The captain promptly recovered his composure, and at his order the sailors threw down into the deck everything which could deaden and check the mad rush of the gun--mattresses, hammocks, spare sails, coils of rope, extra equipments, and the bales of forged French currency of which the corvette carried a whole cargo--an infamous deception which the English considered a fair trick in war. But what could these rags avail? No one dared descend to arrange them in any useful fashion, and in a few instants they were mere heaps of lint. There was just sea enough to render the accident as complete as possible. A tempest would have been desirable--it might have thrown the gun upside down; and the four wheels once in the air, the monster could have been mastered. But the devastation continued and increased. There were gashes and even fractures in the masts, which, embedded in the woodwork of the keel, pierce through the decks of ships like great round pillars. The mizzenmast was cracked, and the mainmast itself was injured under the convulsive blows of the gun. The battery was being destroyed. Ten pieces out of the thirty were disabled; the breaches multiplied in the side, and the corvette began to take in water. The old passenger, who had descended to the gun-deck, looked like a form of stone stationed at the foot of the stairs. He stood motionless, gazing sternly about upon the devastation. Indeed, it seemed impossible to take a single step forward. Each bound of the liberated carronade menaced the destruction of the vessel. A few minutes more and shipwreck would be inevitable. They must perish or put a summary end to the disaster. A decision must be made--but how? What a combatant--this cannon! They must check this mad monster. They must seize this flash of lightning. They must overthrow this thunderbolt. Boisberthelot said to La Vieuville: "Do you believe in God, chevalier?" La Vieuville replied: "Yes. No. Sometimes." "In a tempest?" "Yes; and in moments like this." "Only God can aid us here," said Boisberthelot. All were silent; the cannon kept up its horrible fracas. The waves beat against the ship; their blows from without responded to the strokes of the cannon. It was like two hammers alternating. Suddenly, into the midst of this sort of inaccessible circus, where the escaped cannon leaped and bounded, there sprang a man with an iron bar in his hand. It was the author of this catastrophe--the gunner whose culpable negligence had caused the accident; the captain of the gun. Having been the means of bringing about the misfortune, he desired to repair it. He had caught up a handspike in one fist, a tiller rope with a slipping noose in the other, and thus equipped had jumped down into the gun-deck. Then a strange combat began, a Titanic strife--the struggle of the gun against the gunner; a battle between matter and intelligence; a duel between the inanimate and the human.