As soon as Silver was gone, the captain turned and saw that nobody was at his post except Gray. It was the first time we had seen him angry.
“To your places!” he roared. “Gray, I’ll write your name in the logbook; you did your duty like a true sailor. Mr. Trelawney, I’m surprised at you, sir. Doctor, I thought you had been a soldier!”
We hurried back, every one of us with a red face.
“My lads,” said the captain, “I was hard on Silver on purpose. Before the hour is over, they will attack. There are more of them, but we fight from shelter, and I have no doubt that we can beat them.”
We had about twenty guns for the seven of us, and on each side of the house loaded guns lay ready on a pile of firewood. The cutlasses lay in the middle of the room. The captain gave his orders: the doctor at the door, Hunter on the east side, Joyce on the west, and the squire, our best shot, with Gray on the long north side, which had five loopholes. That was where the danger was.
“Hawkins,” he said, “neither you nor I are much good at shooting. We’ll load the guns.”
The sun climbed above the trees and burned down on us. We threw off our coats and stood at our posts, hot and anxious. An hour went by.
Suddenly Joyce raised his gun and fired. At once shots came back from every side of the stockade. Several bullets hit the log house, but none came in. When the smoke cleared, the woods looked as quiet and empty as before. Most of the shots had come from the north, so the real attack would come from there.
Then, with a loud shout, a small crowd of pirates ran out of the woods on the north side, straight for the stockade. At the same moment a bullet flew in through the doorway and broke the doctor’s gun to pieces.
The pirates climbed over the fence like monkeys. The squire and Gray fired again and again, and three men fell, though one of them jumped up and ran back into the trees. But four got inside and ran up the hill toward us, while the men in the woods kept shooting at the house.
The head of Job Anderson, the boatswain, appeared at the middle loophole.
“At them, all of you!” he roared.
At the same moment another pirate pulled Hunter’s gun out through a loophole and with one blow knocked poor Hunter senseless. A third ran round the house, appeared in the doorway and attacked the doctor with his cutlass.
Everything had changed. A moment before, we were firing from shelter; now we could not hit back. The house was full of smoke, cries and the flashes of pistols.
“Out, lads, out, and fight them in the open! Cutlasses!” cried the captain.
I grabbed a cutlass from the pile. Someone else grabbed one at the same time and cut me across the fingers, but I hardly felt it. I ran out into the bright sunlight. In front of me the doctor was chasing his attacker down the hill, and as I looked, he struck the man down with a great cut across the face.
“Round the house, lads! Round the house!” cried the captain, and even in all that noise I noticed a change in his voice.
I ran round the corner with my cutlass raised and was suddenly face to face with Anderson. He roared, and his cutlass went up above his head, shining in the sun. I had no time to be afraid. I jumped to one side, my foot slipped in the soft sand, and I rolled down the slope.
When I got to my feet again, a pirate in a red cap was still sitting on top of the fence with one leg over, just as when I ran out. It had all happened in a moment, and yet the fight was over, and we had won.
Gray, close behind me, had cut down the big boatswain before he could strike again. Another pirate had been shot at a loophole and lay in pain, his pistol still smoking in his hand. The doctor had struck down a third. The fourth was climbing back over the fence, terrified, without his cutlass, and he escaped into the woods with the rest. Five pirates lay where they had fallen.
The doctor, Gray and I ran back to the house before the pirates could start shooting again. Now we saw what our victory had cost. Hunter lay beside his loophole, senseless. Joyce lay by his, shot through the head; he would never move again. In the middle of the room the squire was holding up the captain, and both were pale.
“The captain’s wounded,” said Mr. Trelawney.
“Have they run?” asked the captain.
“All that could,” said the doctor. “But five of them will never run again.”
“Five!” cried the captain. “Come, that’s better. Now we are four to nine. At the start we were seven to nineteen.”
In fact they were only eight. The man the squire had shot on the ship died that same evening, but we learned this only later.