The two available carronades replied noisily, and jumped as usual; they sent one thirty-two pound shot clean through the schooner’s deck and side; but that was literally all they did worth speaking of.

“Curse them!” cried Dodd; “load them with grape!  They are not to be trusted with ball.  And all my eighteen-pounders dumb!  The coward won’t come alongside and give them a chance.”

At the next discharge the pirate chipped the mizzen mast, and knocked a sailor into dead pieces on the forecastle.  Dodd put his helm down ere the smoke cleared, and got three carronades to bear, heavily laden with grape.  Several pirates fell, dead or wounded, on the crowded deck, and some holes appeared in the foresail; this one interchange was quite in favor of the ship.

But the lesson made the enemy more cautious; he crept nearer, but steered so adroitly, now right astern, now on the quarter, that the ship could seldom bring more than one carronade to bear, while he raked her fore and aft with grape and ball.

In this alarming situation, Dodd kept as many of the men below as possible; but, for all he could do four were killed and seven wounded.

Fullalove’s word came too true:  it was the swordfish and the whale:  it was a fight of hammer and anvil; one hit, the other made a noise.  Cautious and cruel, the pirate hung on the poor hulking creature’s quarters and raked her at point blank distance.  He made her pass a bitter time.  And her captain!  To see the splintering hull, the parting shrouds, the shivered gear, and hear the shrieks and groans of his wounded; and he unable to reply in kind!  The sweat of agony poured down his face.  Oh, if he could but reach the open sea, and square his yards, and make a long chase of it; perhaps fall in with aid.  Wincing under each heavy blow, he crept doggedly, patiently on, towards that one visible hope.

At last, when the ship was cloven with shot, and peppered with grape, the channel opened:  in five minutes more he could put her dead before the wind.

No.  The pirate, on whose side luck had been from the first, got half a broadside to bear at long musket shot, killed a midshipman by Dodd’s side, cut away two of the Agra’s mizzen shrouds, wounded the gaff:  and cut the jib stay; down fell the powerful sail into the water, and dragged across the ship’s forefoot, stopping her way to the open sea she panted for, the mates groaned; the crew cheered stoutly, as British tars do in any great disaster; the pirates yelled with ferocious triumph, like the devils they looked.

But most human events, even calamities, have two sides.  The Agra being brought almost to a standstill, the pirate forged ahead against his will, and the combat took a new and terrible form.  The elephant gun popped, and the rifle cracked, in the Agra’s mizzen top, and the man at the pirate’s helm jumped into the air and fell dead:  both Theorists claimed him.  Then the three carronades peppered him hotly; and he hurled an iron shower back with fatal effect.  Then at last the long 18-pounders on the gun-deck got a word in.  The old Niler was not the man to miss a vessel alongside in a quiet sea; he sent two round shot clean through him; the third splintered his bulwark, and swept across his deck.