The man forward made a silent signal
to Dodd.
"Port!" said Dodd, quietly.
"Port it is."
But at this critical moment the pirate astern sent a mischievous shot,
and knocked one of the men to atoms at the helm.
Dodd waved his hand without a word, and another man rose from the deck,
and took his place in silence, and laid his unshaking hand on the wheel
stained with that man's warm blood whose place he took.
The high ship was now scarce sixty yards distant: _she seemed to know_:
she reared her lofty figurehead with great awful shoots into the air.
But now the panting pirates got their new foresail hoisted with a joyful
shout: it drew, the schooner gathered way, and their furious consort
close on the _Agra's_ heels just then scourged her deck with grape.
"Port!" said Dodd, calmly.
"Port it is."
The giant prow darted at the escaping pirate. That acre of coming canvas
took the wind out of the swift schooner's foresail; it flapped: oh, then
she was doomed! . . . CRASH! the Indiaman's cut-water in thick smoke beat
in the schooner's broadside: down went her masts to leeward like
fishing-rods whipping the water; there was a horrible shrieking yell;
wild forms leaped off on the _Agra_, and were hacked to pieces almost ere
they reached the deck--a surge, a chasm in the ear, filled with an
instant rush of engulfing waves, a long, awful, grating, grinding noise,
never to be forgotten in this world, all along under the ship's keel--and
the fearful majestic monster passed on over the blank she had made, with
a pale crew standing silent and awestruck on her deck; a cluster of wild
heads and staring eyeballs bobbing like corks in her foaming wake, sole
relic of the blotted-out _Destroyer_; and a wounded man staggering on the
gangway, with hands uplifted and staring eyes.
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