"I don't understand you," cried Jones, then he turned to the quartermaster and said softly,--
"Over with the helm! Hard-a-starboard!" As the wheel was put over by the skilful hands of the quartermaster and his mate, the great ship swung slowly to port and rounded to off the port bow of the English ship.
The Englishman hailed again.
"This is the United States ship Bon Homme Richard," shouted Paul Jones in reply, at the top of his voice, springing up on the rail the while. "Stand by!" A quiver and shiver went through the ship from her tops to her very vitals. "Fire!"
Streams of light leaped out in the darkness; clouds of smoke rose at once from the sides of the Richard only to be met and brushed away by a broadside which had been delivered no less promptly from the English ship. Groans and curses and yells and cheers rose from the blood-stained decks upon which men writhed in the agony of ghastly wounds, or lay contorted in hideous death where they had fallen, for at close range both broadsides had done fearful execution.
The desperate men ran the huge guns in and out and loaded them with frantic energy and kept up a continuous cannonade upon their foes. The roar of the great guns drowned every other sound as the two ships sailed side by side in bitter conflict, but the trained ear of the American captain had detected another sound coincident with the first broadside which told a tale of disaster. When the loggerheads had been applied to the priming of two of the eighteens, they had exploded with a terrific concussion, killing and wounding nearly every man of their crews.
McCollin, who commanded the battery, was struck by a piece of iron and received a dreadful wound. He remained at his post, however, clinging tenaciously to a broken stanchion for a moment until he recovered himself a little. As the frightened and appalled men shrank away from the remaining gun of the battery, not yet discharged in view of the dreadful explosion, he seized the hot iron from the dead hand of the captain of number one gun, and setting his lips grimly staggered over to the last cannon.
"Don't do it, sir!" hoarsely cried the old boatswain's mate who served under him. "It'll blow up with ye, as the others ha' done!" There was no reply. McCollin was beyond words. With set lips and grim face, in silence he wavered on before the awestruck men. With tottering steps he reached the gun and applied the iron. There was a blinding roar and the gun whirled inboard in rapid recoil from the force of the discharge.
"Load it again," said the gasping boy, striving to stop the blood with his hand against his side. Before the men, who, inspired by such heroism, had sprung eagerly forward, could reach the piece, an eighteen-pound shot from the Serapis' lower deck struck it fair and square on the trunnion and dismounted it. That battery was useless. The explosion had made a gaping hole in the side of the Richard, through which the red-lighted side of the Serapis but a short distance away could be seen plainly; the deck above and below was badly shattered by the blowing up of the guns.
"All the men alive of this division," said McCollin, thickly, "will find places at the divisions on the gun-deck. We can do nothing more here. Good-bye, Payne."