turned with black and grinning face to the boy.

"Well, sir, what d'ye think? me?—earty fighter, ain't I?"