"The Combatants Cut and Slashed with Savage Fury"

_Illustration from_
JACK BALLISTER'S FORTUNES

_by_ Howard Pyle

_Originally published by_
The Century Company, 1894]

The sloop had got afloat again, and had been coming up to the aid of
the schooner, when the pirates fired their second broadside now at
her. When the lieutenant looked at her she was quivering with the
impact of the shot, and the next moment she began falling off to the
wind, and he could see the wounded men rising and falling and
struggling upon her decks.

At the same moment the boatswain called out that the enemy was coming
aboard, and even as he spoke the pirate sloop came drifting out from
the cloud of smoke that enveloped her, looming up larger and larger as
she came down upon them. The lieutenant still crouched down under the
rail, looking out at them. Suddenly, a little distance away, she came
about, broadside on, and then drifted. She was close aboard now.
Something came flying through the air--another and another. They were
bottles. One of them broke with a crash upon the deck. The others
rolled over to the farther rail. In each of them a quick-match was
smoking. Almost instantly there was a flash and a terrific report, and
the air was full of the whiz and singing of broken particles of glass
and iron. There was another report, and then the whole air seemed full
of gunpowder smoke. "They're aboard of us!" shouted the boatswain, and
even as he spoke the lieutenant roared out, "All hands to repel
boarders!" A second later there came the heavy, thumping bump of the
vessels coming together.

Lieutenant Maynard, as he called out the order, ran forward through
the smoke, snatching one of his pistols out of his pocket and the
cutlass out of its sheath as he did so. Behind him the men were
coming, swarming up from below. There was a sudden stunning report of
a pistol, and then another and another, almost together. There was a
groan and the fall of a heavy body, and then a figure came jumping
over the rail, with two or three more directly following. The
lieutenant was in the midst of the gunpowder smoke, when suddenly
Blackbeard was before him. The pirate captain had stripped himself
naked to the waist. His shaggy black hair was falling over his eyes,
and he looked like a demon fresh from the pit, with his frantic face.
Almost with the blindness of instinct the lieutenant thrust out his
pistol, firing it as he did so. The pirate staggered bac