



Produced by David Widger from page images generously
provided by the Internet Archive







THE STORY OF PAUL JONES

An Historical Romance

By Alfred Henry Lewis

Illustrated by Seymour M. Stone and Phillipps Ward

G. W. Dillingham Company, 1906

London

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[Illustration: 0007]



THE STORY OF PAUL JONES




CHAPTER I--HIS BAPTISM OF THE SEA


This is in the long-ago, or, to be exact, in July, 1759. The new brig
_Friendship_, not a fortnight off the stocks, is lying in her home
harbor of Whitehaven, being fitted to her first suit of sails. Captain
Bennison is restlessly about her decks, overseeing those sea-tailors,
the sail-makers, as they go forward with their task, when Mr. Younger,
the owner, comes aboard. The latter gentleman is lowland Scotch, stout,
middle-aged, and his severe expanse of smooth-shaven upper-lip tells
of prudence, perseverance and Presbyterianism in even parts, as traits
dominant of his character.

“Dick,” says Mr. Younger, addressing Captain Bennison, “ye’ll have a
gude brig; and mon! ye s’uld have a gude crew. There’ll be none of the
last in Whitehaven, for what ones the agents showed me were the mere
riff-raff of the sea. I’ll even go to Arbigland, and pick ye a crew
among the fisher people.”

“Arbigland!” repeats Captain Bennison, with a glow of approval. “The
Arbigland men are the best sailor-folk that ever saw the Solway. Give
me an Arbigland crew, James, and I’ll find ye the Rappahannock with
the _Friendship_, within the month after she tears her anchor out o’
Whitehaven mud.”

And so Mr. Younger goes over to Arbigland.

It is a blowing July afternoon. An off-shore breeze, now freshening to a
gale, tosses the Solway into choppy billows. Most of the inhabitants
of Arbigland are down at the mouth of the little tide-water creek, that
forms the harbor of the village, eagerly watching a small fishing yawl.
The latter craft is beating up in the teeth of the gale, striving for
the shelter of the creek.

The crew of the yawl consists of but one, and him a lad of twelve.
His right hand holds the tiller; with the left he slacks or hauls the
sheets, and shifts the sail when he goes about.

The yawl has just heeled over on the starboard tack, as Mr. Younger
pushes in among the villagers that crowd the little quay.

“They’ll no make it!” exclaims a fisherman, alluding to the boy and
yawl; “they’ll be blawn oot t’ sea!”

“Ay! they’ll make it sure enough,” declares another stoutly. “It’s
little Jack Paul who’s conning her, and he’d bring the yawl in against
a horrycane. She’s a gude boat, too--as quick on her feet as a dancing
maister; and, as for beating to wind’ard, she’ll lay a point closer to
the wind than a man has a right to ask of his lawful wedded wife. Ye’ll
see; little Jack’ll bring her in.”

“Who is he?” asks Mr. Younger of the last speaker; “who’s yon boy?”

“He’s son to John Paul, gardener to the laird Craik.”

“Sitha! son to Gardener Paul, quo’ you!” breaks in an old fish-wife who,
with red arms folded beneath her coarse apron, stands watching the yawl
with the others. “Now to my mind, he looks mair like the laird than I
s’uld want my son to look, if I were wife to Gardener Paul.”

“Shame for ye, Lucky!” cries the fisherman to whom she speaks. “Would ye
cast doots on the lad’s mither, and only because the lad in his favoring
makes ye think now and again on Maister Craik? Jeanny Paul, that was
Jeanny Macduff, is well kenned to be as carefu’ a wife as ever cooked
her man’s breakfast in Arbigland.”

“Ye think so, Tam Bryce?” retorts the incorrigible Lucky. “Much ye s’uld
know of the wives of Arbigland, and you to sea eleven months o’ the
year! I tell ye, Jeanny came fro’ the Highlands; and it’ll be lang, I
trow, since gude in shape of man or woman came oot o’ the Highlands.”

“Guide your tongue, Lucky!” remonstrates the other, in a low tone;
“guide your tongue, ye jade! Here comes Gardener Paul himsel’.’’

“I’ll no stay to meet him,” says Lucky, moving away. “Puir blinded fule!
not to see what all Arbigland, ay! and all Kirkbean Parish, too, for
that matter, has seen the twal years, that his boy Jack is no mair no
less than just the laird’s bairn when all’s said.”

“Ye’ll no mind her, Maister Younger,” says Tom Bryce, pointing after
Lucky; “although, to be preceese, what the carline tells has in it mair
of truth than poetry.”

“I was no thinking on the dame’s clack,” returns Mr. Younger, his eyes
still on the nearing yawl, “or whether yon lad’s a gardener’s bairn or
a gentleman’s by-blaw. What I will say, in the face of the sun, however,
is that he has in him the rudiments of as brisk a sailorman as ever
walked saut water.”

“There’ll be none that’s better,” observes Tom Bryce, “going in and oot
o’ Solway Firth.” Then, eyeing the yawl: “He’ll win to the creek’s mouth
on the next reach to sta’board.”

Gardener Paul joins Mr. Younger and the fisherman, Tom Bryce.

“We were talking of your son,” says Mr. Younger to Gardener Paul. “What
say ye, mon; will ye apprentice him? I’ll send him with Dick Bennison,
in my new brig Friendship, to the Virginias and Jamaica.”

John Paul, gardener to the laird, Robert Craik, is a dull man, notably
thick of wit, and slow.

“The Virginias!” he repeats. “My son William has been there these
sixteen year. He’s head man for my kinsman Jones, on his plantation by
the Rappahannock. If Jack sails with Dick Bennison, he’ll meet William
that he’s never seen.”

“He’ll see his brother for sure,” returns Mr. Younger. “The _Friendship_
goes from Whitehaven to Urbana, and that’s not a dozen miles down the
Rappahannock from your cousin’s plantation.”

The yawl has come safely into the creek’s mouth, and lies rocking at her
moorings as lightly as a gull. The lad leaps ashore, and is patted on
the back by the fisherman in praise of his seamanship. He smiles through
the salt water that drips from his face; for beating to windward is not
the driest point of sailing, and the lad is spray-soaked from head to
heel.

“And may I go, father?

“This is Mr. Younger, Jack,” says Gardener Paul, as the lad conies up.
“He wants ye to sail ‘prentice with Dick Bennison, in the new brig.’’
The difference to show between Gardener Paul and little Jack Paul,
as the pair stand together on the quay, goes far to justify those
innuendoes of the scandalous Lucky. Gardener Paul’s heavy peasant face
possesses nothing to mark, on his part, any blood-nearness to the boy,
whose olive skin, large brown eyes, clean profile and dark hair like
silk, speak only of the patrician.

“And may I go, father?” asks Jack, a flush breaking eagerly through the
tan on his cheek.

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“Ye might as weel, I think,” responds Gardener Paul judgmatically.
“Ye’re the born petrel; and for the matter of gardening, being my own
and Adam’s trade, I’ve kenned for lang ye’ll no mair touch spade or
mattock than handle coals of fire. So, as I was saying, ye might as weel
sail ‘prentice with Dick; and when ye meet your brother William, gi’ him
his father’s gude word. Ye’ll never have seen William, Jack, for he left
hame before ye were born; and so it’ll be a braw fore-gathering between
the twa of ye--being brothers that never met before.”

And after this fashion the fisher-boy, John Panl, afterward Admiral Paul
Jones, is given his baptism of the sea.




CHAPTER II--IN THE BLACK TRADE

The sun is struggling through the dust-coated, cobwebbed windows, and
lighting dimly yet sufficiently the dingy office of Shipowner Younger of
Whitehaven. That substantial man is sitting at his desk, eyes fixed upon
the bristle of upstanding masts which sprout, thick as forest pines on a
hillside, from the harbor basin below. The face of Shipowner Younger has
been given the seasoning of several years, since he went to Arbigland
that squall-torn afternoon, to pick up a crew for Dick Bennison. Also,
Shipowner Younger shines with a new expression of high yet retiring
complacency. The expression is one awful and fascinating to the clerk,
who sits at the far end of the room. Shipowner Younger has been elected
to Parliament, and his awful complacency is that elevation’s visible
sign. The knowledge of his master’s election offers the basis of much
of the clerk’s awe, and that stipendary almost charms himself into the
delusion that he sees a halo about the bald pate of Shipowner Younger.

The latter brings the spellbound clerk from his trance of fascination,
by wheeling upon him.

“Did ye send doon, mon,” he cries, “to my wharf, with word for young
Jack Paul to come?”

The clerk says that he did.

“Then ye can go seek your denner.”

The clerk, acting on this permission, scrambles to his fascinated
feet. As he retires through the one door, young Jack Paul enters. The
brown-faced boy of the Arbigland yawl has grown to be a brisk young
sailor, taut and natty. He shakes the hand of Shipowner Younger, who
gives him two fingers in that manner of condescending reserve, which
he conceives to be due his dignity as a member of the House of Commons.
Having done so much for his dignity, Shipowner Younger relaxes.

“Have a chair, lad!” he says. “Bring her here where we can chat.”

The natty Jack Paul brings the clerk’s chair, as being the only one in
the room other than that occupied by Shipowner Younger. One sees the
thorough-paced sailor in the very motions of him; for his step is quick,
catlike and sure, and there is just the specter of a roll in his walk,
as though the heaving swell of the ocean still abides in his heels. When
he has placed the chair, so as to bring himself and Shipowner Younger
face to face, he says:

“And now, sir, what are your commands’?”

“I’ll have sent for ye, Jack,” begins Shipowner Younger, portentously
lengthening the while his shaven upper-lip--“I’ll have sent for ye, for
three several matters: To pay ye a compliment or twa; to gi’ ye a
gude lecture; an’ lastly to do a trifle of business wi’ ye, by way of
rounding off. For I hold,” goes on Shipowner Younger, in an admonishing
tone, “that conversations which don’t carry a trifle of business are no
mair than just the crackle of thorns under a pot. Ye’ll ken I’m rich,
Jack--ye’ll ken I can clink my gold, an’ count my gold, an’ keep my gold
wi’ the warmest mon in Whitehaven?”

Young Jack Paul smiles, and nods his full agreement.

“But ye’ll no ken,” goes on Shipowner Younger, with proud humility, the
pride being real and the humility imitated--“ye’ll no ken, I believe,
that I’m ‘lected to the Parleyment in Lunnon, lad?” Shipowner Younger
pauses to observe the effect of this announcement of his greatness.
Being satisfied, he goes on. “It’s a sacrifeece, no doot, but I s’all
make it. The King has need of my counsel; an’, God save him! he s’all
have it. For I’ve always said, lad, that a mon’s first debt is to the
King. But it’ll mean sore changes, Jack, sore changes will it mean; for
I’m to sell up my ships to the last ship’s gig of ‘em, the better to
leave me hand-free and head-free to serve the King.”

Young Jack Paul is polite enough to arch his brows and draw a serious
face. Shipowner Younger is pleased at this, and, with a deprecatory wave
of his hand, as one who dismisses discussion of misfortunes which are
beyond the help of words, proceeds:

“But enou’ of idle clavers; I’ll e’en get to what for I brought
you here.” Shipowner Younger leans far back in his big chair, and
contemplates young Jack Paul with a twinkle. “Now, lad,” he begins,
“when from ‘prentice ye are come to be first mate among my ships, I’m to
tell ye that from Dick Bennison who signed ye, to Ed’ard Denbigh whose
first officer ye now be, all the captains ye’ve sailed wi’ declare ye a
finished seaman. But”--here Shipowner Younger shakes his head as though
administering reproof--“they add that ye be ower handy wi’ your fists.”

“Why, then,” breaks in young Jack Paul, “how else am I to keep my watch
in order! Besides, I hold it more humane to strike with your fist
than with a belaying pin. The captains, I’ll warrant, have told you I
thrashed none but ship’s bullies.”

“They’ll have told me nothing of the kind,” returns Shipowner Younger.
“They said naught of bullies. What they did observe was that ye just
pounded the faces of the fo’c’sle hands in the strict line of duty.
Why, they said the whole ship’s crew loved ye like collie dogs! It seems
ye’ve a knack of thrashing yourself into their hearts.”

Young Jack Paul’s eyes show pleasure and relief; he perceives he is not
being scolded.

