He stumbled on the stairs, falling
heavily with his burden. Then I dropped my poor gunner and helped
them carry D'ri to a table, where they bade me lie down beside him.

"It is no time for jesting," said I, with some dignity.

"My dear fellow," the surgeon answered, "your wound is no jest.
You are not fit for duty."

I looked down at the big hole in my trousers and the cut in my
thigh, of which I had known nothing until then. I had no sooner
seen it and the blood than I saw that I also was in some need of
repair, and lay down with a quick sense of faintness. My wound was
no pretty thing to see, but was of little consequence, a missile
having torn the surface only. I was able to help Surgeon Usher as
he caught the severed veins and bathed the bloody strands of muscle
in D'ri's arm, while another dressed my thigh. That room was full
of the wounded, some lying on the floor, some standing, some
stretched upon cots and tables. Every moment they were crowding
down the companionway with others. The cannonading was now so
close and heavy that it gave me an ache in the ears, but above its
quaking thunder I could hear the shrill cries of men sinking to
hasty death in the grip of pain. The brig was in sore distress,
her timbers creaking, snapping, quivering, like one being beaten to
death, his bones cracking, his muscles pulping under heavy blows.
We were above water-line there in the cockpit; we could feel her
flinch and stagger. On her side there came suddenly a crushing
blow, as if some great hammer, swung far in the sky, had come down
upon her. I could hear the split and break of heavy timbers; I
could see splinters flying over me in a rush of smoke, and the legs
of a man go bumping on the beams above. Then came another crash of
timbers on the port side. I leaped off the table and ran, limping,
to the deck, I do not know why; I was driven by some quick and
irresistible impulse. I was near out of my head, anyway, with the
rage of battle in me and no chance to fight. Well, suddenly, I
found myself stumbling, with drawn sabre, over heaps of the hurt
and dead there on our reeking deck. It was a horrible place:
everything tipped over, man and gun and mast and bulwark. The air
was full of smoke, but near me I could see a topsail of the enemy.
Balls were now plunging in the water alongside, the spray drenching
our deck. Some poor man lying low among the dead caught me by the
boot-leg with an appealing gesture.