VIII.—The Galley (in the hold).

From his second swoon Tristram awoke to find the light of a lantern flashing in his face.

The Merry Maid's flag had scarcely been hauled down before night fell; and almost with its falling, while the men of the other galleys were helping to clear L'Heureuse's decks, they perceived lights twinkling off the mouth of the Thames.

At once concluding that these were the lights of English men-of-war sent to pursue them, they used the utmost dispatch. Their first concern was to throw the dead overboard and stow the wounded in the hold. But so closely they were pressed by the fear of losing their prize and being made prisoners, that it is to be feared as many of the living were thrown over for dead as of those who were dead in reality.

This, at any rate, came near to being Tristram's fate. For when the keeper came to unchain the killed and wounded of his seat he was still without consciousness lying among the corpses, bathed in their blood and his own.

"A clean sweep of this bench," said the keeper.

He and his fellows, therefore, without further examination, did but unchain the slaves and then fling them over. It was sufficient that the body neither spoke nor cried.

Tristram's comrades, it is true, were in no doubtful plight. The hand of death had impressed them beyond chance of mistake. They were thrown over limb by limb.

Tristram's was the only body that remained entire, and to all appearance he too was dead. Now, he had been chained by the left leg, in which (as we have said) he was severely wounded. The keeper, not knowing that the chain had been blown away, grasped this leg in his hand, felt for the ring and tried to wrench it open.

Fortunately he tugged so lustily and inflicted so sharp a pang in the wounded limb that Tristram opened his eyes and sobbed with the anguish of it. The fellow let go his grasp.

Then, suddenly perceiving what their intention had been, the poor youth screamed out at the top of his voice:

"Please do not throw me over. I'm not dead yet!"

Upon this they carried him to a small chamber in the hold and tossed him down among a heap of groaning wounded, upon a cable made up into a rouleau, perhaps the hardest bed on which a sick man can lie. About him were stretched indiscriminately petty officers, sailors, soldiers, and slaves. The air could reach this den only through a scuttle about two feet square, and the heat and stench were therefore something intolerable. A surgeon was at work among the sufferers. Reaching Tristram at length, he stopped the bleeding of his wounds with a little spirits of wine. He had no bandages; nor did he come again to see if his patient were dead or alive.

But, indeed, our hero was past caring for this, and when he regained consciousness after a third swoon it was to find himself in other hands.

For the pursuing English, aided by the wind (which had shifted a little farther to the northward), had swept down upon the galleys and taken them, with their prize, and were now towing them triumphantly into Sheerness.