The lieutenant gave him the order, word for word, as he had received it from the captain.
“We’ll try, sir,” said the veteran, with a confident smile and pat on the breech of his gun, which satisfied the lieutenant that the gunner knew his business. The gun was now ready. He sighted her, and gave the command:
“Fire!”
Out poured the deafening discharge, and two hundred pairs of eyes were tracking the course of the ball through the air, each in impatient suspense to see the effect.
It struck close under the stern of the enemy.
“A good shot! a capital shot!” exclaimed the captain. “A little more elevation on your next, and you will splinter his mizzen mast!”
Meanwhile Lieutenant Ethel raised his telescope and took sight at the chase. And it seemed that the captain of the Sea Scourge, finding that his false colors did not protect him, and having a ball drop so close under his stern, concluded that he was known, and determined to fight the battle out under his true ones. Down fluttered St. George’s Cross and up flew the Stars and Bars. And the next instant his stern chaser answered the iron messenger from the Xyphias.
The shot plunged into the sea close on the weather quarter of our gallant ship, doing no other harm than copiously sprinkling the jolly tars on that side.
“A free shower bath in hot weather is a pleasant and a wholesome thing!” exclaimed a young midshipman, who had received his full share of that blessing.
But another good fellow, a landsman recently shipped from Cape Town, who had been standing gaping and staring with mouth and eyes open, received a deluge on his face and chest, striking him with such a shock that he lost his balance and his reason at the same moment, and fell flat upon his back, rolling over and over, imagining that the ball had struck him, and that the water gurgling back from his throat was his own lifeblood, and bawling at the top of his voice: