“All right!” answered the skipper. Then turning to the men on the schooner’s deck, he shouted:
“Run those two guns out of the stern-ports there, and train them so as to sweep the boats just before they reach the landing. So! that’s well. Now wait for the word, and when I give it, fire.”
The boats, however, were meantime lying upon their oars, their crews apparently holding a consultation. The fire-light which revealed their approach revealed to them also the fact that the occupants of the shipyard were fully prepared to emphatically dispute any attempt on their part to land; and the sight brought vividly to their minds the aphorism that “discretion is the better part of valour.”
At length, after some twenty minutes of inaction—during which the workers underneath the schooner’s bottom plied their tools with a skill and energy that was truly astounding—the two boats were once more put in motion, their crews directing their course toward the landing, each boat having a rude substitute for a white flag reared upon a boat-hook in the bow.
The moment that they were near enough for their occupants to hear him Captain Staunton hailed them with an imperative order to keep off or he would fire into them.
They at once laid upon their oars, and a man rising in the stern-sheets of the launch returned an answer, which was, however, quite unintelligible. Meanwhile the boats, still having way upon them, continued slowly to approach.
“Back water!” shouted the skipper, seizing the trigger line of one of the guns, whilst Brook stood manfully at the other. “Back water, all of you, instantly, or we will fire.”
The man in the stern-sheets of the launch waved his hand; the oars again flashed into the water, and both boats dashed at the landing-place.
“Wait just a moment yet,” said the skipper, raising a warning hand to Brook and squinting along his gun at the same time. “Now, fire!”
The report of the two brass nine-pounders rang sharply out at the same moment, making the schooner quiver to her keel, and severely testing the construction of her cradle. A crash was heard, then a frightful chorus of shrieks, yells, groans, and execrations; and as the smoke curled heavily away, both boats were seen with their planking rent and penetrated here and there, and their occupants tumbling over and over each other in their anxiety to get at the oars—many of which had been suffered to drop overboard—and withdraw as quickly as possible to a somewhat safer distance.