Page:A Set of Rogues.djvu/353

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THE END OF THAT BUSINESS.
339

only of their past wrongs, and of satiating the thirst for vengeance, which had grown to a madness by previous restraint.

"There's for thirteen years of misery," cries one, driving his spike into the heart of one. "Take that for hanging of my brother," screams a second, cleaving a Moor's skull with his hatchet. "Quits for turning an honest lad into a devil," calls a third, drawing his knife across the throat of a shrieking wretch, and so forth, till not one of all the crowd was left to murder.

Then still devoured by their lust for blood, they swarmed over the side of the galley to finish this massacre—Groves leading with a shout of "No quarter," and all echoing these words with a roar of joy. But here they were met with some sort of resistance, for the Moors aboard, seeing the fate of their comrades, forewarning them of theirs, had turned their swivel gun about and now fired—the ball carrying off the head of Joe Groves, the best man of all that crew, if one were better than another. But this only served to incense the rest the more, and so they went at their cruel work again, and ceased not till the last of their enemies was dead. Then, with a wild hurrah, they signal their triumph, and one fellow, holding up his bloody hands, smears them over his face with a devilish scream of laughter.

And now, caring no more for us or what might befall us, than for the Turks who lay all mangled on our deck, one cuts away the tackle that lashes their galley to us, while the rest haul up the sail, and so they go their way, leaving us to shift for ourselves.