they had to do, not with men, but with devils.
And all the while, the bitter cold became more intense. Snow thickened in the air, and the wind was freshening toward actual gale; but the English meant to settle things at all costs, and Iberville did not refuse the challenge. Repeatedly, the storms of iron and lead swept the ship, until her handlines were frozen red, until blood sloshed and froze about her gun-carriages. Yet the voice of Iberville lifted clear and calm, while Bess Adams relayed his orders, one arm useless and her eyes like burning stars in a white face.
Roundshot and musketry and grape poured into the doomed frigate; but ever she gave back shot for shot. If a helmsman was hit, another man took his place at the reddened tiller. Her gunners died, and staggering sick men came reeling from below to man the cannon with scarecrow hands. Repeatedly Iberville accomplished the impossible, slipping away each time he was cornered, and the one fought on against the three.
Then Fletcher, despairing of winning by such tactics, suddenly lost all patience. He seized his chance, and suddenly bore down with the Hampshire, in a savage effort to ram and sink the Frenchman.
Iberville let out a wild yell. Bess Adams stumbled and slipped to the poop rail, shrilly repeating the frantic orders. Powder-blackened men tailed on to the lines; the yards swung, the helm went over, and the foaming Hampshire lost her weather-gauge as the reeling Pelican evaded the frenzied rush.
"Round shot!" shouted Iberville, sending the word to the gun crews. "Double-shot every gun!"
The two ships were plunging along at the edge of the shallows, so near that their yardarms almost touched; so close now, side by side, that grenades and curses and yells flew back and forth, faces peered from port and bulwark, musketry rippled out unceasingly while the guns belched and thundered. But the English used grape, while the French guns held double loads of round shot only, at this pointblank range.
Staggering and shuddering under recoil of smashing shot and howling squall, the two craft drove on and on as though gripped in a frenzy of utter madness, the same insensate battlefury that gripped their crews.
Then, it seemed, the end had come. One final terrific broadside, a blast of fire and iron from those English guns, sent the Pelican fluttering around into the wind, all her rigging cut to ribbons, half the men in her waist dead amid that hurricane of grape, and her helmsman struck down.
Bess Adams slipped as the frigate reeled; a splinter from the rail smashed her across the head and sent her all asprawl on the bloody ice. Luckily, the jagged wood did her no great damage. She struggled erect, wiping blood from her eyes, and a wild cry escaped her. Iberville was gone! All her heart, all her fright, leaped forth in that shrill, frantic cry; then she checked it.
Gone, yes; but to the helm. He stood there gripping the reddened tiller. His voice lifted with its vibrant, powerful blare, to be drowned in a new and more frightful cry that went surging along the decks.
Staring out as the smoke blew away, Bess Adams saw it happen; she saw the lordly Hampshire reel and
