"Pearson hailed Paul Jones and shouted out, 'Have you struck your colors yet?'
"It was then that Paul Jones sent back that answer. Those were grand words, Herc. They ought to be framed and placed on board every vessel in Uncle Sam's navy."
"Yes, Paul Jones was a wonderful sea-fighter all right," agreed Herc, "but I wonder what he'd have done if he'd been cooped up in here."
"Figured on some way of getting out," rejoined Ned promptly. "Time after time British frigates hemmed him in. They thought they had him trapped. But every time he slipped through their fingers and resumed his career as a sea tiger. With his little bit of a junk-shop fleet he did more to establish the name of Americans as sea fighters than any man in the republic."
"But how about Ben Franklin, who advanced the money to buy the ships, or at least saw that it was raised?" asked the practical Herc.
"Well, of course he helped," admitted Ned, "but even he couldn't save Paul Jones from his country's ingratitude. Why, it was a hundred years or more before his bones were discovered in an obscure spot in Paris, where he died in poverty, and were brought back to this country and buried with the honors they deserved."
"Humph!" observed Herc, "that was a pretty shabby way to treat one of our biggest naval heroes. Wish we had him here now. What was that old anecdote you told me once about Paul burning his way out of a prison some place?"
"Oh, that!" laughed Ned. "I guess that was a bit of imagination on the part of the writer. At any rate it isn't mentioned in the histories. It was one time that they locked Paul Jones in the cabin of a British vessel. They thought they had him safe. But he ripped out the lining of stuffed cushions of the captain's sofas and burned a way out through a port hole that they thought was securely locked. I read it in an old book I picked up in Philadelphia, but I guess the book was more fiction than fact."
Another silence ensued, and then Herc spoke. He took up the conversation where it had been left off.
"It's worth trying," he said in a matter-of-fact tone.