"I wish they would," said Ellis. "Our shipwrights are half asleep. Do you s'pose you can repair that pivot-gun? We hadn't a smith worth his salt."
"She'll swing like new, before long," said Taber. "The man that's filing away at her could invent a better gearing than that is. He could make a watch."
Right there was one important difference, then and afterward, between American sailors and European. It was a difference which was to be illustrated on land as well, in the records of the Patent Office at Washington, and in the wonderful development of all imaginable varieties of mechanism.
"There she comes, the beauty!" was Taber's next remark, as the Noank neared them. "She can outsail anything of her size that I know of."
"She must keep out o' the way of heavy cruisers, though," said Ellis, a little savagely. "I'd ha' beat her, myself, if I hadn't been caught weak as I was."
A hail from Captain Morgan prevented Taber from answering, and in a minute more the two American crews were cheering each other lustily.
"What cargo do you find?" asked Morgan through his trumpet, after he had learned that all else was well.
"All sorts!" responded Taber. "Picked up from prizes. Plenty o' water, provisions, ammunition. I can't guess where they pulled in some o' the stuff. Woollen cloths, and crockery crates, and tobacco. It looks as if they'd taken some Hamburg trader for an American. You can't say what a privateer'll do, well away at sea."
Ellis heard, and there came a queer, half-anxious grin upon his deeply lined, hardened face. He did not, in fact, look like a man who would hesitate long over any small moral questions of mere flags and ownerships. He was a privateersman in preference to any other occupation, without need for the patriotic spirit which was sending into it the seafaring veterans of America.
"All right!" was the hearty reply from the Noank. "Now, Taber, we must keep company if we can for two or three days, at least. Our two batteries, worked together, 'd be an over match for any o' the lighter king's cruisers. We could knock one o' their ten-gun brigs all to flinders."