“The cap’n--dead! At ’em--cut ’em off!” Indeed, what had been Captain Moon was now a poor dead thing, head horribly askew in that fierce grip. Moses Deakin had defeated himself. The men’s stupefaction fled. A yell broke from them and they flooded forward. Deakin dropped his victim, seized the hangar from Crawford. “Too late!” he snarled. “Another minute----” Too late indeed; a pistol roared, and Deakin staggered as the ball hipped him. Crawford might have run for it, but that was not his way; a laugh broke on his lips and he halted. The Bostonnais, knife and cutlass in hand, stood like a bear at bay. Crawford made one desperate effort to stay the onrush. “Hold, men! Your fleet’s destroyed--Nelson is captured--your only chance is----” A howl of fury drowned his words and the company men closed in, wielding hangars, knives, clubbed muskets, anything and everything. Deakin’s hand moved, and the knife sang through the air; the lieutenant, blade through gullet, pitched down and lay still. Crawford saw why those fusils had been kicked into the water, for with the firearms the company men would have picked off the two and shot them down. Now, back to back, Deakin and Crawford met the rush with whistling cutlass and delicate rapier; as the maddened crowd closed in blindly, men died by point and edge, for the only cool heads there were the two who faced their doom unafraid. Rapier slithered in and out, hangar crashed and whirled and thudded again, and the laugh of Crawford echoed the roaring bellow of the Bostonnais. The ranks of redskins, leaping up, watched the fight with gleaming eyes and low grunts of astonishment. The company men soon had enough of this, for three of them were gasping at death and others were reeling away; they fell back, yelling at one another to close in yet none caring to be the first. Deakin bawled a laugh at them, pressing one hand to his thigh, but Crawford, eyeing that ring of fierce faces, smiled thinly. “Your prophecy was right, Deakin,” he panted. “Had it not been for that gift from the Star Woman, we might have----” Deakin hurled curses at the watching chiefs who refused him aid, broke off short to dodge a hurled axe--and the circle was closing in again. This time more cautiously, clubbed fusils and bits of wreckage battering down while the holders stood beyond reach of hangar and rapier. One man came in too far, and Deakin split his skull--but a gun-butt struck the giant over the head and staggered him. Like wolves they leaped upon him and had him down, and the writhing, heaving mass of men went rolling across the sand.