“His masts! fire at his masts!” roared Dodd to Monk, through his trumpet; he then got the jib clear, and made what sail he could without taking all the hands from the guns.

This kept the vessels nearly alongside a few minutes, and the fight was hot as fire.  The pirate now for the first time hoisted his flag.  It was black as ink.  His crew yelled as it rose:  the Britons, instead of quailing, cheered with fierce derision:  the pirate’s wild crew of yellow Malays, black chinless Papuans, and bronzed Portuguese, served their side guns, 12-pounders, well and with ferocious cries; the white Britons, drunk with battle now, naked to the waist, grimed with powder, and spotted like leopards with blood, their own and their mates’, replied with loud undaunted cheers, and deadly hail of grape from the quarterdeck; while the master gunner and his mates loading with a rapidity the mixed races opposed could not rival, hulled the schooner well between wind and water, and then fired chain shot at her masts, as ordered, and began to play the mischief with her shrouds and rigging.  Meantime, Fullalove and Kenealy, aided by Vespasian, who loaded, were quietly butchering the pirate crew two a minute, and hoped to settle the question they were fighting for; smooth-bore v. rifle:  but unluckily neither fired once without killing; so “there was nothing proven.”

The pirate, bold as he was, got sick of fair fighting first; he hoisted his mainsail and drew rapidly ahead, with a slight bearing to windward, and dismounted a carronade and stove in the ship’s quarter-boat, by way of a parting kick.

The men hurled a contemptuous cheer after him; they thought they had beaten him off.  But Dodd knew better.  He was but retiring a little way to make a more deadly attack than ever:  he would soon wear, and cross the Agra’s defenceless bows, to rake her fore and aft at pistol-shot distance; or grapple, and board the enfeebled ship two hundred strong.

Dodd flew to the helm, and with his own hands put it hard aweather, to give the deck guns one more chance, the last, of sinking or disabling the Destroyer.  As the ship obeyed, and a deck gun bellowed below him, he saw a vessel running out from Long Island, and coming swiftly up on his lee quarter.

It was a schooner.  Was she coming to his aid?

Horror!  A black flag floated from her foremast head.

While Dodd’s eyes were staring almost out of his head at this death-blow to hope, Monk fired again; and just then a pale face came close to Dodd’s, and a solemn voice whispered in his ear:  “Our ammunition is nearly done!”

Dodd seized Sharpe’s hand convulsively, and pointed to the pirate’s consort coming up to finish them; and said, with the calm of a brave man’s despair, “Cutlasses! and die hard!”