These were his last words. Percy, quick as thought, drew a pistol from his belt and fired into his face! He fell heavily to the deck, and the combatants closed around him, as tempest-waves close over a foundering ship! The pirates, now that their leader was slain, fought with less spirit, and the victory was soon decided in our favor. Sooth to say, it was dearly earned; and many who sought the battle with a quickened pulse, and eager for the strife, were that evening consigned to the waves. Of all the pirate's crew, consisting of nearly a hundred men, but thirteen remained unharmed. Heavens!--what a ghastly spectacle her decks presented! Fifty stalwart forms lay there, stiffened in death, or writhing in the agony of their deep wounds, severed and mangled in every way imaginable; and so slippery was the main deck that we could hardly cross it, while the sea all around was died with the red waters of life, that gushed in a continuous stream from her scuppers. On the forecastle deck, where the last desperate struggle had taken place, I recognized many of our own crew among the lifeless heaps. Poor old Ramrod, the gunner, lay there, with the black blood trickling over his swarthy brow, from a bullet hole in his temple. He had died while the might of battle was yet upon him--and the fierce scowl which he darted at his foes, still remained on his rigid features. His hand, even in the agonies of death, had not relinquished its firm grasp on his cutlass, and the gigantic form of a swart pirate, with his skull cloven down, close at hand, showed that it had been swayed to some purpose. Poor Benjamin! I could have wept over him. He had been in the service from his earliest days, and the scars of many a sanguinary fight were visible upon his muscular arms, and on his bronzed and powerful chest. My brave boy, Ponto, was there also, hanging pale and wounded over the britch of the bow gun. He had followed me when we boarded, like a young tiger robbed of his mate. Although faint and helpless with the loss of blood, which belched at every heave of his bosom, from a deep sabre wound in his shoulder, and which had completely saturated his checked shirt and his duck pantaloons, yet his firmness was unshaken. I ordered one of our men to take charge of him, until he could be looked to by the surgeon. "Not yet," faintly exclaimed the generous child, pointing to Mengs, the boatswain, who lay wounded over a coil of the cable, with three or four grim looking bucaneers stretched dead across his chest, the blood from their wounds streaming into his face and neck,--"look to him first, he may be suffocated." "No, no, youngster," murmured the hardy Briton, "I'd do very well till my turn comes, if I had this ugly looking craft cast off from my gun-deck, and a can of water stowed away in my cable tier!"