great forecastle gun belch its cloud of smoke. The water was spouting up in
white jets through our scuppers. It came foaming green and white through
our gun ports. Then, in solid green sheets, it leaped up over the bulwarks,
and for a moment the long flush deck was a boiling cauldron with a bloody
scum, in which twirled and twisted dead men and living, and fragments of
the ship and rigging.

When I came up through the roaring green water I found myself within arm's
length of the foretopsailyard, to which a strip of ragged sail still hung.
I hooked my arm over it and looked round for my comrades. About a score of
heads floated in the belching bubbles of the sunken ship, but even as I
looked the number lessened, for the Island men of those days were no
swimmers. A burly body swung past me. I grabbed it, dragged it to the spar
and hoisted its arm over it. It was John Ozanne, and presently he recovered
sufficiently to get his other arm up and draw himself chest-high to look
about him. The light spar would not support us both, and I let myself sink
into the water, with only a grip on a hanging rope's end to keep in tow
with it.

John Ozanne gazed wildly round for a minute, and then raised his right arm
and volubly cursed the Frenchman, who was coming right down on us.

"Oh, you devils! You devils! May--" and then to my horror, for with the
wash of the waves in my ears I could hear nothing, a small round hole bored
itself suddenly in his broad forehead, just where the brown and the white
met, and he threw up his arms and dropped back into the water.

I made a grab for him, but he was gone, and even as I did so the meaning of
that hideous little round hole in his forehead came plain to me. The
Frenchman was shooting at every head he could see.