“And now,” says Shipowner Younger, donning the alert manner of your
true-born merchant approaching pounds, shillings and pence--“and now,
having put the compliments and the lecture astern, we’ll even get doon
to business. As I was tellin’, I’m about to retire from the ships. I’m
rich enou’; and, being called to gi’ counsel to the King, I want no
exter-aneous interests to distract me. The fair truth is, I’ve sold all
but the bark ye’re now wi’, the _John O’ Gaunt_, ye’ll ken; and that’s
to be sold to-day.”

“You’ll sell our _John O’ Gaunt_, sir? Who is to own it?”

“Ed’ard Denbigh, your captain, is to own five-sixths of her, for which
he’ll pay five thousand pounds; being dog-cheap”--here a deep sigh--“as
I’m a Christian! As for the remaining sixth, lad, why it’s to be yours.
Ye’ll sail oot o’ Whitehaven this v’yage in your own ship, partners wi’
Ed’ard Denbigh.”

“But, sir,” protests young Jack Paul, his voice startled into a tremor,
“with all thanks for your goodness, I’ve got no thousand pounds. You
know the wages of a mate.’’

“Ay! I ken the wages of a mate weel enou’; I’ve been payin’ ‘em for
thirty year come New Year’s day. But ye’ll no need money, Jack!”--the
dry, harsh tones grow soft with kindliness--“ye’ll no need money, mon,
and there’s the joke of it. For I’m to gi’ ye your one-sixth of the John
O’ Gaunt, wi’ never a shillin’ from your fingers, and so make a man and
a merchant of ye at a crack. Now, no words, lad! Ye’ve been faithful;
and I’ve no’ forgot that off Cape Clear one day ye saved me a ship. Ay!
ye’ll ken by now that Jamie Younger, for all he’s ‘lected to Parleyment
to tell the King his mind, is no so giddy wi’ his honors as to forget
folk who serve him. No words, I tell ye! There ye be, sailor and
shipowner baith, before ye’re twenty-one. An’ gude go wi’ ye!”

The big-hearted Scotchman smothers the gratitude on the lips of young
Jack Paul, and hands him out the door. As the latter goes down the
stair, Shipowner Younger calls after him with a kind of anticipatory
crow of exultation:

“And, lad! if ye get ever to Lunnon, come doon to Westminster, and see me
just passin’ the laws!”

The _John O’ Gaunt_ lies off the Guinea coast. The last one of its
moaning, groaning, black cargo of slaves has come over the side from
the shore boats, and been conveyed below. The _John O’ Gaunt_ has been
chartered by a Bristol firm to carry three thousand slaves from the
Guineas to Kingston; it will require ten voyages, and this is the
beginning of the first.

The three hundred unhappy blacks who make the cargo are between decks.
There they squat in four ranks, held by light wrist-chains to two great
iron cables which are stretched forward and aft.

There are four squatting ranks of them; each rank sits face to face
with its fellow rank across the detaining cable. Thus will they sit
and suffer, cramped and choked and half-starved in that tropical hell
between decks, through those two-score days and nights which lie between
the _John O’ Gaunt_ and Kingston.

Captain Denbigh keeps the deck until the anchors are up. The wind is
forward of the beam, and now, when its canvas is shaken out, the _John
O’ Gaunt_ begins to move through the water on the starboard tack. The
motion is slow and sulky, as though the ship were sick in its heart at
the vile traffic it has come to, and must be goaded by stiffest gales
before it consents to any show of speed. Captain Denbigh leaves the
order, “West by north!” with second mate Boggs, who has the watch on
deck; and, after glancing aloft at the sails and over the rail at the
weather, waddles below to drink “Prosperous voyage!” with his first mate
and fellow owner, young Jack Paul.

He finds that youthful mariner gloomy and sad.

The cabin where the two are berthed is roomy. At one end is a case of
bottles--brandy and rum, the property of Captain Denbigh. At the other
is a second lock-fast case, filled with books, the sailing companions of
first mate Jack Paul. There are text-books--French, Spanish, Latin and
Greek; for first mate Jack Paul is of a mind to learn languages during
his watch below. There are books on navigation and astronomy, as well
as volumes by De Foe and Richardson. Also, one sees the comedies of
Congreve, and the poems of Alexander Pope. To these latter, first mate
Jack Paul gives much attention; his inquiring nose is often between
their covers. He studies English elegancies of speech and manner in
Congreve, Pope and Richardson, while the crop-eared De Foe feeds his
fancy for adventure.

As Captain Denbigh rolls into the cabin, first mate Jack Paul is not
thinking on books. He has upon his mind the poor black wretches between
decks, the muffled murmur of whose groans, together with the clanking
of their wrist-chains, penetrates the bulkhead which forms the forward
cabin wall. Captain Denbigh never heeds the silence and the sadness
of his junior officer and partner, but marches, feet spread wide and
sailorwise, to the locker which holds his bottles. Making careful
selection, he brings out one of rum and another of sherry.

“You not likin’ rum,” explains Captain Denbigh, as he sets the sherry
within reach of first mate Jack Paul.

First mate Jack Paul mechanically fills himself a moderate glass, while
Captain Denbigh does himself more generous credit with a brimmer from
the rum bottle.

“Here’s to the good ship _John O’ Gaunt_,” cries Captain Denbigh,
tossing the rum down his capacious throat. “May it live to carry <DW65>s
a hundred years!”

There is no response to this sentiment; but Captain Denbigh doesn’t feel
at all slighted, and sits down comfortably to the floor-fast table,
the rum at his elbow. Being thus disposed, he glances at his moody
companion.

There is much that is handsome in a rough, saltwater way about Captain
Denbigh. He is short, stout, with a brown pillar of a throat, and
shoulders as square as his yardarms. His thick hair is clubbed into a
cue; there are gold rings in his ears, and his gray eyes laugh as he
looks at you.

“An’ now, mate Jack,” says Captain Denbigh, cheerfully, “with our three
hundred <DW65>s stowed snug, an’ we out’ard bound for Jamaica, let you
an’ me have a bit of talk. Not as cap ‘in an’ mate, mind you, but as
owners. To begin with, then, you don’t like the black trade?”

First mate Jack Paul looks up; the brown eyes show trouble and resolve.

“Captain,” he says, “it goes against my soul!” Then, he continues
apologetically: “Not that I say aught against slavery, which I’ve heard
chaplains and parsons prove to be right and pious by Bible text. Ay!
I’ve heard them when I’ve been to church ashore, with my brother William
by the Rappahannock. My kinsman Jones owns slaves; and I can see, too,
that they have safer, happier lives with him than could fall to their
lot had they remained savages in the wild Guinea woods. But owning
slaves by the Rappahannock, where you can give them kindness and
make them happy, is one thing. This carrying the tortured creatures
--chained, and mad with grief!--to Jamaica is another.”

Captain Denbigh refreshes himself with more rum.

“It wards off the heat,” he vouchsafes, in extenuation of his partiality
for the rum. Having set himself right touching rum, he takes, up the
main question: “What can we do?” he asks. “You know we’re chartered for
ten v’yages?”

“I’m no one to argue with my captain,” responds first mate Jack Paul.
“Still less do I talk of breaking charters. All I say is, it makes me
heart-sore.”

“Let me see!” responds Captain Denbigh, searching for an idea. “Your
brother William tells me, the last time we takes in tobacco from the
Jones plantation, that old William Jones is as fond o’ you as o’ him?”

“That is true. He wanted me to stay ashore with him and William, and
give up the sea.”

“An’ why not, mate Jack?”

First mate Jack Paul shrugs his shoulders, which, despite his youth, are
as broad and square as his captain’s.

“Because I like the sea,” says he; “and shall always like the sea.”

Captain Denbigh takes more rum; after which he sits knitting his
forehead into knots, in a very agony of cogitation. Finally he gives the
table a great bang, at which the rum bottle jumps in alarm.

“I’ve hit it!” he cries. “I knowed I would if I’d only drink rum
enough. I never has a bright idea yet, I don’t get it from rum. Here,
now, mate Jack; I’ll just buy you out. You don’t like the black trade,
an’ you’ll like it less an’ less. It’s your readin’ books does it; that,
an not drinkin rum. Howsumever, I’ll buy you out. Then you can take a
merchant-ship; or--an’ you may call me no seaman if that ain’t what
I’d do you sits down comfortable with your brother an’ your old kinsman
Jones by the Rappahannock, an plays gentleman ashore.”

While Captain Denbigh talks, the trouble fades from the face of first
mate Jack Paul.

“What’s that?” he cries. “You’ll buy me out?”

“Ay, lad! as sure as my name’s Ed’ard Denbigh. That is, if so be you can
sell, bein’ under age. I allows you can, howsumever; for you’re no one
to go back on a bargain.” Having thus adjusted to his liking the legal
doubt suggested, Captain Denbigh turns to the question of price. “Master
Younger puts your sixth at a thousand pounds. If so be you’ll say the
word, mate Jack, I’ll give you a thousand pounds.”

Countenance brightened with a vast relief, first mate Jack Paul
stretches his hand across the table. Captain Denbigh, shifting his
glass to the left hand, grasps it.

“Done!” says first mate Jack Paul.

“An’ done to you, my hearty!” exclaims Captain Denbigh. “The money’ll
be yours, mate Jack, as soon as ever we sees Kingston light. An’ now for
another hooker of rum to bind the bargain.”




CHAPTER III--THE YELLOW JACK

At Kingston, Captain Denbigh goes ashore with first mate Jack Paul,
and pays over in Bank of England paper those one thousand pounds which
represent that one-sixth interest in the _John O’Gaunt_. While the
pair are upon this bit of maritime business, the three hundred mournful
blacks are landed under the supervision of the second mate. Among the
virtues which a cargo of slaves possesses over a shipment of cotton or
sugar or rum, is the virtue of legs. This merit is made so much of by
the energetic second officer of the _John O’Gaunt_, that, within half
a day, the last of the three hundred blacks is landed on the Kingston
quay. Received and receipted for by a bilious Spaniard with an umbrella
hat, who is their consignee, the blacks are marched away to the
stockade which will confine them while awaiting distribution among the
plantations. Captain Denbigh puts to sea with the _John O’Gaunt_ in
ballast the same evening. A brisk seaman, and brisker man of business,
is Captain Denbigh, and no one to spend money and time ashore, when he
may be making the one and saving the other afloat.

First mate Jack Paul, his fortune of one thousand pounds safe in the
strong-boxes of the Kingston bank, sallies forth to look for a ship. He
decides to go passenger, for the sake of seeing what it is like, and his
first thought is to visit his brother William by the Rappahannock. This
fraternal venture he forbears, when he discovers Kingston to be in the
clutch of that saffron terror the yellow fever. Little is being locally
said of the epidemic, for the town is fearful of frightening away its
commerce. The Kingston heart, like most human hearts, thinks more of its
own gold than of the lives of other men. Wherefore Kingston is sedulous
to hide the plague in its midst, lest word go abroad on blue water and
drive away the ships.

First mate Jack Paul becomes aware of Kingston for the death-trap it is
before he is ashore two days. It is the suspicious multitude of funerals
thronging the sun-baked streets, that gives him word. And yet the
grewsome situation owns no peculiar threat for him, since he has sailed
these blistering latitudes so often and so much that he may call himself
immune. For him, the disastrous side is that, despite the Kingston
efforts at concealment, a plague-whisper drifted out to sea, and as a
cautious consequence the Kingston shipping has dwindled to be nothing.
This scarcity of ships vastly interferes with that chance of a passage
home.

“The first craft, outward bound for England, shall do,” thinks first
mate Jack Paul. “As to William, I’ll defer my visit until I may go
ashore to him without bringing the yellow jack upon half Virginia.”

While waiting for that home-bound ship, first mate Jack Paul goes upon a
pilgrimage of respect to the tomb of Admiral Benbow. That sea-wolf lies
buried in the parish chapel-yard in King Street.

As first mate Jack Paul leaves the little burying-ground, he runs foul
of a polite adventure which, in its final expression, will have effect
upon his destiny. His aid is enlisted in favor of a lady in trouble.

