At this second discharge the drummer went furious. To be fired on casually and without any provocation whatever! With his good arm, he flung his carbine along the top of the bags leveled down, and fired at the captain. At his first movement, however, the sailor had dropped down and disappeared below the garboard of the schooner.
The American fired two vicious shots at the place where the captain must have been prone. Then he glared at the vacant deck, with the bitterest sense of injury he had ever known. To be fired upon when he was seeking aid and comfort—to be shot at like a rat!
His feeling of injury became so intense he burst out cursing the invisible sailor, loading him with every obscene and profane qualification. With his carbine leveled over the bags, he swore furiously for two or three minutes. Then he began to repeat his oaths, and presently fizzled out through a mere sense of rhetoric. Then he damned his enemy for a coward, and invited him to stand up like a man and get killed.
Passed a slight interim, and a voice behind the gunwale, but considerably removed from where the fellow had disappeared, called out, "Señor!"
Through some strange reaction, this placating "Señor" added fuel to Strawbridge's wrath. He broke out again, howling, swearing, and urging the captain to get up and be shot.
But the captain conducted his end of the conversation from cover.
"Señor," he repeated without any resentment in his tone, "are you not a revolutionista?"
"No!" yelled Strawbridge. "I'm a decent American citizen down in this hell-fired country...." He continued this strain upward half a minute.
When he became silent again, the hidden one ejaculated mildly:
"Caramba! How should I know you were an Americano, señor?"