Finally, about six bells of the watch, the stranger wore ship and bore down across our bows, hoisting English colours, at sight of which I could scarce forbear a cheer.  At this instant, Captain Griggs woke to the fact that his helm was still lashed, and bestowing a hearty kick on his prostrate quartermaster stuck fast to the pitchy seams of the deck, took the wheel himself, and easing off before the wind to bring the vessels broadside to broadside, commanded that the guns be shooed to the muzzle, an order that was barely executed before the brigantine came within close range.  Aboard her was all order and readiness; the men at her guns fuse in hand, an erect and pompous figure of a man, in a cocked hat, on the break of her poop.  He raised his hand, two puffs of white smoke darted out, and I heard first the shrieking of shot, the broadside came crashing round us, one tearing through the mainsail below me, another mangling two men in the waist of our schooner, and Griggs gave the order to touch off.  But two of his guns answered, one of which had been so gorged with shot that it burst in a hundred pieces and sent the fellow with the swab to perdition, and such a hell of blood and confusion as resulted is indescribable.  I saw Griggs in a wild fit of rage force the helm down, the schooner flying into the wind.  And by this time, the brigantine having got round and presented her port battery, raked us at a bare hundred yards, and I was the first to guess by the tilting forward of the mast that our hull was hit between wind and water, and was fast settling by the bow.

The schooner was sinking like a gallipot.

That day, with the sea flashing blue and white in the sun, I saw men go to death with a curse upon their lips and a fever in their eyes, with murder and defiance of God’s holy will in their hearts.  Overtaken in bestiality, like the judgment of Nineveh, five and twenty disappeared from beneath me, and I had scarce the time to throw off my cutlass before I, too, was engulfed.  So expired the Black Moll.

RICHARD CARVEL

By Winston Churchill

Volume 4.

XIX.  A Man of Destiny
XX.  A Sad Home-coming
XXI.  The Gardener’s Cottage
XXII.  On the Road
XXIII.  London Town
XXIV.  Castle Yard
XXV.  The Rescue

CHAPTER XIX

A MAN OF DESTINY

I was picked up and thrown into the brigantine’s long-boat with a head and stomach full of salt water, and a heart as light as spray with the joy of it all.  A big, red-bearded man lifted my heels to drain me.

“The mon’s deid,” said he.

“Dead!” cried I, from the bottom-board.  “No more dead than you!”

I turned over so lustily that he dropped my feet, and I sat up, something to his consternation.  And they had scarce hooked the ship’s side when I sprang up the sea-ladder, to the great gaping of the boat’s crew, and stood with the water running off me in rivulets before the captain himself.  I shall never forget the look of his face as he regarded my sorry figure.