“Except you, Sir Galahad?” sneered the Fishhawk.
“Yes, I, you damned black swine!” roared Kane unexpectedly. The crash of his powerful voice almost shattered the ear drums and hardened buccaneers started and blenched. Nothing is more stunning or terrible than the sight of a man of icy nerves and iron control suddenly losing that control and flaming into a full withering blast of murderous fury. For a fleeting instant as he thundered those words, Kane was a fearful picture of primitive, relentless and incarnate passion. Then the storm passed instantly and he was his icy self again – cold as chill steel, calm and deadly as a cobra.
One black muzzle centered directly on Hardraker's breast, the other menaced the rest of the gang.
“Make your peace with God, pirate,” said Kane tonelessly, “for in another instant it will be too late.”
Now for the first time the pirate blenched.
“Great God,” he gasped, sweat beading his brow, “you'd not shoot me down like a jackal, without a chance?”
“That will I, Jonas Hardraker,” answered Kane, with never a tremor of voice or steely hand, “and with a joyful heart. Have you not committed all crimes under the sun? Are you not a stench in the nostrils of God and a black smirch on the books of men? Have you ever spared weakness or pitied helplessness? Shrink you from your fate, you black coward?”
With a terrific effort the pirate pulled himself together.
“Why, I shrink not. But it is you who are the coward.”
Menace and added fury clouded the cold eyes for an instant. Kane seemed to retreat within himself – to withdraw himself still further from human contact. He poised himself there on the stairs like some brooding unhuman thing – like a great black condor about to rend and slay.
“You are a coward,” continued the pirate recklessly, realizing – for he was no fool – that he had touched the one accessible chord in the Puritan's breast – the one weak spot in Kane's armor – vanity. Though he never boasted, Kane took a deep pride in the fact that whatever his many enemies said of him, no man had ever called him a coward.
“Mayhap I deserve killing in cold blood,” went on the Fishhawk, watching him narrowly, “but if you give me no chance to defend myself, men will name you poltroon.”
“The praise or the blame of man is vanity,” said Kane somberly. “And men know if I be coward or not.”
“But not I!” shouted Hardraker triumphantly. “An' you shoot me down I will go into Eternity, knowing you are a dastard, despite what men say or think of you!”
After all Kane, fanatic as he was, was still human. He tried to make himself believe that he cared not what this wretch said or thought, but in his heart he knew that so deep was his underlying vanity of courage, that if this pirate died with a scornful sneer on his lips, that he, Kane, would feel the sting all the rest of his life. He nodded grimly.
“So be it. You shall have your chance, though the Lord knoweth you deserve naught. Name your weapons.”
The Fishhawk's eyes narrowed. Kane's skill with the sword was a byword among the wild outcasts and rovers that wandered over the world. With pistols, he, Hardraker, would have no opportunity for trickery or to use his iron strength.
“Knives!” he snapped with a vicious clack of his strong white teeth.
Kane eyed him moodily for a moment, the pistols never wavering, then a faint grim smile spread over his dark countenance.
“Good enough; knives are scarce a gentleman's arm – but with one an end may be made which is neither quick nor painless.”
He turned to the pirates. “Throw down your weapons.” Sullenly they obeyed.
“Now loose the girl and the boy.” This also was done and Jack stretched his numbed limbs, felt the cut in his head, now clotted with dried blood, and took the whimpering Mary in his arms.
“Let the girl go,” he whispered, but Solomon shook his head.
“She could never get by the guards outside the house.”
Kane motioned Jack to stand part way up the stairs, with Mary behind him. He gave Hollinster the pistols and swiftly undid his sword belt and jacket, laying them on the lower step. Hardraker was laying aside his various weapons and stripping to his breeches.
“Watch them all,” Kane muttered. “I'll take care of the Fishhawk. If any other reaches for a weapon, shoot quick and straight. If I fall, flee up the stairs with the girl. But my brain is on fire with the blue flame of vengeance and I will not fall!”
The two men now approached each other, Kane bareheaded and in his shirt, Hardraker still wearing his knotted bandanna, but stripped to the waist. The pirate was armed with a long Turkish dagger which he held point upward. Kane held a dirk in front of him as a man holds a rapier. Experienced fighters, neither held his blade point down in the conventional manner – which is unscientific and awkward, except in special cases.
It was a strange, nightmare scene that was lighted by the guttering lanthorn on the walclass="underline" the pale youth with his pistols on the stair with the shrinking girl behind him, the fierce hairy faces ringed about the walls, reddened eyes glittering with savage intensity – the gleam on the dull blue blades – the tall figures in the center circling each other while their shadows kept pace with their movements, changing and shifting as they advanced or gave ground.
“Come in and fight, Puritan,” taunted the pirate, yet giving ground before Kane's steady though wary approach. “Think of the wench, Broadbrim!”
“Iam thinking of her, offal of Purgatory,” said Kane somberly. “There be many fires, scum, some hotter than others –” how deadly blue the blades shimmered in the lanthorn light! – “but save the fires of Hell – all fires – may be – quenched – by – blood!”
And Kane struck as a wolf leaps. Hardraker parried the straight thrust and springing in, struck upward with the venomous disembowelling stroke. Kane's down-turned point deflected the sweep of the blade and with a dynamic coil and release of steel-spring muscles, the pirate bounded backward out of reach. Kane came on in a relentless surge; he was ever the aggressor in any battle. He thrust like lightning for face and body and for an instant the pirate was too busy parrying the whistling strokes to launch an attack of his own. This could not last; a knife fight is necessarily short and deadly. The nature of the weapons prevents any long drawn play of fencing skill.
Now Hardraker, watching his opportunity, suddenly caught Kane's knife wrist in an iron grip and at the same time ripped savagely upward for the belly. Kane, at the cost of a badly cut hand, caught the uplunging wrist and checked the point an inch from his body. There for a moment they stood like statues glaring into each other's eyes, exerting all their strength.
Kane did not care for this style of fighting. He had rather trust the other way which was more swiftly deadly – the open free style, the leaping in and out, thrusting and parrying, where one relied on his quickness of hand and foot and eye, and gave and invited open strokes. But since it was to be a test of strength – so be it!
Hardraker had already begun to doubt. Never had he met a man his equal in sheer brute power, but now he found this Puritan as immovable as iron. He threw all his strength, which was immense, into his wrists and his powerfully braced legs. Kane had shifted his grip on his dirk to suit the emergency. At first grips, Hardraker had forced Kane's knife hand upward. Now Solomon held his dirk poised above the pirate's breast, point downward. His task at hand was to force down the hand that gripped his wrist until he could drive the dirk through Hardraker's breast. The Fishhawk's knife hand was held low, the blade upward; he sought to strain against Kane's arresting left hand and braced arm until he could rip open the Puritan's belly.