Page 114 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

ing noise in the prison, as though a family of rats, disturbed
at a flour cask, were scampering to the ship’s side for shel-
ter. This skurrying noise was made by the convicts rushing
to their berths to escape the threatened shower of grape; to
the twenty desperadoes cowering before the muzzle of the
howitzer it spoke more eloquently than words. The charm
was broken; their comrades would refuse to join them. The
position of affairs at this crisis was a strange one. From the
opened trap-door came a sort of subdued murmur, like
that which sounds within the folds of a sea-shell, but, in
the oblong block of darkness which it framed, nothing was
visible. The trap-door might have been a window looking
into a tunnel. On each side of this horrible window, almost
pushed before it by the pressure of one upon the other, stood
Pine, Vickers, and the guard. In front of the little group lay
the corpse of the miserable boy whom Sarah Purfoy had led
to ruin; and forced close upon, yet shrinking back from the
trampled and bloody mass, crouched in mingled terror and
rage, the twenty mutineers. Behind the mutineers, with-
drawn from the patch of light thrown by the open hatchway,
the mouth of the howitzer threatened destruction; and be-
hind the howitzer, backed up by an array of brown musket
barrels, suddenly glowed the tiny fire of the burning match
in the hand of Vickers’s trusty servant.
The entrapped men looked up the hatchway, but the
guard had already closed in upon it, and some of the ship’s
crew—with that carelessness of danger characteristic of
sailors—were peering down upon them. Escape was hope-
less.

11