ain the deck pelted the nearest pirates with
these ugly missiles. The air was full of hurtling bricks and the
earliest casualty was a stout buccaneer who stopped one with his
stomach.

Driven back in yelling confusion, the pirates found their firearms
almost useless, so drenched had the whole ship been by the battering
seas, but they were accustomed to fighting it out with the cold steel
and they were by no means a panicky mob. The fusillade of bricks held
them long enough for the merchant sailors to escape from the forecastle
and this was an advantage more precious than Captain Wellsby had hoped
for.

What the pirates required was a leader to rally them for attack. Quicker
than it takes to tell it, Ned Rackham had raced along the poop and
leaped to the waist at peril of breaking his neck. Agile, quick-witted,
he bounded into the thick of it, cutlass in hand, while he shouted:

"At 'em, lads! And give the dogs no quarter!"

With hoarse outcry, his gallows-birds mustered compactly while those who
had been in the cabin came scampering to join them. Curiously enough,
Captain Jonathan Wellsby had been forgotten. He was left alone to handle
the ship while the pirate helmsmen stood by the great tiller. To forsake
it meant to let the vessel run wild and perhaps turn turtle in the
swollen seas. And so the doughty skipper was, for the time, a looker-on.

And now with Ned Rackham in the van, it seemed that the British sailors
were in a parlous plight and that their sortie must fail. Craftily the
pirates manoeuvered to drive them back into the forecastle and there
to butcher them like sheep.

CHAPTER V

RELEASING A FEARFUL WEAPON

JACK COCKRELL sprawled flat upon the forecastle roof and knew not what
to do. He could lay hands on nothing to serve as a weapon and he bade
fair to be trapped like the sailors whose cause he had joined. With a
feeling of despair he let his gaze rove to the scrawny figure of Joe
Hawkridge who still bestrode the nine-pounder and took no part in the
fray. But Joe had no comfort for him, as a gesture conveyed. It had been
Joe's wild scheme to obtain the help of Jack and Captain Wellsby, at the
least, and so cast loose the gun and slew it around to rake the deck and
mow the pirates down. But the men were lacking for this heavy task, and
the sailors of the _Plymouth Adventure_ were too intent on fighting
against fearful odds to pay heed to Joe Hawkridge's appeals. He had even
skulked into th