The troubled lady, fat, florid and forty, is being conveyed along King
Street in her _ketureen_, a sort of sedan chair on two wheels, drawn by
a half-broken English horse. The horse, excited by a funeral procession
of dancing, singing, shouting blacks, capsizes the _ketureen_, and the
fat, florid one is decanted upon the curb at the feet of first mate
Jack Paul. Alive to what is Christian in the way of duty, he raises the
florid, fat decanted one, and congratulates her upon having suffered no
harm.

The _ketureen_ is restored to an even keel. The fat, florid one boards
it, though not before she invites first mate Jack Paul to dinner.
Being idle, lonesome, and hungry for English dishes, he accepts,
and accompanies the fat, florid one in the dual guise of guest and
bodyguard.

Sir Holman Hardy, husband to the fat, florid one, is as fatly florid as
his spouse. Incidentally he is in command of what British soldiers are
stationed at Kingston. The fat, florid one presents first mate Jack Paul
to her Hector, tells the tale of the rescue, and thereupon the three go
in to dinner. Later, first mate Jack Paul and his host smoke in the
deep veranda, where, during the cool of the evening, Sir Holman drinks
sangaree, and first mate Jack Paul drinks Madeira. Also Sir Holman
inveighs against the Horse Guards for consigning him to such a pit of
Tophet as is Kingston.

Between sangaree and maledictions levelled at the Horse Guards, Sir
Holman gives first mate Jack Paul word of a brig, the _King George’s
Packet_, out of China for Kingston with tea, which he looks for every
day. Discharging its tea, the _King George’s Packet_ will load with rum
for Whitehaven; and Sir Holman declares that first mate Jack Paul shall
sail therein, a passenger-guest, for home. Sir Holman is able to promise
this, since the fat, florid rescued one is the child of Shipowner Donald
of Donald, Currie & Beck, owners of the _King George’s Packet_.

“Which makes me,” expounds Sir Holman, his nose in the sangaree, “a kind
of son-in-law to the brig itself.”

He grumblingly intimates--he is far gone in sangaree at the time--that a
fleet of just such sea-trinkets as the _King George’s Packet_, so far
as he has experimented with the marital condition, constitutes the one
redeeming feature of wedlock.

“And so,” concludes the excellent Sir Holman, “you’re to go home with
the rum, guest of the ship itself; and the thing I could weep over is
that I cannot send my kit aboard and sail with you.”

Two days go by, and the _King George’s Packet_ is sighted off Port
Royal; twenty-four hours later its master, Captain Macadam---a Solway
man--is drinking Sir Holman’s sangaree. Making good his word, Sir Holman
sends for first mate Jack Paul, and that business of going passenger to
Whitehaven is adjusted.

“True!” observes Captain Macadam, when he understands--“true, the
_George_ isn’t fitted up for passengers. But”--turning to first mate
Jack Paul--“you’ll no mind; bein’ a seaman yours eh?”

“More than that, Captain,” breaks in Sir Holman, “since the port is
reeling full of yellow jack, some of your people might take it to sea
with them. Should aught go wrong, now, why here is your passenger, a
finished sailorman, to give you a lift.”

Captain Macadam’s face has been tanned like leather. None the less,
as he hears the above the mahogany hue thereof lapses into a pasty,
piecrust color. Plainly that word yellow jack fills his soul with fear.
He mentions the wearisome fact to first mate Jack Paul, as he and that
young gentleman, after their cigars and sangaree with Sir Holman, are
making a midnight wake for the change house whereat they have bespoken
beds.

“It’s no kindly,” complains Captain Macadam, “for Sir Holman to let me
run my brig blindfold into sic a snare. But then he has a fourth share
in the tea, and another in the rum; and so, for his profit like, he lets
me tak’ my chances. He’d stude better wi’ God on high I’m thinkin’, if
he’d let his profit gone by, and just had a pilot boat standin’ off and
on at Port Royal, to gi’ me the wink to go wide. I could ha’ taken the
tea to New York weel enou’. But bein’ I’m here,” concludes the disturbed
Captain, appealing to first mate Jack Paul, “what would ye advise?”

“To get your tea ashore and your rum aboard as fast as you may.”

“Ay! that’ll about be the weesdom of it!”

Captain Macadam can talk of nothing but yellow jack all the way to the
change house.

“It’s the first time I was ever in these watters,” he explains
apologetically, “and now I can smell fever in the air! Ay! the hond o’
death is on these islands! Be ye no afeard, mon?”

First mate Jack Paul says that he is not. Also he is a trifle irritated
at the alarm of the timorous Captain Macadam.

“That’ll just be your youth now!” observes the timorous one. “Ye’re no
old enou’ to grasp the responsibeelities.”

At four in the morning Captain Macadam comes into first mate Jack Paul’s
room at the change house. He is clad in his linen sleeping suit, and his
teeth are chattering a little.

“It’s the bein’ ashore makes my teeth drum,” he vouchsafes. “But what
I wushed to ask ye, lad, is d’ye believe in fortunes? No? Weel, then,
neither do I; only I remembered like that lang syne a wierd warlock sort
o’ body tells me in the port o’ Leith, that I’m to meet my death in the
West Injies. It’s the first time, as I was tellin’ ye, that ever I comes
pokin’ my snout amang these islands; and losh! I believe that warlock
chiel was right. I’ve come for my death sure.”

Captain Macadam promises his crew’ double grog and double wages, and
works night and day lightering his tea ashore, and getting his rum casks
into the _King George’s Packet_. Then he calls a pilot, and, with a
four-knot breeze behind him, worms his way along the narrow, corkscrew
channel, until he finds himself in open water.

Then the pilot goes over the side, and Captain Macadam takes the brig.
He casts an anxious eye astern at Port Royal, four miles away.

“I’ll no feel safe,” says he, “while yon Satan’s nest is under my
quarter. And afterward I’ll no feel safe neither. How many days, mon, is
a victeem to stand by and look for symptoms?”

First mate Jack Paul, to whom the query is put, gives it as his opinion
that, if they have yellow fever aboard, it will make its appearance
within the week.

“Weel that’s a mercy ony way!” says Captain Macadam with a sigh.

There are, besides first mate Jack Paul, and the Captain with his two
officers, twelve seamen and the cook--seventeen souls in all--aboard
the _King George’s Packet_ as, north by east, it crawls away from Port
Royal. For four days the winds hold light but fair. Then come head
winds, and the brig finds itself making long tacks to and fro in
the Windward Passage, somewhere between Cape Mazie and the Mole St.
Nicholas.

“D’ye see, mon!” cries Captain Macadam, whose fears have increased,
not diminished, since he last saw the Jamaica lights. “The vera weather
seeks to keep us in this trap! I’ll no be feelin’ ower weel neither, let
me tell ye!”

First mate Jack Paul informs the alarmed Captain that to fear the fever
is to invite it.

“I’m no afeard, mon,” returns Captain Macadam, with a groan, “I’m just
impressed.”

The timidities of the Captain creep among the mates and crew; forward
and aft the feeling is one of terror. The _King George’s Packet_ becomes
a vessel of gloom. There are no songs, no whistling for a wind. Even
the cook’s fiddle is silent, and the galley grows as melancholy as the
forecastle.

It is eight bells in the afternoon of the fourth day, when the man at
the wheel calls to Captain Macadam. He tosses his thumb astern.

“Look there!” says he.

Captain Macadam peers over the rail, and counts eleven huge sharks. The
monsters are following the brig. Also, they seem in an ugly mood, since
ever and anon they dash at one another ferociously.

“It’ll be a sign!” whispers Captain Macadam. Then he counts them.
“There’ll be ‘leven o’ them,” says he; “and that means we’re ‘leven to
die!” After this he dives below, and takes to the bottle.

Bleared of eye, shaken of hand, Captain Macadam on the fifth morning
finds first mate Jack Paul on the after deck. The eleven sharks are
still sculling sullenly along in the slow wake of the wind-bound brig.

“Be they there yet?” asks Captain Macadam, looking over the stern with a
ghastly grin. Then answering his own query: “Ay! they’ll be there--the
‘leven of ‘em!”

First mate Jack Paul, observing their daunting effect on the
over-harrowed nerves of Captain Macadam, is for having up his pistols to
take a shot at the sharks; but he is stayed by the other.

“They’ll be sent,” says Captain Macadam; “it’ll no do to slay ‘em, mon!
But losh! ain’t a sherk a fearfu’ feesli?” Then, seeing his hand shake
on the brig’s rail: “It’s the rum. And that’s no gude omen, me takin’ to
the rum; for I’m not preeceesely what you’d ca’ a drinkin’ body.”

Two hours later Captain Macadam issues from his cabin and seeks first
mate Jack Paul, where the latter is sitting in the shade of the main
sail.

“Mon, look at me!” he cries. “D’ye no see? I tell ye, Death has found me
oot on the deep watters!”

The single glance assures first mate Jack Paul that Captain Macadam is
right. His eyes are congested and ferrety; his face is flushed. Even
while first mate Jack Paul looks, he sees the skin turn yellow as a
lemon. He thumbs the sick man’s wrist; the pulse is thumping like a
trip-hammer. Also, the dry, fevered skin shows an abnormal temperature.

“Your tongue!” says first mate Jack Paul; for he has a working knowledge
of yellow jack.

It is but piling evidence upon evidence; the tongue is the color of
liver. Three hours later, the doomed man is delirious. Then the fever
gives way to a chill; presently he goes raving his way into eternity,
and the _King George’s Packet_ loses its Captain.

First mate Jack Paul sews the dead skipper in a hammock with his own
fingers; since, mates, crew and cook, not another will bear a hand.
When the hammock sewing is over, the cook aids in bringing the corpse
on deck. As the body slips from the grating into the sea, a thirty-two
pound shot at the heels, the cook laughs overboard at the sharks, still
hanging, like hounds upon a scent, to the brig’s wake.

“Ye’ll have to dive for the skipper, lads!” sings out the cook.

Offended by this ribaldry, first mate Jack Paul is on the brink of
striking the cook down with a belaying pin. For his own nerves are
a-jangle, and that misplaced merriment rasps. It is the look in the
man’s face which stays his hand.

“Ye’ll be right!” cries the cook, as though replying to something in the
eye of first mate Jack Paul. “Don’t I know it? It is I who’ll follow the
skipper! I’ll just go sew my own hammock, and have it ready, shot and
all.”

As the cook starts for the galley, a maniac yell is heard from the
forecastle. At that, he pauses, sloping his ear to listen.

“I’ll have company,” says he.

First the cook; then the mates; then seven of the crew. One after the
other, they follow a thirty-two pound shot over the side; for after the
Captain’s death the sailors lose their horror of the plague-killed ones,
and sew them up and slip them into the sea as readily as though they are
bags of bran. The worst is that a fashion of dull panic takes them, and
they refuse their duty. There is no one to command, they say; and, since
there can be no commands, there can be no duty. With that they hang
moodily about the capstan, or sulk in their bunks below.

First mate Jack Paul takes the wheel, rather than leave the _King
George’s Packet_ to con itself across the ocean. As he is standing
at the wheel trying to make a plan to save the brig and himself, he
observes a sailor blundering aft. The man dives below, and the next
moment, through the open skylights, first mate Jack Paul hears him
rummaging the Captain’s cabin. In a trice, he lashes the wheel, and
slips below on the heels of the sailor. As he surmises, the man is at
the rum. Without word spoken, he knocks the would-be rum guzzler over,
and then kicks him up the companion way to the deck.

Pausing only to stick a couple of pistols in his belt, first mate Jack
Paul follows that kicked seaman with a taste for rum. He walks first to
the wheel. The wind is steady and light; for the moment the brig will
mind itself. Through some impulse he glances over the stern; the sharks
are gone. This gives him a thought; he will use the going of the sharks
to coax the men.

The five are grouped about the capstan, the one who was struck is
bleeding like tragedy. First mate Jack Paul makes them a little speech.

“There are no more to die,” says he. “The called-for eleven are dead,
and the sharks no longer follow us. That shows the ship free of menace;
we’re all to see England again. And now, mates”--there is that in the
tone which makes the five look up--“I’ve a bit of news. From now, until
its anchors are down in Whitehaven basin, I shall command this ship.”

“You?” speaks up a big sailor. “You’re no but a boy!”

