The sweep of those old cutlasses in the powerful hands that held them was awful, magnificent; no matter what may have been the history of those old blades they had never been wielded as now. But numbers began to tell and the infuriated negroes fought like fiends, urged on by the old siren Sybella who shrieked out a kind of battle song of the blacks. How long the four held back the hundreds none can tell, but it seemed an age to the fast wearying men who held the gate. A blow from an ax split McLeod’s head and he fell dead without even a groan. Brice turned as he heard his shipmate fall and received a stunning smash on the temple from a club that felled him like an ox in the shambles. [Illustration: “He recklessly rushed in front of Burton.” Page 286] Jack saw Burton, who was fighting furiously, beset by two savage blacks armed with axes stuck on long poles. In that supreme moment of peril the thought of Lucy’s sorrow at loss of her husband, should she be restored to reason, came to the mind of the great hearted sailor. He recklessly rushed in front of Burton, severed at a stroke of his sword the arm of one of Burton’s assailants, and caught the descending ax of the other when within an inch of the head of the man who had taken the place in Lucy’s love that he had hoped for. Jack Dunlap’s cutlass warded off the blow from Burton but the sharp ax glanced along the blade and was buried in the broad breast of Lucy’s knight, and he fell across the bodies of his faithful followers, Brice and McLeod; Jack’s fast deafening ears caught sound of— “Follow me, lads, give them cold steel. Don’t shoot. You may hit friends! Charge!” Tom Maxon’s voice was far from jolly now. There was death in every note of it as, at the head of a body of United States Blue-jackets, he dashed in among the black barbarians. When he caught sight of the prostrate, bleeding form of his old school-fellow he raged like a wounded lion among Sybella’s savage followers. As the lieutenant saw that the range of fire was free from his friends, he cried out, hoarse with passion, “Fire at will. Give them hell!” and he emptied his own revolver into the huddled crowd of mountaineers, who still stood, brave to recklessness, hesitating about what to do against the new adversaries. The repeating rifles of the Americans soon covered the roadway with dark corpses. Long lanes were cut by the rapid fire through the black mass. With howls and yells of mingled terror, rage and disappointment the mob broke and taking to the jungle disappeared in the darkness of the adjacent forest. A sailor kicked aside what he thought was a bundle of rags, and started back as the torch that he bore revealed the open, fangless mouth and snake-like, glaring eyes of an old crone of a woman who in death seemed even more horrible than in life. A rifle ball, at close range, had shattered Mother Sybella’s skull. XVII.