his de-fences, and went through it to stretch him bleeding upon
the deck. Yet he staggered up, knowing as full as did they that if he
succumbed then all was lost. Armed now with a short axe which he had
found under his hand when he went down, he hacked a way to the bulwarks,
set his back against the timbers, and hoarse of voice, ghastly of face,
spattered with the blood of his wound he urged on his men until the
victory was theirs--and this was fortunately soon. And then, as if he
had been sustained by no more than the very force of his will, he sank
down in a heap among the dead and wounded huddled against the vessel's
bulwarks.

Grief-stricken his corsairs bore him back aboard the carack. Were he to
die then was their victory a barren one indeed. They laid him on a couch
prepared for him amidships on the main deck, where the vessel's
pitching was least discomfiting. A Moorish surgeon came to tend him, and
pronounced his hurt a grievous one, but not so grievous as to close the
gates of hope.

This pronouncement gave the corsairs all the assurance they required. It
could not be that the Gardener could already pluck so fragrant a fruit
from Allah's garden. The Pitiful must spare Sakr-el-Bahr to continue the
glory of Islam.

Yet they were come to the straits of Gibraltar before his fever abated
and he recovered complete consciousness, to learn of the final issue
of that hazardous fight into which he had led those children of the
Prophet.

The Dutchman, Othmani informed him, was following in their wake, with
Ali and some others aboard her, steering ever in the wake of the carack
which continued to be navigated by the Nasrani dog, Jasper Leigh. When
Sakr-el-Bahr learnt the value of the capture, when he was informed that
in addition to a hundred able-bodied men under the hatches, to be sold
as slaves in the sok-el-Abeed, there was a cargo of gold and silver,
pearls, amber, spices, and ivory, and such lesser matters as gorgeous
silken fabrics, rich beyond anything that had ever been seen upon the
seas at any one time, he felt that the blood he had shed had not been
wasted.

Let him sail safely into Algiers with these two ships both captured
in the name of Allah and his Prophet, one of them an argosy so richly
fraught, a floating treasure-house, and he need have little fear of
what his enemies and the crafty evil Sicilian woman might have wrought
against him in his absence.

Then he made inquiry touching his two Englis