Chapter Six.
Taken prisoners.
Jack and Bill made themselves very useful in hauling the nets, and cleaning the fish when caught. Jack was well up to the work, and showed Bill how to do it. Captain Turgot was highly pleased, and called them “bons garçons,” and said he hoped that they would remain with him till the war was over, and as much longer as they liked. When the cutter returned into the harbour to land her fish, Jack and Bill were sent below, so that the authorities might not see them and carry them off. Captain Turgot was much afraid of losing them. They were getting on famously with their French, and Bill could chatter away already at a great rate, though not in very good French, to be sure, for he made a number of blunders, which afforded constant amusement to his companions, but Pierre was always ready to set him right.
Jack made much slower progress. He could not, he said, twist his tongue about sufficiently to get out the words, even when he remembered them. Some, he found, were wonderfully like English, and those he recollected the best, though, to be sure, they had different meanings. One day the cutter had stood out farther from the shore than usual, her nets being down, when, at daybreak, a strange sail was seen in the offing. The captain, after taking one look at her, was convinced that she was an enemy.
“Quick! quick! my sons,” he shouted: “we must haul the nets and make sail, or we shall be caught by the English. They are brave people, but I have no wish to see the inside of one of their prisons.”
All hands worked away as if their lives depended on their exertions. Jack and Bill lent a hand as usual. They scarcely knew what to wish. Should the stranger prove to be an English ship, and come up with them, they would be restored to liberty; but, at the same time, they would feel very sorry that their kind friends should lose their vessel and be made prisoners; still, Jack wanted to let his mother know that he was alive, and Bill wished to be on board a man-of-war again, fighting for Old England, and getting a foot or two up the ratlines.
His ambition had been aroused by what the captain had said to him, and the assistant master had observed, though he had spoken in joke, that he might, some day or other, become an admiral.
Bill had thought the subject over and over, till he began to fancy that, could he get another chance, the road to fame might be open to him. The loss of the ship with the captain and officers seemed, to be sure, to have overthrown all his hopes; but what had happened once might happen again, and by attending to his duty, and keeping his eyes open, and his wits awake, he might have another opportunity of distinguishing himself.
No one could possibly have suspected what was passing in Bill’s mind, as he worked away as energetically as the rest in stowing the nets and making sail.