Page:A Mainsail Haul - Masefield - 1913.djvu/188

176 he turned it over. It was a black card, black on both sides, of a black like the black of swirling smoke, and its blackness made him shudder. The hag watched his face a moment, and broke into a violent and mirthless merriment. Her face wrinkled in her laugh, and sharpened till she looked like a vulture rocking with some uncanny joy. Then she screamed in a long, shrill, wailing scream like the scream of night birds flying in a company. She tossed her hands upward, and it seemed to her victim that the wicked figure vanished through his eyes, and as though the skinny fingers clutched at his heart from inside him. In another second the cave had torn apart and flung him upward. He gave a gasp and a cry and awoke in the darkness of the sail-locker, in a silence only broken by scurrying rats and the dull gurgling of the bilge.

He picked himself up and went on deck, his head throbbing like a drum. He saw that the deck had been ripped with shot. Many bodies were lying on the planks. There was a smell of blood, of burning, of burnt linen, and powder smoke. The ship was unusually still, for the lower deck