“I’m man enough to sail the brig to England, and make you work like a
dog, you swab!” The look in the eye of first mate Jack Paul, makes the
capstan quintette uneasy. He goes on: “Come, my hearties, which shall
it be? Sudden death? or you to do your duty by brig and owners? For, as
sure as ever I saw the Solway, the first who doesn’t jump to my order,
I’ll plant a brace of bullets in his belly!”

And so rebellion ceases; the five come off their gloomings and their
grumblings, and spring to their work of sailing the brig. It is labor
night and day, however, for all aboard; but the winds blow the fever
away, the gales favor them, one and all they seem to have worn out
the evil fortune which dogged them out of Kingston. The _King George’s
Packet_ comes safe, at the last of it, into Whitehaven---first mate Jack
Paul and his crew of five looking for the lack of sleep like dead folk
walking the decks.

Donald, Currie & Beck pay a grateful salvage on brig and cargo to first
mate Jack Paul and the five, for bringing home the brig. This puts six
hundred pounds into the pockets of first mate Jack Paul, and one-fifth
as much into the pockets of each of the five. Then Donald, Currie & Beck
have first mate Jack Paul to dinner with the firm.

“We’ve got a ship for ye,” says shipowner Donald, as the wine is being
passed. “Ye’re to be Captain.”

“Captain!” repeats first mate Jack Paul. “A ship for me?”

“Who else, then!” returns shipowner Donald. “Ay! it’s the _Crantully
Castle_, four hundred tons, out o’ Plymouth for Bombay. Ye’re to be
Captain; besides, ye’re to have a tenth in the cargo. And now if that
suits ye, gentlemen”--addressing shipowners Currie & Beck--“let the
firm of Donald, Currie & Beck fill up the glasses to the _Crantully
Castle_ and its new Captain, Jack Paul.”




CHAPTER IV--THE KILLING OF MUNGO

Captain Jack Paul and his _Grantully Castle_ see friendly years
together. They go to India, to Spain, to the West Indies, to the
Mediterranean, to Africa. While Captain Jack Paul is busy with the
_Grantully Castle_, piling up pounds and shillings and pence for owners
Donald, Currie & Beck, he is also deep with the books, hammering at
French, Spanish and German. Ashore, he makes his way into what best
society he can find, being as eager to refine his manners as refine his
mind, holding the one as much an education as is the other. Finally he
is known in every ocean for the profundity of his learning, the
polish of his deportment, the power of his fists, and the powder-like
explosiveness of his temper.

It is a cloudy October afternoon when Captain Jack Paul works the
_Grantully Castle_ out of Plymouth, shakes free his canvas, and fills
away on the starboard tack for Tobago. The crew is an evil lot, and a
spirit of mutiny stirs in the ship. Captain Jack Paul, who holds that
a good sailor is ever a good grumbler, can overlook a deal in favor of
this aphorism; and does. On the sixth day out, however, when his first
officer, Mr. Sands, staggers below with a sheath-knife through his
shoulder, it makes a case to which no commander can afford to seem
blind.

“It was Mungo!” explains the wounded Mr. Sands.

Captain Jack Paul goes on deck, and takes his stand by the main mast.

“Pipe all hands aft, Mr. Cooper,” he says to the boatswain.

The crew straggle aft. They offer a circling score of brutal faces; in
each the dominant expression is defiance.

“The man Mungo!” says Captain Jack Paul. “Where is he?”

At the word, a gigantic black slouches out from among his mates. Sloping
shoulders, barrel body, long, swinging arms like a gorilla’s, bandy
legs, huge hands and feet, head the size and shape of a cocoanut, small,
black serpent eyes, no soul unless a fiend’s soul, Mungo is at once
tyrant, pride and leader of the forecastle. Rumor declares that he has
sailed pirate in his time, and should be sun-drying in chains on the
gibbet at Corso Castle.

As he stands before Captain Jack Paul, Mungo’s features are in a black
snarl of fury. It is in his heart to do murderously more for his captain
than he did for first officer Sands. He waits only the occasion before
making a spring. Captain Jack Paul looks him over with a grim stare as
he slouches before him.

“Mr. Cooper,” says Captain Jack Paul after a moment, during which he
reads the black Mungo like a page of print, “fetch the irons!”

The boatswain is back on deck with a pair of steel wristlets in briefest
space. He passes them to Captain Jack Paul. At this, Mungo glowers,
while the mutinous faces in the background put on a dull sullenness.
There are a brace of pistols in the belt of Captain Jack Paul, of which
the sullen dull ones do not like the look. Mungo, a black berserk, cares
little for the pistols, seeing he is in a white-hot rage, the hotter for
being held in present check. Captain Jack Paul, on his part, is in no
wise asleep; he notes the rolling, roving, bloodshot eye, like the eye
of a wild beast at bay, and is prepared.

“Hold out your hands!” comes the curt command.

Plainly it is the signal for which Mungo waited. With a growling roar,
bear-like in its guttural ferocity, he rushes upon Captain Jack Paul.
The roaring rush is of the suddenest, but the latter is on the alert.
Quick as is Mungo, Captain Jack Paul is quicker. Seizing a belaying-pin,
he brings it crashing down on the skull of the roaring, charging black.
The heavy, clublike pin is splintered; Mungo drops to the deck, a
shivering heap. The great hands close and open; the muscles clutch and
knot under the black skin; there is a choking gurgle. Then the mighty
limbs relax; the face tarns from black to a sickly tallow. Mouth agape,
eyes wide and staring, Mungo lies still.

Captain Jack Paul surveys the prostrate black. Then he tosses the irons
to Boatswain Cooper.

“They will not be needed, Mr. Bo’sen,” he says. “Pipe the crew for’ard!”

The keen whistle sings; the mutinous ones scuttle forward, like fowls
that hear the high scream of some menacing hawk..

It is two bells in the evening; the port watch, in charge of the
knife-wounded Mr. Sands, has the deck. The dead Mungo, tight-clouted in
a hammock, lies stretched on a grating, ready for burial.

Captain Jack Paul comes up from his cabin. In his hand he carries a
prayer-book. Also those two pistols are still in his belt.

“Turn out the watch below!” is the word.

The crew makes a silent half-circle about the dead Mungo. That
mutinous sullenness, recently the defiant expression of their faces, is
supplanted by a deprecatory look, composite of apology and fear. It
is as though they would convince Captain Jack Paul of their tame and
sheep-like frame of thought. The fate of Mungo has instructed them; for
one and all they are of that criminal, coward brood, best convinced by a
club and with whom death is the only conclusive argument. As they stand
uncovered about the rigid one in the clouted hammock, they realize in
full the villainy of mutiny, and abandon that ship-rebellion which has
been forecastle talk and plan since ever the Plymouth lights went out
astern.

Captain Jack Paul reads a prayer, and the dead Mungo is surrendered to
the deep. As the body goes splashing into the sea, Captain Jack Paul
turns on the subdued ones.

“Let me tell you this, my men!” says he. His tones have a cold,
threatening ring, like the clink of iron on arctic ice. “The first of
you who so much as lifts an eyebrow in refusal of an order shall go the
same voyage as the black. And so I tell you!”

Captain Jack Paul brings the _Grantully Castle_ into Tobago, crew as it
might be a crew of lambs. Once his anchors are down, he signals for the
port admiral. Within half an hour the gig of that dignitary is
alongside.

The Honorable Simpson, Judge Surrogate of the Vice-Admiralty Court of
Tobago, with the Honorable Young, Lieutenant-Governor of the colony, to
give him countenance, opens court in the after cabins of the _Grantully
Castle_. The crew are examined, man after man. They say little, lest
they themselves be caught in some law net, and landed high and dry
in the Tobago jail. First Officer Sands shows his wound and tells his
story.

Throughout the inquiry Captain Jack Paul sits in silence, listening
and looking on. He puts no questions to either mate or crew. When First
Officer Sands is finished, the Honorable Simpson asks:

“Captain, in the killing of the black, Mungo, are you in conscience
convinced that you used no more force than was necessary to preserve
discipline in your ship?”

“May it please,” returns Captain Jack Paul, who has not been at his
books these years for nothing, and is fit to cope with a king’s counsel
--“may it please, I would say that it was necessary in the course of
duty to strike the mutineer Mungo. This was on the high seas. Whenever
it becomes necessary for a commanding officer to strike a seaman, it is
necessary to strike with a weapon. Also, the necessity to strike carries
with it the necessity to kill or disable the mutineer. I call your
attention to the fact that I had loaded pistols in my belt, and
could have shot the mutineer Mungo. I struck with a belaying-pin in
preference, because I hoped that I might subdue him without killing him.
The result proved otherwise. I trust your Honorable Court will take due
account that, although armed with pistols throwing ounce balls, weapons
surely fatal in my hands, I used a belaying-pin, which, though a
dangerous, is not necessarily a fatal weapon.”

Upon this statement, the Honorable Simpson and the Honorable Young
confer. As the upcome of their conference, the Honorable Simpson
announces judgment, exonerating Captain Jack Paul.

“The sailor Mungo, being at the time on the high seas, was in a state
of mutiny.” Thus runs the finding as set forth in the records of the
Vice-Admiralty Court of Tobago. “The sailor Mungo was mutinous under
circumstances which lodged plenary power in the hands of the master
of the vessel. Therefore, the homicide was justifiable, because it had
become the only means of maintaining the discipline required for the
safety of the ship.”

The court rises, and Captain Jack Paul bows the Honorable Simpson and
the Honorable Young over the side. When they are clear, First Officer
Sands addresses Captain Jack Paul.

“Are the crew to be set ashore, sir?” he asks.

“What! Mr. Sands, would you discharge the best crew we’ve ever had?”
 He continues as though replying to his first officer’s look of
astonishment. “I grant you they were a trifle uncurried at first. The
error of their ways, however, broke upon them with all clearness in the
going of Mungo. As matters now are, compared to the _Grantully Castle_,
a dove-cote is a merest theatre of violence and murderous blood. No,
Mr. Sands; we will keep our crew if you please. Should there be further
mutiny, why then there shall be further belaying-pins, I promise you.”

The _Grantully Castle_ goes finally back to England, the most peaceful
creature of oak and cordage that ever breasted the Atlantic. Cargo
discharged, the ship is sent into winter overhaul.

“As for you, sir,” remarks owner Donald, of Donald, Currie & Beck,
shoving the wine across to Captain Jack Paul, “ye’re just a maister
mariner of gold! Ye’ll no wait ashore for the _Grantully Castle_. We’ve
been buildin’ ye a new ship at our Portsmouth yards. She’s off the ways
a month, and s’uld be sparred and rigged and ready for the waves by now.
We’ve called her _The Two Friends_.”




CHAPTER V--THE SAILOR TURNS PLANTER

The wooded April banks of the Rappahannock are flourishing in the new
green of an early Virginia spring. The bark _Two Friends_, Captain Jack
Paul, out of Whitehaven by way of Lisbon, Madeira, and Kingston, comes
picking her dull way up the river, and anchors midstream at the foot of
the William Jones plantation. Almost coincident with the splash of the
anchors, the _Two Friends_ has her gig in the water, and the next moment
Captain Jack Paul takes his place in the stern sheets.

“Let fall!” comes the sharp command, as he seizes the tiller-ropes.

The four sailors bend their strong backs, the four oars swing together
like clockwork, and the gig heads for the plantation landing where a
twenty-ton sloop, current-vexed, lies gnawing at her ropes.

At twenty-six, Captain Jack Paul is the very flower of a quarter-deck
nobility. He has not the advantage of commanding height; but the lean,
curved nose, clean jaw, firmly-lined month, steady stare of the brown
eyes, coupled at the earliest smell of opposition with a frowning falcon
trick of brow like a threat, are as a commission to him, signed and
countersigned by nature, to be ever a leader of men. In figure he is
five feet seven inches, and the scales telling his weight consent to
one hundred and forty-five pounds. His hands and feet are as small as a
woman’s. By way of offset to this, his shoulders, broad and heavy, and
his deep chest arched like the deck of a whale-back, speak of anything
save the effeminate. In his movements there is a feline graceful
accuracy> with over all a resolute atmosphere of enterprise. To his men,
he is more than a captain; he is a god. Prudent at once and daring, he
shines a master of seamanship, and never the sailor serves with him who
would not name him a mariner without a flaw. He is born to inspire
faith in men. This is as it should be, by his own abstract picture of a
captain, which he will later furnish Doctor Franklin:

“Your captain,” he will say, when thus informing that philosopher, “your
captain, Doctor, should have the blind confidence of his sailors. It is
his beginning, his foundation, wanting which he can be no true captain.
To his men your captain must he prophet, priest and king. His authority
when off-shore is necessarily absolute, and therefore the crew should
be as one man impressed that the captain, like the sovereign, can do no
wrong. If a captain fail in this, he cannot make up for it by severity,
austerity or cruelty. Use force, apply restraint, punish as he may, he
will always have a sullen crew and an unhappy ship.”

