“Mon capitaine, Josef is dead.”

This decided the matter, and the body was laid aside, while another stepped forward and sponged the gun.  At that moment Raoul found leisure to walk a yard or two toward the rear, in order to ascertain if the cover of Ghita were sufficient.  The girl was on her knees, lost to all around her; though, could he have read her heart, he would have found it divided between entreaties to the Deity and love for himself.

The lugger sustained no harm.  O’Leary had overshot her, in his desire to make his missiles reach.  Not even a canister had lodged in her spars, or torn her sails.  The usual luck appeared to attend her, and the people on board fought with renewed confidence and zeal.  Not so with the felucca, however.  Here the fire of the English had been the most destructive.  The wary and calculating McBean had given his attention to this portion of the French defences, and the consequences partook of the sagacity and discretion of the man.  A charge of canister had swept across the felucca’s decks, more than decimating Ithuel’s small force; for it actually killed one, and wounded three of his party.

But, the din once commenced, there was no leisure to pause.  The fire was kept up with animation on both sides, and men fell rapidly.  The boats cheered and pressed ahead, the water becoming covered with a wide sheet of smoke.

In moments like this, the safest course for the assailants is to push on.  This the English did, firing and cheering at every fathom they advanced, but suffering also.  The constant discharge of the carronades, and the total absence of wind, soon caused a body of smoke to collect in front of the rock, while the English brought on with them another, trailing along the water, the effect of their own fire.  The two shrouds soon united, and then there was a minute when the boats could only be seen with indistinctness.  This was Ithuel’s moment.  Perceiving that the ten or twelve men who remained to him were engrossed with their muskets, he pointed the two carronades himself, and primed them from the horns which he had never quitted.  For the felucca he felt no present concern.  Winchester and all the boats in the centre of the English line were most in advance, the fire of the ruins urging them to the greatest exertion.  Then McBean, besides being more distant, could not cross the rock in front of the felucca without making a circuit, and he must, as yet, be ignorant of the existence of the impediment.  Ithuel was cool and calculating by nature, as well as by habit; but this immunity from present risk probably increased the immediate possession of qualities so important in battle.  His carronades were loaded to their muzzles with bags of bullets, and he beckoned to the best seaman of his party to take one of the matches, while he used the other himself, each holding a monkey’s-tail in one hand, in readiness to train the light gun, as circumstances required.  The pieces had been depressed by Ithuel himself, in the midst of the fray, and nothing remained but to wait the moment for using them.