The light spar would not support us both, and I let myself sink into the water, with only a grip on a hanging rope's end to keep in tow with it.
John Ozanne gazed wildly round for a minute, and then raised his right arm and volubly cursed the Frenchman, who was coming right down on us.
"Oh, you devils! You devils! May--" and then to my horror, for with the wash of the waves in my ears I could hear nothing, a small round hole bored itself suddenly in his broad forehead, just where the brown and the white met, and he threw up his arms and dropped back into the water.
I made a grab for him, but he was gone, and even as I did so the meaning of that hideous little round hole in his forehead came plain to me.

The Frenchman was shooting at every head he could see.
I dragged the spar over me, and floated under the strip of sail with no more than my nose showing between it and the wood, and the long black hull, with its red streak glistening as though but just new dipped in blood, swept past me so close that I could have touched it.

Through the opening between my sail and the spar I could see grim faces looking over the side, and the flash and smoke of muskets as the poor strugglers beyond were shot down one by one.
I lay there--in fear and trembling, I confess, for against cold-blooded brutality such as this no man's courage may avail--till the last shots had long died away.

And when at last I ventured to raise my head and look about me, the Frenchman was stretching away to the north-east and the Indiaman was pressing to the north, and both were far away.

The sun sank like a ball of fire dipped in blood as I watched.