g through the mainsail below me,
another mangling two men in the waist of our schooner, and Griggs gave
the order to touch off. But two of his guns answered, one of which had
been so gorged with shot that it burst in a hundred pieces and sent
the fellow with the swab to perdition, and such a hell of blood and
confusion as resulted is indescribable. I saw Griggs in a wild fit of
rage force the helm down, the schooner flying into the wind. And by this
time, the brigantine having got round and presented her port battery,
raked us at a bare hundred yards, and I was the first to guess by the
tilting forward of the mast that our hull was hit between wind and
water, and was fast settling by the bow.

The schooner was sinking like a gallipot.

That day, with the sea flashing blue and white in the sun, I saw men go
to death with a curse upon their lips and a fever in their eyes, with
murder and defiance of God's holy will in their hearts. Overtaken in
bestiality, like the judgment of Nineveh, five and twenty disappeared
from beneath me, and I had scarce the time to throw off my cutlass
before I, too, was engulfed. So expired the Black Moll.

Volume 4.

CHAPTER XIX. A MAN OF DESTINY

I was picked up and thrown into the brigantine's long-boat with a head
and stomach full of salt water, and a heart as light as spray with the
joy of it all. A big, red-bearded man lifted my heels to drain me.

"The mon's deid," said he.

"Dead!" cried I, from the bottom-board. "No more dead than you!"

I turned over so lustily that he dropped my feet, and I sat up,
something to his consternation. And they had scarce hooked the ship's
side when I sprang up the sea-ladder, to the great gaping of the boat's
crew, and stood with the water running off me in rivulets before
the captain himself. I shall never forget the look of his face as he
regarded my sorry figure.

"Now by Saint Andrew," exclaimed he, "are ye kelpie or pirate?"

"Neither, captain," I replied, smiling as the comical end of it came up
to me, "but a young gentleman in misfortune."

"Hoots!" says he, frowning at the grinning half-circle about us, "it's
daft ye are--"

But there he paused, and took of me a second sizing. How he got at my
birth behind my tangled mat of hair and wringing linsey-woolsey I
know not to this day. But he dropped his Scotch and merchant-captain's
manner, and was suddenly a French courtier, making me a bow that had
done credit to a Richelie