About ten minutes after the boat had been hoisted, Hardy, who continued to watch the barque through the glass, saw several men go forward, and shortly after a man got into the fore-rigging, and crawled aloft and gained the fore-yard. The powerful lenses brought the barque close, and Hardy easily saw, as he followed the man sliding to the yard-arm, that he carried a tail-block in his hand. He made this block fast to the extremity of the yard, and whilst he was doing this another man got into the fore-rigging holding a line, the end of which he gave to the fellow on the yard, who rove it through the block, and then came into the fore-rigging grasping the line, and both men descended to the deck. Hardy rushed to the companionway and shouted down the hatch, taking his chance of the skipper hearing him, "They are going to hang that mate who killed the captain!" A moment or two later up came Captain Layard. "What's that you sang out?" he cried. "What's wrong? I'm with Johnny." "Look for yourself, sir," answered Hardy, and he gave the glass to him. The captain pointed it. Mad or not mad, he knew what a yard-arm whip was, and what in this case it signified. He saw a crowd of men on the forecastle; he distinguished the figure of the mate, with his arms pinioned behind him, standing within a fathom of the rail rounding to the forecastle break. As he gazed he saw a man bandage the wretch's eyes with a red handkerchief. The same man next secured the end of the line to the man's neck, and the captain, with the telescope at his eye, began to mutter, and Hardy saw that his face had turned a greenish yellow, but he could not understand what he said, nor clearly perceive, as did the captain, all that was happening aboard that tragic barque, with its wift at the gaff-end beating the air like a human arm in agony. In the captain's glass the bulk of the forecastle crowd melted and could not be seen on the main-deck. One who was left--and the muttering captain thought that he was the boatswain--held a book and seemed to be reading from it. The two men kept the barque's victim pinned to the rail; the man who was reading closed his book and raised his arm straight up, looking toward the main-deck. The two men sprang back from the murderer, whose figure soared aloft, a ghastly shape of man flying wingless to the yard-arm. "O my God!" cried Hardy, who saw it, and the crew of the _York_, watching that picture of short shrift and flying form, groaned and cursed with British hatred of the sudden execution, made dastardly by numbers. They could see the man rushed to the nape of his neck to the yard-arm block, then fall, bringing up with a sudden belaying of that gallows-rope, and the hanging man began to swing like a pendulum of death midway betwixt the yard-arm and the feathering surface of the sea.