I handed him the letter. He bowed with the polished ease of a courtier, and after a polite apology, opened and read the letter. At the end he slipped the letter into his wallet, and smilingly held out to me a shapely, bronzed hand.
"Monsieur Clark has explained your reason for sailing, doctor," he said, with a manner that won him my regard on the spot. "I shall be more than pleased to do all in my power to aid you. We shall first send for your chests."
I explained my lack of wardrobe.
"Sacre!" he exclaimed. "But I sail at once. Come! I have it. I lost my third mate in a brush with an English privateer last month. He was a cleanly man of much your build. You shall ship in his berth."
I pointed to the nearest flatboat. "That is the extent of my seamanship, Monsieur Captain."
He shrugged. "The clothes will fit, if the berth does not. You can save your present costume for your landing."
I bowed assent, and we at once swung along side by side to a wharf where his boat was in waiting for him. With a courtesy which I did not then appreciate, though I noted how it impressed the half-dozen swarthy, red-capped oarsmen, he sprang first into the stern-sheets. The moment I stepped in after him, the men pushed off. They rowed with a skill and regularity of stroke that speedily brought us out around the brig which blocked our view, when we approached the most graceful sloop upon which I had ever set eyes.
Not being a seaman, I can only say that the Siren's masts and yards seemed to me to be unusually long, and the former strongly inclined to the stern—raked, I believe is the marine term. Her hull, which was painted a dull gray, with a narrow stripe of red, was sharp in the bow, broad and overhanging at the stern, and low-set in the water.
When we came aboard, I noticed that the sloop's decks were cleaner and more orderly than those of any other merchant vessel I had seen at close quarters, and that besides a number of carronades, she carried abaft the mainmast a great pivot-gun that could have found few mates afloat elsewhere than aboard a man-of-war. It was a long French twenty-four-pounder, which is really a twenty-six-and-a-half-pounder by English weight. As is well known, many frigates carry no heavier longs than eighteen-pounders.
Observing my interested glance, Captain Lafitte said, with a smile: "As you see, doctor, Monsieur Clark is disinclined to deliver his sloop and cargo to the Spanish privateers without a protest."