He walked to the break of the poop, with the woman in his arms.  She seemed like a child held to his breast.  He spoke to the men below in a hushed, solemn voice.

“It is ended,” he said.  “Swope is dead.”

As he stood there, the flares commenced to go out.  One by one they guttered and extinguished, and the black night swept down like a falling curtain.

Five bells chimed in the cabin.

CHAPTER XXIII

It was the end, even as Newman said.  The end of the mutiny, the end of hate and dissension in that ship, the end, for us, of Newman, himself, and the lady.  Peace came to the Golden Bough that night, for the first time, I suppose, in her bitter, blood-stained history.  A peace that was bought with suffering and death, as we discovered when we reckoned the cost of the night’s work.

Swope was dead—­for which there was a prayer of thanks in every man’s heart.  Fitzgibbon was gone, and the Nigger.  Boston was dead at my hand; his partner, Blackie, lay stark in the scuppers, as did also the stiff named Green, each with a bashed in skull, the handiwork of Mister Lynch.

Such was the death list for that night’s work.  It was no heavier I think—­though of much different complexion—­than the list Captain Swope had planned.

As for wounded—­God’s truth, the Golden Bough was manned by a crew of cripples for weeks after.  Lynch had wrought terribly, there on the main deck—­broken pates, broken fingers, a cracked wrist, a broken foot, and three men wounded, though not seriously, by Swope’s and Connolly’s shots.  Such were the foc’sle’s lighter casualties.  Aft, the list was shorter.  Morton had a bullet wound in the shoulder; it would lay him up for the rest of the passage, but was not dangerous.  Connolly had a lump behind his ear.  Lynch was bruised a bit, and his clothes were slashed to ribbons, otherwise he had escaped scathless.

The lady was not really hurt at all.  Swope’s bullet plowed through her mass of hair, creasing her so lightly the skin was unbroken, though the impact knocked her down.

I was almost the only man on the ship who bore no marks of that fight, though I was a sight from the beating, and Lynch—­or perhaps it was Newman—­made me bo’sun of the deck in the labor of bringing order out of chaos.  I rallied the unhurt and lightly hurt, and we carried the worse injured into the cabin, where the lady and Newman attended them.  I opened the barricaded galley, and freed the frightened Chinamen, Wong and the cook and the cabin boy, and Holy Joe, the parson.  As I learned afterwards, Holy Joe, when he learned of the intended mutiny, threatened, in vain attempt to stop it, to go aft and blow the plot.  Blackie and Boston wanted to kill him for the threat, but the squareheads would not have it so, and he was shut up in the galley with the Chinamen.