MISS PRINGLE CALLS ON MR.CLEGGETT
But the rushing onset of events struck them apart.Out of the night leaped danger, enhancing love and forbidding it.From the starboard bow Captain Abernethy shrilled a cry of warning, and the heavy, bellowing voice of Loge shouted an answer of challenge and ferocity.The wind had fallen, but the lightning played from the clouds now almost without intermission.Cleggett saw Loge and his followers, machete in hand, flinging themselves at the rail.They lifted a hoarse cheer as they came.The fire from the Jasper B.had checked the assault temporarily; it had not broken it up; once they found lodgment on the deck the superior numbers of Loge's crowd must inevitably tell.
Loge was a dozen feet in advance of his men.He had cast aside the light sword which belonged to Cleggett, and now swung a grim machete in his hand.Cleggett flung down his gun, grasped a cutlass, and sprang forward, his one idea to come to close quarters with that gigantic figure of rage and power.
But before Loge reached the bulwark on one side, and while Cleggett was bounding toward him on the other, this on-coming group of Cleggett's foes were suddenly smitten in the rear as if by a thunderbolt.Out of the night and storm, mad with terror, screaming like fiends, with distended nostrils and flying manes and flailing hoofs, there plunged into the midst of the assaulting party a pair of snow-white horses--astounding, felling, trampling, scattering, filling them with confusion.A rocking carriage leaped and bounded behind the furious animals, and as the horses struckthe bulwark and swerved aside, its weight and bulk, hurled like a missile among Cleggett's staggered and struggling enemies, completed and confirmed their panic.
No troops on earth can stand the shock of a cavalry charge in the rear and flank; few can face surprise; the boarding party, convinced that they had fallen into a trap, melted away.One moment they were sweeping forward, vicious and formidable, confident of victory; the next they were floundering weaponless, scrambling anyhow for safety, multiplying and transforming, with the quick imagination of panic terror, these two horses into a troop of mounted men.
This sudden and almost spectral apparition of galloping steeds and flying carriage, hurled upon the vessel out of the tempest, flung, a piece of whirling chaos, from the chaotic skies, had almost as startling an effect upon the defenders.For a moment they paused, with weapons uplifted, and stared.Where an enemy had been, there was nothing.So doubtful Greeks or Trojans might have paused and stared upon the plains of Ilion when some splenetic and fickle deity burst unannounced and overwhelming into the central clamor of the battle.
But it is in these seconds of pause and doubt that great commanders assert themselves; it is these electric seconds from which the hero gathers his vital lightning and forges his mordant bolt.Genius claims and rules these instants, and the gods are on the side of those who boldly grasp loose wisdom and bind it into sheaves of judgment.Cleggett (whom Homer would have loved) was the first to recover his poise.He came to his decision instantaneously.A lesser man might have lost all by rushing after his retreating enemies; a lesser man, carried away by excitement, would have pursued.Cleggett did not relax his grasp upon the situation, he restrained his ardor.
"Stand firm, men! Do not leave the ship," he shouted."The day is ours!"And then, turning to Captain Abernethy, he cried: "We have routed them!""Look at them crazy horses!" screamed the Captain in reply.
The animals were rearing and struggling among the ruins of the broken gangplank.As the Captain spoke, they plunged aboard the ship, and the carriage, bounding after them, overturned on the deck--horses and carriage came down together in a welter of splintering wheels and broken harness and crashing wood.
A negro driver, whom Cleggett now noticed for the first time, shot clear of the mass and landed on the deck in a sitting posture.
