"Listen! Oh, listen!" whimpered the child, clinging to her.
All in the fort could hear it now—a vast ululation of mad blood-lust, rising from the depths of the dark forest.
That sound spurred on the panting men reeling toward the stockade.
"They're almost at our heels!" gasped Harston, his face a drawn mask of muscular exhaustion. "My ship—"
"She's too far out for us to reach," panted Villiers. "Make for the fort. See, the men camped on the beach have seen us!" He waved his arms in breathless pantomime, but the men on the strand had already recognized the significance of that wild howling in the forest. They abandoned their fires and cooking-pots and fled for the stockade gate. They were pouring through it as the fugitives from the forest rounded the south angle and reeled into the gate, half dead from exhaustion. The gate was slammed with frenzied haste, and men swarmed up the firing ledge.
Françoise confronted Villiers.
"Where is Black Vulmea"'
The buccaneer jerked a thumb toward the blackening woods. His chest heaved, and sweat poured down his face. "Their scouts were at our heels before we gained the beach. He paused to slay a few and give us time to get away."
He staggered away to take his place on the wall, whither Harston had already mounted. Henri stood there, a somber, cloak-wrapped figure, aloof and silent. He was like a man bewitched.
"Look!" yelped a pirate above the howling of the yet unseen horde.
A man emerged from the forest and raced fleetly toward the fort.
"Vulmea!"
Villiers grinned wolfishly.
"We're safe in the stockade. We know where the treasure is. No reason why we shouldn't put a bullet through him now."
"Wait!" Harston caught his arm. "We'll need his sword! Look!"
Behind the fleeing Irishman a wild horde burst from the forest, howling as they ran—naked savages, hundreds and hundreds of them. Their arrows rained about the fugitive. A few strides more and Vulmea reached the eastern wall of the stockade, bounded high, seized the points of the palisades and heaved himself up and over, his cutlass in his teeth. Arrows thudded venomously into the logs where his body had just been. His resplendent coat was gone, his white silk shirt torn and bloodstained.
"Stop them!" he roared as his feet hit the ground inside. "if they get on the wall we're done for!"
Seamen, soldiers and henchmen responded instantly and a storm of bullets tore into the oncoming horde.
Vulmea saw Françoise, with Tina clinging to her hand, and his language was picturesque.
"Get into the manor," he commanded. "Their arrows will arch over the wall— what did I tell you?" A shaft cut into the earth at Françoise's feet and quivered like a serpent-head. Vulmea caught up a musket and leaped to the firing-ledge. "Some of you dogs prepare torches!" he roared, above the rising clamor of battle. "We can't fight them in the dark!"
The sun had sunk in a welter of blood; out in the bay the men about the ship had cut the anchor chain and the War-Hawk was rapidly receding on the crimson horizon.
VII. — MEN OF THE WOODS
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NIGHT had fallen, but torches streamed across the strand, casting the mad scene into lurid revealment. Naked men in paint swarmed the beach; like waves they came against the palisade, bared teeth and blazing eyes gleaming in the glare of the torches thrust over the wall.
From up and down the coast the tribes had gathered to rid their country of the white-skinned invaders, and they surged against the stockade, driving a storm of arrows before them, fighting into the hail of bullets and shafts that tore into their masses. Sometimes they came so close to the wall they were hewing at the gate with their war-axes and thrusting their spears through the loopholes. But each time the tide ebbed back, leaving its drift of dead. In this kind of fighting the pirates were at their stoutest. Their matchlocks tore holes in the charging horde, their cutlasses hewed the wild men from the palisades.
Yet again and again the men of the woods returned to the onslaught with all the stubborn ferocity that had been roused in their fierce hearts.
"They are like mad dogs!" gasped Villiers, hacking downward at the savage hands that grasped at the palisade points, the dark faces that snarled up at him.
"If we can hold the fort till dawn they'll lose heart," grunted Vulmea, splitting a feathered skull. "They won't maintain a long siege. Look, they're falling back again."
The charge rolled back and the men on the wall shook the sweat out of their eyes, counted their dead, and took a fresh grasp on the blood-slippery hilts of their swords. Like blood-hungry wolves, grudgingly driven from a cornered prey, the Indians slunk back beyond the ring of torch-light. Only the bodies of the slain lay before the palisades.
"Have they gone?" Harston shook back his wet, tawny locks. The cutlass in his fist was notched and red, his brawny bare arm was splashed with blood.
"They're still out there." Vulmea nodded toward the outer darkness which ringed the circle of torches. He glimpsed movements in the shadows, glitter of eyes and the dull sheen of spears.
"They've drawn off for a bit, though," he said. "Put sentries on the wall and let the rest drink and eat. It's past midnight. We've been fighting steadily for hours."
The captains clambered down, calling their men from the walls. A sentry was posted in the middle of each wall, east, west, north and south, and a clump of soldiers was left at the gate. The Indians, to reach the wall, would have to charge across a wide, torch-lit space, and the defenders could resume their places long before the rush could reach the stockade.
"Where's d'Chastillon?" demanded Vulmea, gnawing a huge beef-bone as he stood beside the fire the men had built in the center of the compound. Englishmen and Frenchmen mingled together, wolfing the meat and wine the women brought them, and allowing their wounds to be bandaged.
"He was fighting on the wall beside me an hour ago," grunted Harston, "when suddenly he stopped short and glared out into the darkness as if he saw a ghost. 'Look!' he croaked. 'The black devil! I see him, out there in the night!' Well, I could swear I saw a strange figure moving among the shadows; it was just a glimpse before it was gone. But Henri jumped down from the wall and staggered into the manor like a man with a mortal wound. I haven't seen him since."
"He probably saw a forest-devil," said Vulmea tranquilly. "The Indians say this coast is lousy with them. What I'm more afraid of is fire-arrows. They're likely to start shooting them at any time. What's that? It sounded like a cry for help!"
When the lull came in the fighting, Françoise and Tina had crept to their window, from which they had been driven by the danger of flying arrows. They watched the men gather about the fire.
"There are not enough sentries on the stockade," said Tina.
In spite of her nausea at the sight of the corpses sprawled about the palisades, Françoise was moved to laugh.
"Do you think you know more about war than the men'?" she chided gently.
"There should be more men on the walls," insisted the child, shivering. "Suppose the black man came back! One man to a side is not enough. The black man could creep beneath the wall and shoot him with a poisoned dart before he could cry out. He is like a shadow, and hard to see by torchlight."
Françoise shuddered at the thought.
"I am afraid," murmured Tina. "I hope Villiers and Harston are killed."
"And not Vulmea?" asked Françoise curiously.
"Black Vulmea would not harm a woman," said the child confidently.
"You are wise beyond your years, Tina," murmured Françoise.
"Look!" Tina stiffened. "The sentry is gone from the south wall! I saw him on the ledge a moment ago. Now he has vanished."
From their window the palisade points of the south wall were just visible over the slanting roofs of a row of huts which paralleled that wall almost its entire length. A sort of open-topped corridor, three or four yards wide, was formed by the stockade-wall and the back of the huts, which were built in a solid row. These huts were occupied by the retainers.