s the Senor
grinned at him with his monkey face and bowed and wagged, the captain
fetched him a slash across the cheek with his sword that cut up into his
head; and that don went spinning across the poop like a morris-man and
brought up against the rail, and then down he came," and the lad dashed
his hand on his thigh again--"as dead as mutton."

Again came a louder gust of laughter from the room. Anthony half rose in
his chair, and then sat down again.

"Well," said the lad, "and that was not all. Down he raged again to the
decks and I behind him--I tell you, it was like a butcher's shop--but it
was quieter now--the fighting was over--and the Spaniards were all run
below, except half-a-dozen in the tops; looking down like young rooks at
an archer. There had been a popish priest too with his crucifix in one
hand and his god-almighty in the other, over a dying man as we came up;
but as we came down there he lay in his black gown with a hole through
his heart and his crucifix gone. One of the lads had got it no doubt.
Well, the captain brought up at the main mast. 'God's blood,' he bawled,
'where are the brown devils got to?' Some one told him, and pointed down
the hatch. Well, then I turned sick with my wound and the smell of the
place and all; and I knew nothing more till I found myself sitting on a
dead don, with the captain holding me up and pouring a cordial down my
throat."

Then talk and laughter broke out in the audience; but the landlord held
up his hand for silence.

"And what of the others?" he shouted.

"Dead meat too," said the lad--"the captain went down with a dozen or
more and hunted them out and finished them. There was one, Dick told me
afterwards," and the lieutenant gave a cackle of mirth, "that they hunted
twice round the ship before he jumped over yelling to some popish saint
to help him; but it seems he was deaf, like the old Baal that parson
tells of o' Sundays. The dirty swine to run like that! Well, he's got his
bellyful now of the salt water that he came so far to see. And then the
captain with his own hands trained a robinet that was on the poop on to
the tops; and down the birds came, one by one; for their powder up there
was all shot off."

"And the _Seahorse_?" said the landlord again.

There fell a dead silence: all in the room knew that the ship was lost,
but it was terrible to hear it again. The lad's face broke into lines of
grief, and he spoke huskily.

"Gone down with the dea