The heat of the sun and our exertions made us feel very hot, and now the Yankee’s oranges came into requisition. Both midshipmen and men might be seen sucking them heartily, as we once more stood into action. The enemy seemed still disposed to defend himself as we stood across his stern, so that he could bring no guns to bear on us. He, however, trusting to the effect his large body of marines might produce, fired a rattling volley as we were about to pour in our broadside. Spellman and I were at the moment standing near the boatswain. As the French marines fired, I felt a sharp burning pang in my shoulder, which made me jump on one side, while I saw Spellman’s orange flying away, and, putting up both his hands, he cried out, “Oh, my orange! my orange!—and they have riddled my cheeks, the blackguards.”
I could not help laughing at his exclamation and face of astonishment, in spite of the sickness which was creeping over me.
“It’s lucky it was not through your head, Mr Spellman,” observed the boatswain, picking up the orange and handing it to him, but he was in no way inclined to suck it, for his mouth was full of blood, which he began vehemently spluttering out over the deck.
Now our frigate sent forth a roaring broadside; the enemy’s ship was for an instant shrouded in smoke. As it cleared away, down came the French ensign, and an officer was seen to spring on to the taffrail, and, with the politest of bows, signify that they had struck. Loud, hearty cheers was the answer returned by our brave fellows, who by sheer hard fighting, and rapid working of their guns, had achieved, in little more than three hours, a victory over a foe so vastly superior. Those cheers, though pleasant sounds to our ears, must have been very much the contrary to our enemies.
Then, and not till then, did Mr Bryan consent to be carried below. I have no personal knowledge of what happened after this, for even before the cheering had ceased, I should have sunk fainting on the deck, had not the boatswain caught me. When I came to myself, I was undressed in my hammock, and, except a pain and stiffness in my shoulder, there was nothing, I thought, very much the matter with me, though when I tried to rise I found that to do so was out of the question. Spellman and Grey were in their hammocks close to me. Though Spellman was least seriously hurt of either of us, his appearance, from having his head bound up with two huge plasters over his cheeks, was by far the most lugubrious, as he sat up and looked first at Grey, and then at me, and said, “Well, I hope you like it.”
“Thank you, Miss Susan,” said I. “We might be worse off, but we shan’t have to go whistling through the world in future as you will, and if ever you fall into the hands of savages they’ll put a rope through your cheeks and drag you along like a tame bear.”
“You don’t think so, Merry, I’m sure,” he answered, in a tone of alarm, which showed that he vividly pictured the possibility of such an occurrence; “do you, Grey?”
Poor Grey was too weak to say much, but he gave Spellman very little encouragement to hope for the best, and when Macquoid visited us, entering into the joke, he said nothing to remove his apprehensions.
My chief anxiety was now about Toby Bluff, and I was very glad to find that he had not been hurt. At last, when he came to me, I had some difficulty in quieting his apprehensions, and in persuading him that it was a very fine thing to be wounded, and that I should have lots of honour and glory, and be made more of when I got home than I had ever been before in my life, and that he would share in it without having had the disagreeable ceremony to go through of being wounded.
“As to the glory, and all that sort of thing, I’d as lief have let it alone, if it was to cost a bullet through me, Muster Merry,” he answered. “But I’d have been main glad if the mounseers had just shot me instead of you. It wouldn’t have done me no harm to matter.”