There was no hailing nor trumpeting, although, as we crossed on opposite tacks when we first weathered her, just before she hove in stays, I had heard a shrill voice sing out, “Take good aim, men—Fire”; but now each cannon in thunder shot forth its glance of flame, without a word being uttered, as she kept away to bring them to bear in succession, while the long feathery cloud of whirling white smoke that shrouded her sides from stem to stem, was sparkling brilliantly throughout with crackling musketry, for all the world like fire-flies in a bank of night fog from the hills, until the breeze blew it back again through the rigging, and once more unveiled the lovely craft in all her pride and glory.
“You see all that?’ said Obed.
“To be sure I do, and I feel something too’; for a sharp rasping jar was repeated in rapid succession three or four times, as so many shot struck our hull, and made the splinters glance about merrily; and the musketballs were mottling our top sides and spars, plumping into the timber, whit whit! as thick as ever you saw schoolboys’ plastering a church door with clay-pellets. There was a heavy groan, and a stir amongst the seamen in the run.
“And, pray, do you see and hear all that yourself, Master Obed? The iron has clenched some of your chaps down there.—Stay a bit, you shall have a better dose presently, you obstinate old”—
He waved his hand, and interrupted me with great energy—“I dare not give in, I cannot give in; all I have in the world swims in the little hooker, and strike I will not so long as two planks stick together.
“Then,” quoth I, “you are simply a damned, cold-blooded, calculating scoundrel—brave I will never call you.” I saw he was now stung to the quick.
“Lieutenant, smuggler as I am, don’t goad me to what worse I may have been; there are some deeds done in my time, which at a moment like this I don’t much like to think upon. I am a desperate man, Master Cringle; don’t, for your own sake, as well as mine, try me too far.’
“Well but”—persisted I. He would hear nothing.
“Enough said, sir, enough said; there was not an honester trader nor a happier man in all the Union, until your infernal pillaging an burning squadron in the Chesapeake captured and ruined me; but I paid it off on the prize-master, although we were driven on the rocks after all. I paid it off, and, God help me, I have never thriven since, enemy although he was. I see the poor fellow’s face yet, as I!”—He checked himself suddenly, as if aware that he might say more than could be conveniently retracted. “But I dare not be taken; let that satisfy you, Master Cringle, so go below—below with you, sir”—I saw he had succeeded in lashing himself into a fury—“or, by the Almighty God, who hears me, I shall be tempted to do another deed, the remembrance of which will haunt me till my dying day.”
All this passed in no time, as we say, much quicker than one can read it; and I now saw that the corvette had braced up sharp to the wind again, on the same tack that we were on; so I slipped down like an eel, and once more stretched myself beside Paul, on the lee side of the cabin. We soon found that she was indeed after us in earnest, by the renewal of the cannonade, and the breezing up of the small arms again. Two round shot now tore right through the deck, just beneath the larboard coamings of the main hatchway; the little vessel’s deck, as she lay over, being altogether exposed to, the enemy’s fire, they made her whole frame tremble again, smashing every thing in their way to shivers, and going right out through her bottom on the opposite side, within a dozen streaks of her keel, while the rattling of the clustered grapeshot every now and then made us start, the musketry all the while peppering away like a hail shower. Still the skipper, who I expected every moment to see puffed away from the tiller like smoke, held upon deck as if he had been bullet-proof, and seemed to escape the hellish tornado of missiles of all sorts and sizes by a miracle.