The nose of the gig grates on the river’s bank, and Captain Jack Paul
leaps ashore. He is greeted by a tall, weather-beaten old man--grizzled
and gray. The form of the latter is erect, with a kind of ramrod
military stiffness. His dress is the rough garb of the Virginia overseer
in all respects save headgear. Instead of the soft wool hat, common of
his sort, the old man cocks over his watery left eye a Highland bonnet,
and this, with its hawk’s feather, fastened by a silver clasp, gives to
his costume a crag and heather aspect altogether Scotch.

The gray old man, with a grinning background of <DW64> slaves, waits for
the landing of Captain Jack Paul. As the latter springs ashore, the old
man throws up his hand in a military salute.

“And how do we find Duncan Macbean!” cries Captain Jack Paul. “How also
is my brother! I trust you have still a bale or two of winter-cured
tobacco left that we may add to our cargo!”

“As for the tobacco, Captain Paul,” returns old Duncan Macbean, “ye’re
a day or so behind the fair, since the maist of it sailed Englandward
a month hack, in the brig _Flora Belle_. As for your brother William of
whom ye ask, now I s’uld say ye were in gude time just to hear his dying
words.”

“What’s that, Duncan Macbean!” exclaims Captain Jack Paul. “William
dying!”

“Ay, dying! He lies nearer death than he’s been any time since he and I
marched with General Braddock and Colonel Washington, against the red
salvages of the Ohio. But you s’uld come and see him at once, you his
born brother, and no stand talking here.”

“It’s lung fever, Jack,” whispers the sick man, as Captain Jack Paul
draws a chair to the side of the bed. “It’s deadly, too; I can feel it.
I’ll not get up again.”

“Come, come, brother,” retorts Captain Jack Paul cheerfully, “you’re no
old man to talk of death--you, with your fewer than fifty years. I’ll
see you up and on your pins again before I leave.”

[Illustration: 0071]

“No, Jack, it’s death. And you’ve come in good time, too, since there’s
much to talk between us. You know how our cousin left me his heir, if I
would take his name of Jones?”

“Assuredly I know.”

“And so,” continues the dying man, “my name since his passing away has
been William Paul Jones. Now when it is my turn to go, I must tell you
that, by a clause of the old man’s will, he writes you in after me as
legatee. I’m to die, Jack; and you’re to have the plantation. Only you
must clap ‘Jones’ to your name, and be not John Paul, but John Paul
Jones, as you take over the estate.”

“What’s this? I’m to heir the plantation after you?”

“So declares the will. On condition, however, that you also take the
name of Jones. That should not be hard; ‘Jones’ is one of our family
names, and he that leaves you the land was our kinsman.”

“Why, then,” cries Captain Jack Paul, “I wasn’t hesitating for that.
Paul is a good name, but so also is Jones. Only, I tell you, brother, I
hate to make my fortune by your death.”

“That’s no common-sense, Jack. I die the easier knowing my going makes
way for your good luck. And the plantation’s a gem, Jack; never a cold
or sour acre in the whole three thousand, but all of it warm, sweet
land. There’re two thousand acres of woods; and I’d leave that stand.”
 The dying man, being Scotch, would give advice on his deathbed. “The
thousand acres now under plow are enough.” Then, after a pause: “Ye’ll
be content ashore? You’re young yet; you’re not so wedded to the sea, I
think, but you’ll turn planter with good grace?”

“No fear, William. I’ve had good fortune by the sea; but then I’ve met
ill fortune also. By and large, I shall be very well content to turn
planter.”

“It’s gainful, Jack, being a planter is. Only keep Duncan Macbean by
you to manage, and he’ll turn you in one thousand golden guineas profit
every Christmas day, and you never to lift hand or give thought to the
winning of them.”

“Is the plantation as gainful as that? Now I have but three thousand
guineas to call mine, after sailing these years.”

“Ay! it’s gainful, Jack. If you will work, too, there’s that to keep
you busy. There’s the grist mill, the thirty slaves, the forty horses,
besides the cows and swine and sheep to look after; as well as the <DW64>
quarters, the tobacco houses, the stables, and the great mansion itself
to keep up. They’ll all serve to fill in the time busily, if you
should like it that way. Only Jack, with the last of it, always leave
everything to Duncan Macbean. A rare and wary man is old Duncan, and
saving of money down to farthings.”

“Whose sloop is that at the landing!” asks Captain Jack Paul, willing to
shift the subject.

“Oh, yon sloop! She goes with the plantation; she’ll be yours anon,
brother. And there you are: When the sea calls to you, Jack, as she will
call, you take the sloop. Cato and Scipio are good sailors, well trained
to the coast clear away to Charleston.”

And so William Paul Jones dies, and John Paul takes his place on the
plantation. His name is no longer John Paul, but John Paul Jones; and,
as his dying brother counselled, he keeps old Duncan Macbean to be the
manager.

When his brother is dead, Captain Jack Paul joins his mate, Laurence
Edgar, on the deck of the _Two Friends_, swinging tide and tide on her
anchors.

“Mate Edgar,” says Captain Jack Paul, “it is the last time I shall plank
this quarterdeck as captain. I’m to stay; and you’re to take the ship
home to Whitehaven. And now, since you’re the captain, and I’m no more
than a guest, suppose you order your cabin boy to get us a bottle of the
right Madeira, and we’ll drink fortune to the bark and her new master.”




CHAPTER VI--THE FIRST BLOW IN VIRGINIA

It is a soundless, soft December evening. The quietly falling flakes
are cloaking in thin white the streets and roofs of Norfolk. Off shore,
a cable’s length, an English sloop of war, eighteen guns, lies tugging
at her anchors. In shore from the sloop of war rides the peaceful
twenty-ton sloop of Planter Paul Jones. The sailor-planter, loitering
homeward from a cruise to Charleston and the coast towns of the
Carolinas, is calling on friends in Norfolk. Both the war sloop and the
peace sloop seem almost deserted in the falling snow. Aside from the
harbor light burning high in the rigging, and an anchor watch of two
sailors muffled to the ears, the decks of neither craft show signs of
life.

Norfolk’s public hall is candle-lighted to a pitch of unusual
brilliancy; the waxed floors are thronged with the beauty and gentility
of the Old Dominion, as the same find Norfolk expression. It is indeed
a mighty social occasion; for the local élite have seized upon the
officers of the sloop of war, and are giving a ball in their honor. The
honored ones attend to a man--which accounts for the deserted look of
their sloop--and their gold lace blazes bravely by the light of the
candles, and with tremendous gala effect.

Planter Paul Jones is also among the guests. Since he is in town,
his coming to the ball becomes the thing most natural. Already he is
regarded as the Admirable Crichton, of tide-water Virginia, and the
function wanting his presence would go down to history as incomplete.

Paul Jones, planter for two years, has made himself a foremost figure in
Virginia. Twenty-eight, cultured, travelled, gallant, brilliant, and a
bachelor, he is welcome in every drawing-room. Besides, is there not the
Jones plantation, with its mile of river front, its noble mansion house,
its tobacco teeming acres, its well-trained slaves, and all turning in
those yearly one thousand yellow guineas under the heedful managing
thumb of canny Duncan Macbean? Planter Paul Jones is a prince for
hospitality, too; and the high colonial dames, taking pity on his
wifeless state, preside at his table, or chaperone the water parties
which he gives on his great sloop. Also--still considering his
wifelessness--they seek to marry him to one of their colonial daughters.

In this latter dulcet intrigue, the high colonial dames fail wholly. The
young planter-sailor is not a marrying man. There is in truth a blushing
story which lasts throughout a fortnight in which he is quoted as about
to yield. Rumor gives it confidently forth that the Jones mansion will
have a mistress, and its master carry altar-ward Betty Parke, the pretty
niece of Madam Martha Washington. But pretty Betty Parke, in the very
face of this roseate rumor, becomes Mrs. Tyler, and it will be one of
her descendants who, seventy-five years later, is chosen President--a
poor President, but still a President. Planter Paul Jones rides to the
wedding of pretty Betty Parke, and gives it his serene and satisfied
countenance. From which sign it is supposed that Dame Rumor mounts by
the wrong stirrup when she goes linking the name of pretty Betty Parke
with that of Planter Paul Jones; and no love-letter scrap, nor private
journal note, will ever rise from the grave to disparage the assumption.

That Planter Paul Jones has thus lived for two years, and moved and had
his social being among the most beautiful of women, and escaped hand
free and heart free to tell the tale, is strange to the brink of
marvellous. It is the more strange since no one could be more than he
the knight of dames. And he can charm, too--as witness a letter which
two years farther on the unimpressionable Doctor Franklin will write to
Madam d’Haudetot:

“No matter, my dear madam,” the cool philosopher will say, “what the
faults of Paul Jones may be, I must warn your ladyship that when face
to face with him neither man nor, so far as I learn, woman, can for a
moment resist the strange magnetism of his presence, the indescribable
charm of his manner; a commingling of the most compliant deference with
the most perfect self-esteem that I have ever seen in a man; and above
all the sweetness of his voice and the purity of his language.”

Paul Jones is not alone the darling of colonial drawing-rooms, he is
also the admiration of the men. This is his description as given by one
who knew him afloat and ashore:

“Though of slender build, his neck, arms and shoulders were those of a
heavy, powerful man. The strength of his arms and shoulders could hardly
be believed. And he had equal use of both hands, even to writing with
the left as well as with the right. He was a past master of the art of
boxing. To this he added a quickness of motion that cannot be described.
When roused he could strike more blows and cause more havoc in a second
than any other could strike or cause in a minute. Even when calm
and unruffled his gait and all his bodily motions were those of the
panther--noiseless, sleek, the perfection of grace.”

The above, by way of portrait: When one adds to it that Planter Paul
Jones rides like a Prince Rupert, fences like a Crillon, gives blows
with his fist that would stagger Jack Slack, and is death itself with
either gun or pistol, it will be seen how he owns every quality that
should pedestal him as a paragon in the best circles of his day.

It is towards the hour of midnight when Planter Paul Jones, attired like
a Brummel, stands in quiet converse with his friend Mr. Hurst. Their
talk runs on the state of sentiment in the colonies, and the chance of
trouble with the motherland.

“Hostilities are certain, my dear Hurst,” says Planter Paul Jones. “I
hear it from Colonel Washington, Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Henry. They make
no secret of it in Williamsburg about the House of Burgesses.”

“But the other colonies’?”

“Mr. Morris of Philadelphia, as well as Mr. Pynckney of Charleston,
agrees with the gentlemen I’ve quoted. They say, sir, there will soon be
an outbreak in Boston.”

“In Boston!” repeats Mr. Hurst doubtfully.

“Have the Massachusetts men the courage, think you?”

“Courage, ay! and the strength, my friend! Both Colonel Washington and
Mr. Jefferson assured me that, although slow to anger, they are true
sons of Cromwell’s Ironsides.

“And what shall be our attitude?”

“We must sustain them at all hazards, sir--sustain them to the death!”

It is now that a knot of English officers drift up--a little flushed of
wine, are these guests of honor. They, too, have been talking, albeit
thickly, of a possible future full of trouble for the colonies.

“I was observing,” says Lieutenant Parker, addressing Planter Paul Jones
and Mr. Hurst, “that the insolence of the Americans, which is more or
less in exhibition all the way from Boston to Savannah, will never get
beyond words. There will be no blows struck.”

“And why are you so confident?” asks Planter Paul Jones, eye agate,
voice purringly soft. “Now I should say that, given provocation, the
colonies would strike a blow, and a heavy one.”

“When do you sail?” interrupts Mr. Hurst, speaking to Lieutenant Parker.
Mr. Hurst would shift conversation to less perilous ground. As a mover
of the ball, he is in sort host to the officers, as well as to Planter
Paul Jones, and for the white credit of the town desires a peaceful
evening. “I hear,” he concludes, “that your sloop is for a cruise off
the French coast.”

