The man was posted in an angle, the bar and rope in his two fists; backed against one of the riders, settled firmly on his legs as on two pillars of steel, livid, calm, tragic, rooted as it were in the planks, he waited. He waited for the cannon to pass near him. The gunner knew his piece, and it seemed to him that she must recognize her master. He had lived a long while with her. How many times he had thrust his hand between her jaws! It was his tame monster. He began to address it as he might have given an order to his dog. "Come!" said he. Perhaps he loved it. He seemed to wish that it would turn toward him. But to come toward him would be to spring upon him. Then he would be lost. How to avoid its crush? There was the question. All stared in terrified silence. Not a breast respired freely, except perchance that of the old man who alone stood in the deck with the two combatants, a stern second. He might himself be crushed by the piece. He did not stir. Beneath them the blind sea directed the battle. At the instant when, accepting this awful hand-to-hand contest, the gunner approached to challenge the cannon, some chance fluctuation of the waves kept it for a moment immovable, as if suddenly stupefied. "Come on!" the man said to it. It seemed to listen. Suddenly it darted upon him. The gunner avoided the shock. The struggle began--struggle unheard of. The fragile matching itself against the invulnerable. The living thing of flesh attacking the inanimate brass. On the one side blind force, on the other a soul. The whole passed in a half light. It was like the indistinct vision of a miracle. A soul--strange thing; but you would have said that the cannon had one also--a soul filled with rage and hatred. This blindness appeared to have eyes. The monster had the air of watching the man. There was--one might have fancied so at least--cunning in this mass. It also chose its moment. It became some gigantic insect of metal, having, or seeming to have, the will of a demon. Sometimes this colossal grasshopper would strike the low ceiling of the gun-deck, then fall back on its four wheels like a tiger upon its four claws, and dart anew on the man. He, supple, agile, adroit, would glide away like a snake from the reach of these lightning-like movements. He avoided the threatened encounters; but the blows which he escaped fell upon the vessel and continued the havoc. An end of broken chain remained attached to the carronade. This chain had twisted itself, one could not tell how, about the screw of the breech button. One extremity of the chain was fastened to the carriage. The other, hanging loose, whirled wildly about the gun and added to the danger of its blows. The screw held it like a clinched hand, and the chain, multiplying the strokes of the battering-ram by its strokes of a thong, made a fearful whirlwind about the cannon--a whip of iron in a fist of brass. This chain complicated the battle.