r company gave them such male passengers as lacked strength or courage
to join the battle.

While they were thus engaged, two pirates came flying down the ladder
from the poop deck into the main cabin. They revolved like windmills in
a jumble of arms and legs. Close behind them, in a manner more orderly
came Captain Jonathan Wellsby who had tossed the one and tremendously
booted the other. They were the helmsmen whom he had replaced with his
own officers at the steering tackles, while his first mate had been left
in charge of handling the ship.

The skipper was now free to follow his own desires and he fell upon
those two stunned pirates in the cabin and trussed them tight with bits
of rope. Then he reloaded with dry powder all the pistols he could find
and made a walking arsenal of himself. The two lads who now joined him
needed no word of command. At his heels they made for the main deck and
the shout which arose from those British sailors, so sorely beset, was
mightily heartening.

Blazing away with his pistols, the skipper cleared a path for himself,
the pirates being taken aback when they were attacked in the rear. And
they were leaderless, for Ned Rackham had been dragged aside with the
marks of the boatswain's fingers on his throat and a sheath-knife buried
in his side. He was alive but nobody paid heed to his groans.

With the skipper in the thick of it, there was no danger of being penned
in the forecastle again. The pirates were crowded aft, step by step,
before the play of those wicked boarding-pikes. It would be hard to
match a sea fight like this, amid the spray and the washing seas, on a
deck that tipsily danced and staggered, with a truant gun smashing a
good ship to bits and the wounded screaming as they saw this horror
thundering at them. Captain Wellsby's men were at pains to drag their
helpless comrades to safety but the pirates were too callous and too
hard pressed to care for aught save their own worthless skins. They
fought like wolves but they lacked the gristle and endurance of the
stalwart sailors. Wheezing for breath, they ceased to curse and reeled
back in silence while the sailors huzzaed and seemed to wax the lustier.

As was bound to happen, the stubborn retreat broke into a rout. It was
every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. The pirates fled
for the after cabin-house, there to take cover behind the timbered walls
and use the small port-holes for musketry fire. Thus they