Again came the hail:  “What ship is that?”

John Paul Jones leaned forward over the rail.

“Pass the word below to the first lieutenant to begin the action, sir.”

Hardly were the words out of my mouth before the deck gave a mighty leap, a hot wind that seemed half of flame blew across my face, and the roar started the pain throbbing in my ears.  At the same instant the screech of shot sounded overhead, we heard the sharp crack-crack of wood rending and splitting,—­as with a great broadaxe,—­and a medley of blocks and ropes rattled to the deck with the ’thud of the falling bodies.  Then, instead of stillness, moans and shrieks from above and below, oaths and prayers in English and French and Portuguese, and in the heathen gibberish of the East.  As the men were sponging and ramming home in the first fury of hatred, the carpenter jumped out under the battle-lanthorn at the main hatch, crying in a wild voice that the old eighteens had burst, killing half their crews and blowing up the gundeck above them.  At this many of our men broke and ran for the hatches.

“Back, back to your quarters!  The first man to desert will be shot down!”

It was the same strange voice that had quelled the mutiny on the John, that had awed the men of Kirkcudbright.  The tackles were seized and the guns run out once more, and fired, and served again in an agony of haste.  In the darkness shot shrieked hither and thither about us like demons, striking everywhere, sometimes sending casks of salt water over the nettings.  Incessantly the quartermaster walked to and fro scattering sand over the black pools that kept running, running together as the minutes were tolled out, and the red flashes from the guns revealed faces in a hideous contortion.  One little fellow, with whom I had had many a lively word at mess, had his arm taken off at the shoulder as he went skipping past me with the charge under his coat, and I have but to listen now to hear the patter of the blood on the boards as they carried him away to the cockpit below.  Out of the main hatch, from that charnel house, rose one continuous cry.  It was an odd trick of the mind or soul that put a hymn on my lips in that dreadful hour of carnage and human misery, when men were calling the name of their Maker in vain.  But as I ran from crew to crew, I sang over and over again a long-forgotten Christmas carol, and with it came a fleeting memory of my mother on the stairs at Carvel Hall, and of the negroes gathered on the lawn without.

Suddenly, glancing up at the dim cloud of sails above, I saw that we were aback and making sternway.  We might have tossed a biscuit aboard the big Serapis as she glided ahead of us.  The broadsides thundered, and great ragged scantlings brake from our bulwarks and flew as high as the mizzen-top; and the shrieks and groans redoubled.  Involuntarily my eyes sought the poop, and I gave a sigh of relief at the sight of the commanding figure in the midst of the whirling smoke.  We shotted our guns with double-headed, manned our lee braces, and gathered headway.