As the fugitives, keeping perfect silence, stumbled in the darkness over fields and across ditches toward the harbor, they heard loud shouts to their left, followed by the roll of a drum. Clearly the alarm had been raised, the soldiers were turning out. All now depended on whether the direction of the escape was discovered within the next few minutes. If not, Jack thought that he might reach the harbor with his band in time to seize some boats before they were intercepted. He listened eagerly for shots behind; they seemed long in coming, and the outskirts of the village loomed up in the darkness ahead before the expected reports at last struck his ear. Fervently he hoped that the sound would draw the soldiers off in that direction.
He wished he could go faster, but many of the men were weak from the effects of imprisonment and meager fare, and he had to accommodate his pace to the slowest.
Making a fairly wide circuit, Jack steered for the extremity of the harbor, where only a few fishermen's cottages intervened between him and the waterside. Some fishers who had turned out of their dwellings on hearing the alarm scurried down the rutty road with loud shouts. The noise was bound to bring the soldiers to the spot within a few minutes. Jack's heart was pumping at a great rate, but he did not lose his coolness or his nerve. He must do something to check the soldiers, that was plain. Sending twenty men to search the shore for boats, he posted the nine armed with muskets under cover of the cottages with orders to delay the soldiers at all costs. The rest of his men, some armed with the spoil of the kitchen, others with bricks and stones snatched up on the way, he placed behind the nine to support them.
A minute or two—horribly long they seemed to Jack—of anxious waiting; then the two men who had fired the shots in the rear came panting up, and from the direction of the harbor a messenger brought the good news that six large boats had been found. Almost at the same moment the clump-clump of heavy boots and sabots on the road was distinctly heard, ever growing louder. If the runners proved to be soldiers it would be impossible to escape without a fight. Jack would rather have been allowed to embark in peace, but if there must be a fight—
"Well," he whispered to Babbage, "we'll show them what English Jack Tars are made of."
He at once sent the unarmed men down to the water under guidance of the messenger, bidding them get into the boats; then with the rest he prepared to fight a rear-guard action.
The Frenchmen came on helter-skelter. Not one of them imagined that they had any enemy more formidable than unarmed weaklings to deal with. Jack waited until they were within twenty yards; even in the dim starlight they could be seen distinctly enough. Then in a voice that rang clearly he gave the word "Fire!" The eleven rifles flashed; there were cries from the advancing Frenchmen; some of them, at any rate, must have been hit at this point-blank range. The head of the column was in confusion; men turned this way and that; they were apparently without leadership.
While they halted and wavered another word of command was heard above their cries and the sound of shuffling feet: "Charge!" The sailors responded with a cheer; some thirty strong, they dashed forward as one man; and in a few seconds the enemy were in full flight, struck by one of those sudden panics to which even the best troops are liable in night operations.
Jack also had his moment of alarm. Knowing the thoughtless impetuosity of the British sailor, he feared lest, with the enemy on the run, his men should forget everything else in the excitement of pursuit. But he had them soon in hand again.
"Now to the boats!" he said, "and as quickly as you can."