“She and the fleet she belongs to,” responds Lieutenant Parker,
utterance somewhat blurred, “will remain on this station while a word of
rebel talk continues.”

“Now, instead of keeping you here,” breaks in Planter Paul Jones,
vivaciously, “to hector peaceful colonies, if I were your king I should
send you to wrest Cape Good Hope from the Dutch.”

“Cape Good Hope from the Dutch?”

“Or the Isles of France and Bourbon from the French--lying, as they
do, like lions in the pathway to our Indian possessions. If I were your
king, I say, those would be the tasks I’d set you.”

“And why do you say ‘your king?’ Is he not also _your_ king?”

“Why, sir, I might be pleasantly willing,” observes Planter Paul Jones
airily, “to give you my share in King George. In any event, I do not
propose that you shall examine into my allegiance. And I say again that,
if I were your king, sir, I’d find you better English work to do than an
irritating and foolish patrol of these coasts.”

“You spoke of the Americans striking a blow,” says Lieutenant Parker,
who is gifted of that pertinacity of memory common to half-drunken men;
“you spoke but a moment back of the Americans striking a blow, and a
heavy one.”

“Ay, sir! a blow--given provocation.”

Lieutenant Parker wags his head with an air of sagacity both bibulous
and supercilious. He smiles victoriously, as a fortunate comparison bobs
up to his mind.

“A blow!” he murmurs. Then, fixing Planter Paul Jones with an eye of
bleary scorn: “The Americans would be quickly lashed into their kennels
again. The more easily, if the courage of the American men, as I think’s
the case, is no more firmly founded than the chastity of the American
women.”

[Illustration: 0006]

Planter Paul Jones deals Lieutenant Parker a blow with his clenched
fist, the like of which was never before seen even in the violent port
of Norfolk. Lieutenant Parker’s nose is crushed flat with his face; he
falls like some pole-axed ox. His fellow-officers lift him to his feet,
bleeding, stunned beyond words.

“You shall hear from us!” is the fierce cry from his comrades, as they
hurry the stricken Parker from the ballroom.

“I shall be pleased to hear from any or all of you,” replies Planter
Paul Jones; “or from what other dogs in king’s coats shall question the
honor of American women.” Then, turning to Mr. Hurst: “You, sir, shall
act for me! Accept every challenge they send! Make it pistols, ten
paces, with Craney Island for the place; and fix the time to suit their
English convenience.”




CHAPTER VII--THE BLAST OF WAR

Norfolk is never more at peace than on the day succeeding the ball.
There is no challenge, no duel. Planter Paul Jones waits to hear from
Lieutenant Parker; at first hopefully; in the end, when nothing comes,
with doubtful brow of grief. Is it that Lieutenant Parker will not
fight? Planter Paul Jones hears the suggestion from his friend Mr. Hurst
with polite scorn. Such heresy is beyond reach.

“He _must_ fight,” urges Planter Paul Jones, desperately keeping alive
the fires of his hope. “He will fight, if for no other reason, then
because it is his trade. Lieutenant Parker is pugnacious by profession;
that of itself will make him toe the peg.”

Planter Paul Jones is wrong. Lieutenant Parker never shows his beaten
face on American soil again. Nor does any bellicose gentleman appear for
Lieutenant Parker, or propose to take his place.

This last omission gives Planter Paul Jones as sharp a pang as though
he has been slighted by some dearest friend. Having on his own part a
native lust for battle, it bewilders him when so excellent a foundation
for a duel falls into neglect, and no architect of combat steps forward
to build thereon.

“It is not to be understood!” observes Planter Paul Jones dejectedly,
after the sloop of war, with Lieutenant Parker and those others of that
gold-lace coterie, has sailed away, “it’s not to be understood! Surely,
there must have been one gentleman among them who, free to do so, would
have called me to account.” Then, with solemn sadness: “I am convinced
that their admiral interfered.”

Who shall say? The admiral is the paternal uncle of Lieutenant Parker of
the crushed and broken nose.

The story will go later to England to the explanatory effect that no
fellow-officer would act for Lieutenant Parker. However, in doubt of
this, that last named imprudent person--wearing the marks of Planter
Paul Jones’ rebuke for many a day--is not dismissed the king’s service.
He will be in the fight off Fort Moultrie, where--unlike Sergeant Jasper
of the Americans--he in no wise is to distinguish himself.

Planter Paul Jones, when every final chance of the trouble for which
he longs has departed with the departure of the war sloop, sorrowfully
steers the peace sloop back to his plantation by the Rappahannock; and
thereafter he does his best to forget an incident that--because of the
mysterious tameness of the English, under conditions which should have
brought them ferociously to the field--gives him an aching sense of
pain. He says to Mr. Hurst, when about to spread his small canvas and
sail away for home, “It is one of those experiences, sir, that shake a
man’s faith in his kind.”

The colonial dames get hold of the tale, and

Planter Paul Jones becomes all the more the petted darling of the
drawing-rooms. This of itself is a destiny most friendly to his taste;
for our Virginia Bayard lives not without his tender vanities. Bright
eyes are more beautiful than stars; and he can sigh, or whisper a
sonnet, or softly press a little hand. Also, having in his composition
an ardent dash of the peacock, he is capable, with fair ladies looking
on, of a decorous, albeit a resplendent strut.

Four months, dating from the disaster to Lieutenant Parker’s nose, have
squeezed through the gates of a narrow present, and merged with those
other countless months which together make the past. It is a muggy April
morning, and New York City, panting with its metropolitan population
of forty thousand, is soaked to the bone. Little squalls of rain follow
each other in gusty procession. Between the squalls the sun shines
forth, and sets the world a-steam. After each of these intermittent
bursts of glory, the sun is again blotted ont by a black flurry of
clouds, and another shower sets in.

It is in William Street that the reader comes across the lithe figure of
Planter Paul Jones. That restless tobacco grower, with his two aquatic
slaves, Scipio and Cato, in the little sloop, has been knocking about
the eastern shore for ducks. A sudden change of plan now brings him to
New York, with a final purpose of extending his voyage as far as Boston.
Planter Paul Jones is in a mood to know the Yankees better, and come
by some guess of his own as to how soon our Puritan bulldogs may be
expected to fly at the English throat.

As he goes briskly northward along William Street, even through his
landsman’s garb there shows much that is marine. Also, he evinces a
sailor’s contempt for the dripping weather, plowing ahead through shine
and through shower as though in the catalogue of the disagreeable there
is no such word as a wetting.

At the corner of John Street, Planter Paul Jones comes upon a lean,
prim personage. By his severe air the latter gentleman is evidently an
individual of consequence. The severe gentleman, with a prudent care for
his coat in direct contrast to the weather-carelessness of the other,
has taken refuge in the safe harborage of a doorway. From the dry
vantage thereof he cranes his neck in a tentative way, the better to
survey the heavens. Plainly he desires a guarantee, in favor of some
partial space of sunshine, before he again ventures abroad.

As Planter Paul Jones comes up, both he and the severe gentleman gaze
at each other for one moment. Then their hands are caught in a warm
exchange of greetings:

“Mr. Livingston, by my word!” cries Planter Paul Jones, shaking the
severe gentleman’s hand.

“Paul Jones!” exclaims the severe gentleman, returning the handshake,
but with due regard to the pompous.

“Now this is what I term fortunate!” says Planter Paul Jones, releasing
the other’s fingers. “I was on my way to your house to ask for letters
of introduction to Mr. Hancock and others in Boston.”

“Boston! Surely you have heard the news?”

“News? I’ve heard nothing. For six weeks I’ve been anywhere between
Barnegat and the inner Chesapeake in my sloop. I tied up at the foot of
Whitehall Street within the hour, and you’re the first I’ve spoken with
since I stepped ashore. What is this news that makes you stare at the
name of Boston?”

“And you’ve not heard!” repeats Mr. Livingston. Then, with a look at
once somber and solemn: “Black news! Black news, indeed! I’m on my way
to Hanover Square to have it set in types, and scattered up and down the
town. Come; you shall go with me. I’ll talk as we walk along.”

Mr. Livingston takes Planter Paul Jones by the arm.

“Black news!” he resumes. “The Massachusetts men have attacked the
British at Lexington and Concord; my despatches, while necessarily
meager, declare that the British were disgracefully beaten, and lost,
killed and wounded, several hundred soldiers.”

“And you call that black news?” interjects Planter Paul Jones, his eye
finely aflame. “To my mind now it is as good news as ever I hope to
hear.”

“How can you say so! It fills me with measureless gloom. I cannot but
look ahead and wonder where it will end. And yet we should hope for the
best.” The speaker heaves a weary sigh. “Possibly the mother country may
learn from this experience how bitterly in earnest Americans are, and be
thereby led to mitigate the harshness of her attitude toward us.”

Planter Paul Jones looks his emphatic disbelief.

“There will be no softening of England’s attitude. Believe me, sir,
I’m not so long out of London, but what I’m clear as to the plans and
purposes of King George and his ministers. The Tories have deliberately
forced the present situation.”

“Forced the situation! You amaze me!”

“Sir, my name is not Paul Jones, if it be not the deliberate design of
King George and his advisers to bring about a clash between England and
these colonies.”

“And to what end, pray?”

“To give them an excuse for imposing martial law upon us. They will pour
a cataract of redcoats upon our shores. Musket in fist, cannon to back
them, they will disperse our legislatures, take away our charters of
self-government. That blood at Concord and Lexington gives them the
pretext for which they schemed. They can now call us ‘rebels;’ and,
calling us ‘rebels,’ they will try to reduce us--for all our white skins
and freeborn blood--to the slavish status of Hindostan.”

Mr. Livingston stares, while this long speech is reeled off.

“Do you mean to say,” he asks at last, “that we are the victims of a
Tory plot? Am I to understand that Concord and Lexington were aimed at
by the king?”

“Precisely so; and for one I’m glad the issue’s made. We have now but
the one alternative. We may choose between abject slavery and war to the
hilts.”

Mr. Livingston’s severely pompons face, as the iron truth begins to
overcome him, assumes an expression at once noble and high.

“Why, then!” says he, “if such be the Tory design, war we shall have.”
 Then, following a pause: “And what is to be your course in case of war?”

“I shall take my part in it, never fear! This very day I shall write
to friends who will have seats in the Congress that meets next month in
Philadelphia, and ask them to wear my name in their minds. I am theirs
so soon as ever they have a plank afloat to put me on.”

The pair, earnestly talking, reach Hanover Square, and pause in front of
“The Bible and Crown.”

“Here we are,” says Mr. Livingston. “Now if you’ll but wait until I give
orders to Master Rivington, as to how he shall print and circulate my
despatches, I’ll have you up to the house, where we can further consider
this business over a bottle of wine.”

“I beg that you will excuse me,” returns Planter Paul Jones. He has been
making plans of his own while they talked. “I trust you will pardon me;
but I shall have no more than time to write and post my letters, and get
away on the ebb tide. Three days from now I must be at my plantation by
the Rappahannock, putting all in order for the storm.”

“Remember!” cries Mr. Livingston, as he and Planter Paul Jones shake
bands at parting, “my brother Philip will be in the coming Congress.
You have but to go to him, he is as much your friend as is either Mr.
Washington or Mr. Jefferson. I shall speak to Philip of you before the
day is out.”

“Say to your brother,” returns Planter Paul Jones, “that I shall come to
him among the first.”

The winds generously flatter the little sloop on her return voyage.
She came north slowly, reluctantly; now, with the wind aft and all but
blowing a gale, she flies southward like a bird. As Planter Paul Jones
boasted, within the three days after seeing the last of Sandy Hook, he
steps ashore on his own domain by the Rappahannock.

Cato and Scipio grin in exultation. In a pardonable anxiety to open the
eyes of plodding fellow-slaves of the tobacco fields, they mendaciously
shorten the sailing time out of New York by forty-eight hours, and
declare that Planter Paul Jones brought the sloop home in a single day.

“Potch um home, Marse Paul does, faster than a wil’ duck could
trabble!” is their story. Thereupon, the innocent tobacco blacks
marvel, openmouthed, at the far-travelled Cato, and Scipio of the many
experiences.

