began to speak.  Together with the great guns they spoke to such effect that the fight became very deadly.  Twice the English strove to enter the huge San Jose, and twice the Spaniards, thick upon her as swarming bees, beat them back with sword and pike and blinding volleys from their musketeers.  From the tops fell upon them stones and heated pitch; the hail-shot mowed them down; swordsmen and halberdiers thrust many from their footing, loosening forevermore their clutching fingers, forever stayed the hoarse shout in their throats.  Many fell into the sea and were drowned before the soul could escape through gaping wounds; others reached their own decks to die there, or to lie writhing at the feet of the unhurt, who might not stay for the need of any comrade.  At the second repulse there arose from the galleon a deafening cry of triumph.

Ferne, erect against the break of the Cygnet’s poop, drawing a cloth tight with teeth and hand above a wound in his arm from which the blood was streaming, smiled at the sound, knotted his tourniquet; then for the third time sprang upon that slanting, deadly bridge of straining ropes.  His sword flashed above his head.

“Follow me—­follow me!” he cried, and his face, turned over his shoulder, looked upon his men.  A drifting smoke wreath obscured his form; then it passed, and he stood in the galleon’s storm of shot, poised above them, a single figure breathing war.  Seen through the glare, the face was serene; only the eyes commanded and compelled.  The voice rang like a trumpet.  “St. George and Merry England!  Come on, men!—­come on, come on!”

They poured over the side and across the chasm dividing them from their foes.  A resistless force they came, following the gleam of a lifted sword, the “On—­on!” of a loved leader’s voice.  Sir Mortimer touched the galleon’s side, ran through the body a man of Seville whose sword-point offered at his throat, and stood the next moment upon the poop of the San Jose Robert Baldry, a cutlass between his teeth, sprang after him; then came Sedley and Arden and the tide of the English.

The Spanish captain met his death, as was fitting, at Ferne’s hand; the commandant of the soldiers fell to the share of Henry Sedley.  The young man fought with dilated eyes, and white lips pressed together.  Sir Mortimer, who fought with narrowed eyes, who, quite ungarrulous by nature, yet ever grew talkative in such an hour as this, found time to note his lieutenant’s deeds, to throw to the brother of the woman he loved a “Well done, dear lad!” Sedley held his head high; his leader’s praise wrought in him like wine.  He had never seen a man who did not his best beneath the eyes of Sir Mortimer Ferne....  There, above the opposite angle of the poop, red gold, now seen but dimly through the reek of the guns, now in a moment of clear sunshine flaunting it undefiled, streamed the Spanish flag.  Between him and that emblem of world-power the press