"
"God have mercy on you, then!"
"Amen!" said the Spaniard, crossing himself.
She gave one awful lunge forward, and dived under the coming swell,
hurling her crew into the eddies. Nothing but the point of her poop
remained, and there stood the stern and steadfast Don, cap-a-pie in his
glistening black armor, immovable as a man of iron, while over him the
flag, which claimed the empire of both worlds, flaunted its gold aloft
and upwards in the glare of the tropic noon.
"He shall not carry that flag to the devil with him; I will have it
yet, if I die for it!" said Will Cary, and rushed to the side to leap
overboard, but Amyas stopped him.
"Let him die as he lived, with honor."
A wild figure sprang out of the mass of sailors who struggled and
shrieked amid the foam, and rushed upward at the Spaniard. It was
Michael Heard. The Don, who stood above him, plunged his sword into
the old man's body: but the hatchet gleamed, nevertheless: down went
the blade through the headpiece and through head; and as Heard sprang
onward, bleeding, but alive, the steel-clad corpse rattled down the
deck into the surge. Two more strokes, struck with the fury of a dying
man, and the standard-staff was hewn through.
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