As the women scurried into the cabin the two lines met, with a ringing
clash of blades, on the deck of the Jasper B., and the sparks flew from
the stricken metal. Cleggett strove to engage Loge hand to hand; and
Loge, on his part, attempted to fight his way to Cleggett; they shouted
insults at each other across the press of battle. But in affairs of
this sort a man must give his attention to the person directly in front
of him; otherwise he is lost. As Cleggett cut and thrust and parried,
a sudden seizure overtook him; he moved as if in a dream; he had the
eerie feeling that he had done all this before, sometime, perhaps in a
previous existence, and would do it again. The clangor of the meeting
swords, the inarticulate shouts and curses, the dance of struggling men
across the deck, the whirling confusion of the whole fantastic scene
beneath the quiet skies, struck upon his consciousness with that
strange phantasmagoric quality which makes the hurrying unreality of
dreams so much more vivid and more real than anything in waking life.

In the center of Cleggett's line stood the three detectives shoulder to
shoulder. Their three swords rose and fell as one. They cut and lunged
and guarded with a machine-like regularity, advancing, giving ground,
advancing again, with a rhythmic unanimity which was baffling to their
opponents.

On either flank of the detectives fought one of the gigantic negroes.
Washington Artillery Lamb, almost at once, had broken his cutlass, and
now he raged in the waist of the Jasper B. with a long iron bar in his
hand. Miss Pringle's Jefferson, with his high cockaded hat still
firmly fixed upon his head, laid about him with a heavy cavalry saber;
in his excitement he still held his harmonica in his mouth and blew
blasts upon it as he fought. The Rev. Simeon Calthrop, in a loud
agitated voice, sang hymns as he swung his cutlass. And, among the
legs of the combatants, leapt and snapped Teddy the Pomeranian, biting
friend and foe indiscriminately upon the ankles.

But gradually the weight of superior numbers began to tell. Farnsworth
staggered from the fight with a face covered with blood which blinded
him. Cap'n Abernethy likewise was bleeding from a wound in the head;
George the Greek and Watson Bard were hurt, but both fought on. The
crew of the Jasper B. and their allies of the Annabel Lee were being
slowly forced back towards the cabin, when there came a sudden and
decisive turn in th