Page:Barbour--Joan of the ilsand.djvu/65

Rh wheel to steady the vessel in her perilous position, he yelled to one of his men to take his place. But the black crew had had enough of the white man's fighting methods. Out of a score all told, half a dozen of them had been hit; two lay motionless on the deck. Bullets whizzed past Moniz's head, but he held on his course, his sails full; and, being the faster craft on a straight run, the schooner began to creep away.

Even at the last moment, Moniz, who at least knew not what cowardice was when he had a mob of blacks to deal with, tried to stir his men up to assist him in making a fresh attack; but their spirit was broken, and the Portuguese contented himself for the moment with swearing at them in half a dozen different dialects. When the space between the two vessels was wider, and shots from the Kestrel harried him no more, he left the wheel long enough to kick one black into taking his place, and then he went among them savagely, hammering some on the head with the butt end of his revolver, and kicking others brutally. Moniz knew just how far to go with them. To have left them unpunished would have been a palpable indication of weakness, a sign to the blacks that his iron grip was no longer a thing to reckon on. Physically, any three of them could out-match any white man who ever stepped on the Solomons. And there were far more than three of them on the schooner