lood gushed from his mouth as he fell forwards,
facing me, dead, huddled up in a heap again upon the deck!

"Those devils incarnate, besides mutilating his limbs, had, would you
believe it, cut out his tongue as they had before threatened, for
warning us of their treachery!"

"God in heaven!" exclaimed Captain Applegarth, stopping in his quick
walk up and down the saloon and bringing his fist down on the table with
a bang that made the glasses in the swinging tray above jump and rattle,
two of them indeed falling over and smashing into fragments on the
floor. "The infernal demons! Can such things be? It is dreadful!"

All of us were equally horror stricken and indignant at the colonel's
terrible recital, even old Mr Stokes waking up and stretching out his
hand to the skipper, as if pledging himself to what he wished to urge
before he spoke.

"Horrible, horrible, sir!" he panted out, his anger taking away his
breath and affecting his voice. "But we'll avenge the poor fellow and
kill the rascals when we come up with them, won't we, sir? There's my
hand on it, anyway!"

I did not and could not say anything; no, I couldn't; but you can pretty
well imagine the oath I mentally registered.

Not so Garry O'Neil, though.

The Irishman's face flamed with rage and anger. "Kill them, sor!" cried
he, springing to his feet from the chair in which he had been seated
alongside the colonel, whose injured limb he had been carefully
attending to again all the while, his reddish beard and moustache
bristling, and his steel-blue eyes flashing out veritable sparks, it
seemed of fire. "Faith, killin's too good for 'em, sure, the haythen
miscreants! I'd boil 'em alive, sor, or roast 'em in the stoke-hold,
begorrah, if I had me own way with 'em. I would, sor, so hilp me Moses,
if all the howly saints, whose names be praised, an' the blessed ould
Pope, too, prayed me to spare 'em. Och, the murtherin' bastes, the
daymans, the divvles!"

He was almost beside himself in his rage and passionate invective. So
much so, indeed, that Mr Stokes, despite his own hearty sympathy with
the like cause, looked at the infuriated Irishman in great trepidation,
for his face was flushed, and his hair seemed actually to stand on end,
while his words tumbled out of his mouth pell-mell, jostling each other
in their eagerness to find utterance.

The chief really fancied, I believe, that he had suddenly gone mad, as
he literally fumed with fury.