For sole armament (besides our muskets) the ketch carried, close after of her fore-hatchway, a little obsolete 3-pounder gun, long since superannuated out of the Falmouth packet service. In the dim past, when he had bid for her at a public auction, Captain Pomery may have designed to use the gun as a chaser, or perhaps, even then, for decoration only. She served now—and had served for many a peaceful passage—but as a peg for spare coils of rope, and her rickety carriage as a supplement, now and then, for the bitts, which were somewhat out of repair. My father casting about, as the chase progressed, to put us on better terms of defence, suggested unlashing this gun and running her aft for a stern-chaser.
Captain Pomery shook his head. "Where's the ammunition? We don't carry a single round shot aboard, nor haven't for years. Besides which, she'd burst to a certainty."
"There's time enough to make up a few tins of canister," argued my father. "Or stay—" He smote his leg.
"Didn't I tell you old Worthyvale would turn out the usefullest man on board?"
"What's the matter with Worthyvale?"
"While we've been talking, Worthyvale has been doing. What has he been doing?" Why, breaking up the ballast, and, if I'm not mistaken, into stones of the very size to load this gun."
"Give Badcock and me some share of credit," pleaded Mr. Fett. "Speaking less as an expert than from an imagination quickened by terror of all missiles, I suggest that a hundredweight or so of empty bottles, nicely broken up, would lend a d—d disagreeable diversity to the charge—"
"Not a bad idea at all," agreed my father.
"And a certain sting to our defiance; since I understand these ruffians drink nothing stronger than water," Mr. Fett concluded.
We spent the next half-hour in dragging the gun aft, and fetching up from the hold a dozen basket-loads of stone. It required a personal appeal from my father before old Worthyvale would part with so much of his treasure.