The next instant, with a wild yell of fury, the hidden men burst out of the cabin, and then followed a scene of butchery which I pray Heaven it may nevermore be my fate to witness.

Groves was the first to spill blood.  Leaping upon Mohand, he buried a long curved knife right up to 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 sped away, and I watched her go without regret, not thinking of our own hapless condition, but only of the brutal ferocity of that mad crew aboard her.