“Whose sloop is that at the landing!” asks Captain Jack Paul, willing to shift the subject.
“Oh, yon sloop! She goes with the plantation; she’ll be yours anon, brother. And there you are: When the sea calls to you, Jack, as she will call, you take the sloop. Cato and Scipio are good sailors, well trained to the coast clear away to Charleston.”
And so William Paul Jones dies, and John Paul takes his place on the plantation. His name is no longer John Paul, but John Paul Jones; and, as his dying brother counselled, he keeps old Duncan Macbean to be the manager.
When his brother is dead, Captain Jack Paul joins his mate, Laurence Edgar, on the deck of the Two Friends, swinging tide and tide on her anchors.
“Mate Edgar,” says Captain Jack Paul, “it is the last time I shall plank this quarterdeck as captain. I’m to stay; and you’re to take the ship home to Whitehaven. And now, since you’re the captain, and I’m no more than a guest, suppose you order your cabin boy to get us a bottle of the right Madeira, and we’ll drink fortune to the bark and her new master.”
CHAPTER VI—THE FIRST BLOW IN VIRGINIA
It is a soundless, soft December evening. The quietly falling flakes are cloaking in thin white the streets and roofs of Norfolk. Off shore, a cable’s length, an English sloop of war, eighteen guns, lies tugging at her anchors. In shore from the sloop of war rides the peaceful twenty-ton sloop of Planter Paul Jones. The sailor-planter, loitering homeward from a cruise to Charleston and the coast towns of the Carolinas, is calling on friends in Norfolk. Both the war sloop and the peace sloop seem almost deserted in the falling snow. Aside from the harbor light burning high in the rigging, and an anchor watch of two sailors muffled to the ears, the decks of neither craft show signs of life.
Norfolk’s public hall is candle-lighted to a pitch of unusual brilliancy; the waxed floors are thronged with the beauty and gentility of the Old Dominion, as the same find Norfolk expression. It is indeed a mighty social occasion; for the local élite have seized upon the officers of the sloop of war, and are giving a ball in their honor. The honored ones attend to a man—which accounts for the deserted look of their sloop—and their gold lace blazes bravely by the light of the candles, and with tremendous gala effect.