Planter Paul Jones, on whom a war-fever is growing, plunges into
immediate conference with Duncan Macbean.

“How much free money can we make?” he asks.

The old Highlander scratches his grizzled locks.

Then he thoughtfully considers the inside of his Glengarry bonnet, which
he takes from his head for that purpose. One would think, from his long
study of it, that he keeps his accounts in its linings. The inspection
being over, he puts it back on his head.

“Now there s’uld be the matter of three thousand guineas in gold in
Williamsburg,” returns old Duncan Macbean; “besides a hunner or so
siller in the house. I can gi’ ye three thousand guineas, and never miss
the feel o’ them, gin that’ll be enou’.”

“Three thousand guineas! What time I shall be in Philadelphia it should
keep a king! Have it set to my credit, Duncan, in Mr. Ross’ bank in
Chestnut Street in that town. I shall go there as soon as Congress
convenes.”

“And will ye no be back home agen?” asks Duncan, his bronzed cheek a
trifle white.

“If there’s war--and, take it from me, there will be--I shall not
return. I hope to sail in the first warship that flies the colors of the
Colonies.”

Then, grasping old Duncan’s hand in a grip of steel: “You stay here and
run the plantation, old friend! Wherever I am, I shall know that all is
right ashore while you are here. For I can trust you.”

“Ay! ye can trust me; no fear o’ that!” and the water stands in the old
eyes.




CHAPTER VIII--THE PLANTER TURNS LIEUTENANT

It was Mr. Adams who opposed you. The best place I could make was that
of lieutenant. Mr. Adams wouldn’t hear of you as a captain; and since,
with General Washington, Virginia and the Southern Colonies have been
given control of the Army, his claim of the Navy for Massachusetts and
the Northern Colonies finds general consent. Commodore Hopkins and
four of the five captains, beginning with Mr. Adams’ protégé Dudley
Saltonstall, go to New England. The most that I could make Mr. Adams
agree to, was that you should be set at the head of the list of
lieutenants.”

“I am sorry, sir, that Mr. Adams holds a poor opinion of me.” This with
a sigh. “It was my dream to be a captain, and have a ship of my own.
However, I am here to serve the cause, rather than promote the personal
fortunes of Paul Jones. Let the list go as it is; the future doubtless
will bring all things straight. I am free to say, however, that from the
selections made by Mr. Adams, as you repeat them, I think he has
provided for more courts-martial than victories.” The two gentlemen in
talk are Mr. Hewes, member of the Colonial Congress from North Carolina,
and Planter Paul Jones. Mr. Hewes is old and worn and sick, and only his
granite resolution keeps him at the seat of government.

“Mr. Hancock,” continues Mr. Hewes, “is also from Massachusetts, and as
chairman of our committee he gave Mr. Adams what aid he could. There’s
one honor you may have, however; I arranged for that. The issuance of
the commissions is with Mr. Hancock, and if you’ll accompany me to the
Hall you will be given yours at once. That will make you the first, if
not the highest, naval officer of the Colonies to be commissioned.”

“On what ship am I to serve?”

“The _Alfred_, Captain Saltonstall.”

Raw and bleak sweep the December winds through the bare streets, as
the two go on their way to the Hall, where Congress holds its sittings.
Fortunately, as Lieutenant Paul Jones phrases it, the wind is “aft,” and
so Mr. Hewes, despite his weakness, makes better weather of it than one
would look for.

“I’ll have a carriage home,” says he, panting a little, as the stiff
breeze steals his breath away.

“I can’t,” breaks forth Lieutenant Paul Jones, after an interval of
silence--“I can’t for the life of me make out how I incurred the enmity
of Mr. Adams. I’ve never set foot in Boston, never clapped my eyes on
him before I came to this city last July.”

Mr. Hewes smiles. “You sacrificed interest to epigram,” says he.
Lieutenant Paul Jones glares in wonder. “Let me explain,” goes on Mr.
Hewes, answering the look. “Do you recall meeting Mr. Adams at Colonel
Carroll’s house out near Schuylkill Falls?”

“That was last October.”

“Precisely! Mr. Adams’ memory is quite equal to last October. The more,
if the event remembered were a dig to his vanity.”

“A dig to his vanity!” repeats Lieutenant Paul Jones in astonishment. “I
cannot now recall that I so much as spoke a word to the old polar bear.”

“It wasn’t a word spoken _to_ him, but one spoken _of_ him. This is it:
Mr. Adams told an anecdote in French to little Betty Faulkner. Later you
must needs be witty, and whisper to Miss Betty a satirical word anent
Mr. Adams’ French.”

“Why, then,” interjects Lieutenant Paul Jones, with a whimsical grin,
“I’ll tell you what I said. ‘It is fortunate,’ I observed to Miss Betty,
‘that Mr. Adams’ sentiments are not so English as is his French. If they
were, he would far and away be the greatest Tory in the world.’”

“Just so!” chuckles Mr. Hewes. “And, doubtless, all very true. None the
less, my young friend, your brightness cost you a captaincy. The _mot_
was too good to keep, and little Betty started it on a journey that
landed it, at a fourth telling, slap in the outraged ear of Mr. Adams
himself. Make you a captain? He would as soon think of making you rich.”

The pair trudged on in silence, Mr. Hewes turning about in his mind
sundry matters of colonial policy, while Lieutenant Paul Jones solaces
himself by recalling how it is the even year to a day since that Norfolk
ball, when he smote upon the scandalous nose of Lieutenant Parker.

“Now that I’m a lieutenant like himself,” runs the warlike cogitations
of Lieutenant Paul Jones, “I’d prodigiously enjoy meeting the scoundrel
afloat. I might teach his dullness a better opinion of us.”

Lieutenant Paul Jones for months has been hard at work; one day in
conference with the Marine Committee, leading them by the light of
his ship-knowledge; the next busy with adz and oakum and calking iron,
repairing and renewing the tottering hulks which the agents of the
colonies have collected as the nucleus of the baby navy. Over this very
ship the _Alfred_, on which he is to sail lieutenant, he has toiled
as though it were intended as a present for his bride. He confidently
counted on being made its captain; now to sail as a subordinate, when
he looked to have command, is a bitter disappointment. Sail he will,
however, and that without murmur; for he is too much the patriot to hang
back, too strong a heart to sulk. Besides, he has the optimism of the
born war dog.

“Given open war,” thinks he, “what more should one ask than a cutlass,
and the chance to use it? Once we’re aboard an enemy, it shall go hard,
but I carve a captaincy out of the situation.”

Congress is not in session upon this particular day, and Mr. Hewes
leads Lieutenant Paul Jones straight to Chairman Hancock of the Marine
Committee. That eminent patriot is in his committee room. He is big,
florid, proud, and, like all the Massachusetts men since Concord and
Lexington, a bit puffed up. No presentation is needed; Mr. Hancock
and Lieutenant Paul Jones have been acquainted for months. The big
merchant-statesman beams pleasantly on the new lieutenant. Then he draws
Mr. Hewes into a far window.

“I can’t see what’s got into Adams,” says Mr. Hancock, lowering his
voice to a whisper. “He burst in here a moment ago, and declared that he
meant to move, at the next session, a reconsideration of the appointment
of our young friend.”

“And now where pinches the shoe?”

“He says that Paul Jones isn’t two years out of England; that his
sympathies must needs lean toward King George.”

“It will be news if the patriotism of Mr. Adams himself stands as near
the perpendicular as does that of Paul Jones!”

“And next he urges that our friend is a man of no family.”

“Now, did one ever hear such aristocratic bosh! The more, since our
cause is the cause of human rights, and our shout ‘Democracy!’ I shall
take occasion, when next I have the honor to meet Mr. Adams”--here the
eyes of the old North Carolinian begin to sparkle--“to mention this
subject of families, and remind him that it might worry the Herald’s
College excessively, if that seminary of pedigrees were called upon to
back-track his own.”

“No, no, my dear sir!” and the merchant-statesman, full of lofty
mollifications, makes a soothing gesture with his hands. “For all
our sakes, say nothing to Mr. Adams! You recall what Doctor Franklin
remarked of him: ‘He is always honest, sometimes great, but often mad.’
Let us suppose him merely mad; and so forgive him. We may do it the more
easily, since I told him that, even if his objections were valid, he
was miles too late, the question of that lieutenancy having been already
passed upon and settled. Let us forget Adams, and give Paul Jones his
commission.”

As Lieutenant Paul Jones receives his commission from Mr. Hancock, the
latter remarks with a smile:

“You have the first commission issued, Lieutenant Jones. If the simile
were permissible concerning anything that refers to the sea, I should
say now that, in making you a lieutenant, we lay the corner stone of the
American Navy.”

[Illustration: 0101]

Lieutenant Paul Jones bows his thanks, but speaks never a word. This
silence arises from the deep emotions that hold him in their strong
grip, not from churlishness.

“And now,” observes Mr. Hewes, who is thinking only of heaping extra
honor on his young friend, “since we have a fully commissioned officer
to perform the ceremony, suppose we make memorable the day by going down
to the _Alfred_ and ‘breaking out’ its pennant. Thus, almost with the
breath in which we commission our first officer, we will have also
commissioned our first regular ship of war.”

“Would it not be better,” interposes Mr. Hancock, thinking on the
possible angers of Mr. Adams, “to wait for the coming from Boston of
Captain Saltonstall?”

Mr. Hewes thinks it would not. Since Mr. Hewes’ manner in thus thinking
is just a trifle iron-bound, not to say acrid, Mr. Hancock decides that,
after all, there may be more peril in waiting for Captain Saltonstall
than in going forward with Lieutenant Jones. Whereupon, Mr. Hewes, Mr.
Hancock and Lieutenant Jones depart for the _Alfred_, which lies at the
foot of Chestnut Street. In the main hall of Congress the three pick up
Colonel Carroll, Mad Anthony Wayne. Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Livingston, and
Mr. Morris. These gentlemen, regarding the event as the formal birth of
the new navy, decide to accompany the others in the rôle of witnesses.

The flag is ready in the lockers of the _Alfred_--a pine tree, a
rattlesnake, with the words “_Don’t Tread on Me_.” Lieutenant Paul
Jones, as he shakes out the bunting, surveys the device with no favoring
eye.

[Illustration: 0113]

“I was ever,” observes Lieutenant Paul Jones, looking at Mr. Hewes but
speaking to all--“I was ever curious to know by whose queer fancy that
device was adopted. It is beyond me to fathom how a venomous serpent
could be regarded as the emblem of a brave and honest people fighting to
be free.”

After delivering this opinion, which is tacitly agreed to by the others,
the flag is bent on the halyards, and “broken out.” Also, a ration of
grog is issued to the crew--so far as the _Alfred_ is blessed with a
crew--by way of fixing the momentous occasion in the forecastle mind.
The crew cheers; but whether the cheers are for the grog, or Lieutenant
Paul Jones who orders it, or the rattlesnake pine tree ensign that
causes the order, no one may say.

Following the “breaking out,” the grog and the cheers, Mr. Hewes, Mr.
Hancock and their fellow-statesmen, retire--the day being over cold--to
the land, while Lieutenant Paul Jones, now and until the coming of
Captain Saltonstall in command of the _Alfred_, remains aboard to take
up his duty as a regularly commissioned officer in the regular navy of
the colonies.




CHAPTER IX--THE CRUISE OF THE “PROVIDENCE”

Four ships--the _Alfred_, Captain Saltonstall, in the van, with
Commodore Hopkins in command of the squadron--sail away on a rainy
February day. They clear Cape Henlopen, and turn their untried prows
south by east half south. The fell purpose of Commodore Hopkins is to
harry the Bahamas.

It will be nowhere written that Commodore Hopkins, in his designs upon
the Bahamas, in any degree succeeds. Eight weeks later, the four ships
come scudding into New London with the fear of death in their hearts. An
English sloop of war darted upon them, they say, off the eastern end of
Long Island, and they escaped by the paint on their planks.

