"March!" cried Hart.
The Frenchmen "jabbered" a bit among themselves.
"Quoi donc? Marcher?" asked their skipper.
"We, old son," said Hart; "marshay if you like. Just pack up and quit. We gives you an hour to gather up your dunnage. Now do you understand?"
Whether the Frenchmen understood or not it was tolerably obvious they did not like the tone with which Hart spoke, or the looks of evident disfavour he cast at them. The captain turned away.
"Stop!" said Hart, and he went in for a dumb pantomime, in which he vaguely suggested that over yonder hill was an army of Englishmen.
"And we mean 'avin' our rights," he ended with. And just then old Jones appeared in sight.
"Are they jossers goin' to evacuate or not?" he bellowed. "What's their captain say to the statues quo? Don't they know the first thing about diplomatics? Tell 'em that to prepare for peace we makes war."
"War it is," said Hart, and he launched himself at a crowd of Frenchmen, as his mates came tumbling down the hill.
The fight was short, sharp, and pretty decisive, for the Potluck's crowd numbered ten able seamen, one ordinary seaman, and two boys, or with the captain and the two mates, sixteen in all. Against this array there were twenty-one Frenchmen, and though Hart, in his first onslaught, knocked down two, he was himself stretched out by a third armed with a broken hand-spike. And Simcox fled with the infuriated foreigners at his heels. The true battle (for this was but an affair of outposts) joined on the crest of the rise, and in five minutes the English were in flight for the shelter of the piled-up Potluck. Old Jones was keeled over once, but Lampert and Mackenzie dragged him away and got him down to the ship. He swore most terribly.