Thus the thirty men of the _Falcon's_ crew detailed for the boarding-party, stood by the guards of the brig upon that side of her towards the ship, waiting for the moment when the upheaving and subsidence of the waters should uplift the former and depress the latter, that they might seize the opportunity to leap down upon the deck of the _Duchess_. Captain Johnson was also waiting for the same moment. He had stationed eight men each with a cutlass in his right hand and a pistol in his left, in a position to meet the pirates should they gain his deck. He had so carefully balanced and trained his two guns that, when they should be fired, the balls would come together at a short distance from the muzzles of the cannon. By one of these guns stood Captain Johnson himself, by the other one of his mates, upon whose coolness he could thoroughly depend. Each of these two resolute men held a lighted match in his hand. By this time the sun had been half an hour below the horizon, and the short twilight of that southern latitude was fast darkening into a night of storm and of unusual gloom; for although there was one clear spot in the western sky, all the rest of the face of heaven was veiled in heavy clouds. In his anxiety to gain as soon as possible the deck of the ship, Captain Vance had not noted all the dispositions made on board the _Duchess_; his attention had been given mainly to the ordering of his own men, and to the eight men arranged for the reception of his assaulting party. The critical moment, upon the results of which so much of vital importance to the combatants depended, arrived. The brig rose high upon the summit of a huge billow, while the merchant ship descended into the valley between that and another monster wave. At that instant the pirates sprung towards the deck of the _Duchess_, the eight men of the latter, who had been placed to meet this assault, fired their pistols, and Captain Johnson and his mate applied the matches to the cannon. Three of the pirates fell upon the ship's deck, two killed and one mortally wounded by the pistol-shots of their enemies; five made the leap too late, of whom two were crushed between the vessels, and fell into the sea, and three struck against the guards of the now rising ship, and were thrown back with violence upon their own deck. Captain Vance himself received a pistol-shot through the brain at the moment when he was about to spring from the guards of the _Falcon_ to the deck of the _Duchess_; he disappeared between the two vessels and sunk into the sea.