A sound, almost plumb beneath me, recalled me to more selfish alarms.  The Moors, whether they came from the xebec or, as we agreed later, more probably from shore, in answer to the xebec’s signal-lights—­ must have dropped down on us without stroke of oars.  It may be that for the last half a mile or more they had wriggled their boat down to the attack by means of an oar or sweep shipped in the stern notch:  a device which would avoid all noise and, if they came slowly, all warning but the ripple of briming off the bows.  In any case they had not failed to observe that the ketch was being towed; and now, having discharged her boarding-party, their boat pushed forward to capture ours, which lay beneath us bumping idly against the Gauntlet’s stem.  I heard some half a dozen of them start to jabber as they found it empty.  I divined—­I could not see—­the astonishment in their faces, as they stared up into the darkness.

Just then—­perhaps in response to their cries—­a comrade on deck ran forward to the bows and leaned over to hail them, standing so close to me that his shoulder brushed against the fold of the foresail within which I cowered.  Like me he was bare to the waist, but around his loins he wore a belt scaled with silver sequins, glimmering against the ray of the lantern on the after-hatch, and maybe also in the first weak light of the approaching dawn. . . .

A madness took me at the sight.  In a sudden rage I gripped the forestay with my left hand, lowered my right, and, slipping my fingers under his belt, lifted him—­he was a light man—­swung him outboard and overboard, and dropped him into the sea.

I heard the splash; with an ugly thud, which told me that some part of him had struck the boat’s gunwale.  I waited—­it seemed that I waited many seconds—­expecting the answering yell, or a shot perhaps.  Still gripping the forestay with my left hand, I bent forward, ready to leap for deck.  But even as I bent, the bowsprit shook under me like a whip, and the deck before me opened in a yellow sheet of fire.  The whole ship seemed to burst asunder and shut again, the flame of the explosion went wavering up the rigging, and I found myself hanging on to the forestay and dangling over emptiness.  While I dangled I heard in the roaring echoes another splash, and knew that Billy Priske had been thrown from his hold; a splash, and close upon it a heavy grinding sound, a crash of burst planks, an outcry ending in a wail as the lifting sea bore back the Moor’s boat and our own together upon the Gauntlet’s stem and smashed them like egg-shells.