“Then hoist away the lights, and throw a shot across her forefoot I fire!” Bang went our carronade, but our friend to windward paid no regard to the private signal; he had shaken a reef out of his topsails, and wars coming down fast upon us.
It war clear that old Blowhard had at first taken him for one of our own cruisers, and meant to signalize him, “all regular and shipshape,” to use his own expression. Most of us, however, thought it would have been wiser to have made sail, and widened our distance, a little, in place of bothering with old fashioned manoeuvres, which might end in our catching a tartar; but the skipper had been all his life in line-of-battle ships, or heavy frigates; and it was a tough job, under, any circumstances, to persuade him of the propriety of “up-stick-and-away,” as we soon felt to our cost.
The enemy, for such he evidently was, now all at once yawed, and indulged us with a sight of his teeth; and there he was, fifteen ports of a side on his maindeck, with the due quantum of carronades on his quarterdeck and forecastle; whilst his short lower masts, white canvass, and the tremendous hoist in his topsails, showed him to be a heavy American frigate; and it was equally certain that he had cleverly hooked us under his lee, within comfortable range of his long twenty-fours. To convince the most unbelieving, three jets of flame, amidst wreaths of white smoke, now glanced from his main-deck; but in this instance, the sound of the cannon was followed by a sharp crackle and a shower of splinters from the foreyard.
It was clear we had got an ugly customer—poor Jenkins now called to Treenail, who was standing forward near the gun which had been fired “Och, sir, and it’s badly wounded we are here.”
The officer was a Patlander, as well as the seaman. “Which of you my boy?” the growing seriousness of the affair in no way checking his propensity to fun,—“Which of you,—you, or the yard?”
“Both of us, your honour; but the yard badliest.”
“The devil!—Come down, then, or get into the top, and I will you looked after presently.”
The poor fellow crawled off the yard into the foretop, as he was ordered, where he was found after the brush, badly wounded by a splinter in the breast.
Jonathan, no doubt “calculated,” as well he might, that this taste of his quality would be quite sufficient for a little eighteen-gun sloop, close under his lee; but the fight was not to be so easily taken out of Deadeye, although even to his optic it was now high time to be off.
“All hands make sail, Mr Splinter; that chap is too heavy for us. Mr Kelson,” to the carpenter, “jump up and see what the foreyard will carry. Keep her away, my man,” to the seaman at the helm. “Crack on, Mr Splinter, shake all the reefs out,——set the fore-topsail, and loose topgallant-sails;—stand by to sheet home; and see all clear to rig the booms out, if the breeze lulls.”