Lieutenant Paul Jones of the _Alfred_ is afire with anger and chagrin at
the miserable failure of the cruise, and goes furiously ashore, nursing
a purpose of charging both Commodore Hopkins and Captain Saltonstall
with every maritime offence, from sea-idiocy to cowardice. He is
cooled off by older and more prudent heads. Also, Commodore Hopkins is
summarily dismissed by Congress, while Captain Saltonstall takes refuge
behind the broad skirts of his patron Mr. Adams. Thus, that first
luckless cruise of the infant navy, conceived in ignorance and in
politics brought forth, achieves its dismal finale in investigations,
votes of censure, and dismissals, a situation which goes far to justify
those December prophecies of Lieutenant Paul Jones, that Mr. Adams,
by his selections for commodore and captains, arranged for more
courts-martial than victories.

It has one excellent result, however; it teaches Congress to give
Lieutenant Paul Jones the sloop _Providence_, and send him to sea with
a command of his own. With him go his faithful blacks, Scipio and
Cato; also, as “port-fire,” a red Indian of the Narragansett tribe, one
Anthony Jeremiah of Martha’s Vineyard.

The little sloop--about as big as a gentleman’s yacht, she is--clears on
a brilliant day in June. For weeks she ranges from Newfoundland to the
Bermudas--seas sown with English ships of war. Boatswain Jack Robinson
holds this converse with Polly his virtuous wife, when the _Providence_
again gets its anchors down in friendly Yankee mud.

“And what did you do, Jack?” demands wife Polly, now she has him safe
ashore.

“I’ll tell you what he--that’s the captain--does, when first we puts to
sea. He’s only a leftenant--Leftenant Paul Jones; but he ought to be a
captain, and so, d’ye see, my girl, I’ll call him captain. What does the
captain do, says you, when once he’s afloat? As sure as you’re on my
knee, Polly, no sooner be we off soundings than he passes the word
for’ard for me to fetch him the cat-o’-nine-tails--me being bo’sen. Aft
I tumbles, cat and all, wondering who’s to have the dozen.

“‘Chuck it overboard, Jack!’ says he, like that.

“‘Chuck what, capt’n?’ says I, giving my forelock a tug.

“‘Chuck the cat!’ says he.

“‘The cat?’ says I, being as you might say taken a-back, and wondering
is it rum.

“‘Ay! the cat!’ he says. Then, looking me over with an eye like a coal,
he goes on: ‘I can keep order aboard my ship without the cat. Because
why; because I’m the best man aboard her,’ he says; and there you be.”

“And did the cat go overboard, Jack?”

“Overboard of course, Polly. And being nicely fitted with little knobs
of lead on the nine tails of her, down to the bottom like a solid shot
goes she. And so, d’ye see, we goes cruising without the cat.”

“Did you take no prizes?”

“We sunk eight, and sent eight more into Boston with prize crews aboard.
Good picking, too, they was.”

“And you had no battles then?”

“No battles, Polly; and yet, at the close of the cruise, we’re all but
done for by a seventy-four gun frigate off Montauk. The captain twists us
out of the frigate’s mouth by sheer seamanship.”

“Now how was that, Jack!” cries Polly, breathless and all ears.

“We comes poking ‘round the point, d’ye see, and runs blind into her.
We beats to wind’ard; so does the frigate. And she lays as close to the
wind as we--and closer, Polly. Just as she thinks she has only to
reach out and snap us up, the captain--he has the wheel himself--wears
suddenly round under easy helm, and gets the wind free. This sort o’
takes the frigate by surprise, and, instead of wearing, she starts to
box about. She’s standing as close-hauled as her trim will bear at the
time. So, as I says, as he wears ‘round, the frigate jams her helm down,
and luffs into the teeth of the gale. There’s a squall cat’s-pawing
to wind’ard that she ought to have seen, and would if she’d had our
captain. But she never notices. So, d’ye see, my girl, the frigate don’t
hold her luff, and next the squall takes her in the face. She loses her
steering way, gets took aback; and we showing a clean pair of heels,
with the wind free, on the sloop’s best point of sailing. And there you
be: We leaves the frigate to clear her sheets and reeve preventers at
her leisure--we snapping muskets at her from our taffer-rail, by way of
insult, Polly!”

“Your captain’s too daring, Jack,” says Polly, who is a prudent woman.

“That’s what I tells him, Polly. ‘Cap’n,’ says I, ‘discretion is the
better part of valor.’ At that he gives me a wink. ‘So it is, my mate,’
says he, ‘and damned impudence is the better part of discretion. And
now,’ says he, ‘the frigate being all but hulldown astern, you may take
this wheel yourself, while I goes down to supper.’”

When Lieutenant Paul Jones is again on dry land, he finds two pieces
of news awaiting him. One is a letter from Mr. Jefferson, enclosing his
commission as a captain fully fledged. The other is old Duncan Macbean
in person, and his sunken cheek and leaden eye tell of troubles on the
far-off Rappahannock.

“It was Lord Dunmore,” says old Duncan, very pale, his voice a-quaver.
“He heard of you among the ships, and wanted revenge.”

“And the villain took it!”

“Ay, he took it like! He burned mansion, barn, flour-mill--every
building’s gone, and never stick nor stone to stand one a-top t’ither on
the whole plantation.”

“What else?”

“He killed sheep and swine and cattle, and drove away the horses;
there’s never the hoof left walking about the place. Nothing but the
stripped land is left ye.”

“But the slaves?”

“His lordship took them, too, to sell them in Jamaica.”

Captain Paul Jones turns white as linen three times bleached. His eyes
are hard as jade. Then he tosses up his hands, with a motion of sorrow.

“My poor blacks!” he cries. “The plantation was to them a home, not a
place of bondage. Now they are torn away, to die of pestilence or under
the lash, in the cane fields of Jamaica. The price of their poor bodies
is to swell the pockets of our noble English slave-trader. This may be
Lord Dunmore’s notion of civilized war. For all that I shall one day
exact a reckoning.” Then, resting his hand on old Duncan’s shoulder:
“However, we have seen worse campaigns, old friend! We’ll do well yet!
I’ve still one fortune--my sword; still one prospect--the prospect of
laying alongside the enemy.”




CHAPTER X--THE COUNSEL OF CADWALADER

Philadelphia is experiencing a cool June, and in a sober, Quakerish way
shows grateful for it. The windows of General Washington’s apartments,
looking out into Chestnut Street, are raised to let in the weather and
the urbane sun, not too hot, not too cool, casts a slanting glance into
the room, as though moved of a solar curiosity concerning the mighty
one who inhabits them. The sun, doubtless, goes his way fully satisfied;
General Washington himself is there, in casual talk with the Marquis de
Lafayette.

There is a marked difference between the General and the Marquis;
the former tall, powerful, indomitable--the type American; the latter
nervous, optimistic, full of romantic heroisms--the type French. The
General is speaking; his manner a model of the courteous and the suave.
For the young Marquis is a peer of France, the head of a party, and may
be held as carrying at his heels a third of French sentiment and French
influence. It is not what he brings, but what he leaves behind him, that
makes the young Marquis important.

The talk between the General and the Marquis is running on Captain Paul
Jones.

“It surprises me,” the General is saying, “it surprises me, my dear
Marquis, to learn that you know Captain Jones.”

“We meet--Captaine Jones and I,” responds Lafayette, in a choppy,
fervent fashion of English, that carries something more than a mere
flavor of Paris, “we meet, my dear General, in Alexandria by the
Potomac, when I come North from the Carolina, where I disbark. Captaine
Jones he assist in Alexandria to find horses to bring me here.”

“And you believe, as does he, that a best use that can be made of him is
to give him a ship, and send him to Europe?”

“Certaine, General, certaine! Give him a good ship, and let him hawk
at England with it. It should be a quick, smart ship, that they may
not catch him. Give him such a vessel, General, and he will keep five
hundred English boats at home to guard the British coasts.”

“You think, Marquis, that he would make a good impression in France?”

“The best, General; the best! Captaine Jones has--what you call?--the
aplomb, yes, and the grace, the charm, the dash to captivate the fancy
of my countrymen--ever brave, the French, they love a brave man like
Captaine Jones! More, General, he speaks the French language, and that
is most important.”

General Washington stalks up and down the polished, hardwood floor,
wearing a thoughtful face. As he turns to speak, he is interrupted by an
obsequious black attendant--one of those body slaves brought from Mount
Vernon.

“Pardon, Gin’ral,” says the grizzled old <DW54>, as he pokes his grinning
head in at the door; “Cap’n Jones presents his comp’ments, sare; an’ can
he come up?”

General Washington makes a sign of assent, and the grizzled old servitor
smirks and smiles and bows himself backward into the hall.

There are two pairs of feet heard climbing the stair; the elastic step
belongs to Captain Paul Jones, the more stolid is that of Mr. Morris,
who, using the familiarity of a closest friendship, walks in on General
Washington unannounced.

“The Marquis was just saying,” observes General Washington to Captain
Paul Jones, when greetings are over and conversation, to employ a
nautical phrase, has settled to its lines, “that he met you in Virginia
as he came up.”

“Yes, General; I had been having a look at my plantation, which Lord
Dunmore did me the honor to lay waste.”

“Was the destruction great?”

“The torch had been everywhere. The work could not have been more
complete had his Lordship been a professional incendiary.” Captain Paul
Jones shrugs his wide shoulders, as though dismissing a disagreeable
subject, one not to be helped by talk: “You received my letter, General?
I was so rash as to think you might aid me in getting the new frigate
_Trumbull_.”

“Captain,” returns General Washington, “you will understand that my
connection with the army makes any interference on my part in naval
affairs a most delicate business. I must give my counsel in that quarter
cautiously. As for the _Trumbull_; it is, I fear, already claimed by Mr.
Adams for Captain Saltonstall.”

“Captain Saltonstall!” cries Captain Paul Jones in a fervor of
bitterness. “General, hear me! I sailed lieutenant in the _Alfred_ with
Captain Saltonstall. I know him, and do not scruple to say that he is
an incompetent coward. Since he went ashore in New London after that
disgraceful cruise, he hasn’t shown his face aboard ship. He was ashamed
to do so. Only Mr. Adams could have protected him from the court-martial
he had earned. On my side--if I must plead my own cause--I’ve made two
cruises since then, one in the _Providence_, one in the _Alfred_. I’ve
taken twenty-four prizes; some of them by no means unimportant to the
American cause.”

“Ah, yes!” interrupts General Washington, his steady face lighting up
a trifle; “you mean the _Mellish_ and the _Bideford_. I heard how
you captured the winter equipment meant for Howe’s army--ten thousand
uniforms, eleven hundred fur overcoats, eleven thousand blankets,
besides a battery or two of field guns and six hundred cavalry
equipments. You did us a timely service, Captain Jones. Many an American
soldier was the warmer last winter, because of the _Mellish_ and the
_Bideford_.”

“I am glad,” says Captain Paul Jones, not without confusion, “to learn
that I so much pleased you. It gives me courage to hope that you
will come to my shoulder against Mr. Adams and his pet incompetent,
Saltonstall.”

General Washington again dons his manner of grave inscrutability, and
falls to his habit of striding up and down, hands locked beneath the
buff-and-blue flaps of his coat.

“Captain Jones,” he suddenly breaks forth, “you are a sailor: What do
you do afloat in case of a head wind!”

“A head wind?” repeats Captain Paul Jones. “Why, sir, if it’s no more
than just a gale, I fall to tacking, sta’board and port. If it should be
aught of a hurricane, now, I’d set a storm stays’l, heave to, and wait
for weather.”

“Quite so!” returns the General, soberly. “Well, Captain Jones, one
may find headwinds ashore as well as afloat. Now, in the matter of the
_Trumbull_, I should advise you to ‘heave to,’ as you say, ‘and wait for
weather.’ Mr. Adams insists on Captain Saltonstall; and it is not alone
inconvenient, it’s impossible, with the Marine Committee made up as it
is, to oppose him. Be patient, and you shall not in the end fare worse
than your deserts.”

Captain Paul Jones wheels on Mr. Morris, who, with Lafayette, has kept
silence, while giving interested ear to the conversation.

“You hear, Mr. Morris?” observes Captain Paul Jones, manner dogged and
aggressive. “As I warned you in my letter, I shall now prefer charges
against Captain Saltonstall--charge him with flat cowardice while in
command of the _Alfred_, and demand a court-martial. Under the
circumstances, I deem it my public duty so to do.”

Mr. Morris makes a gesture of dissent and repressive protest.

“My dear Captain,” expostulates Mr. Morris, his manner pleading, yet
full of authority; precisely the manner of one who deals with a
trained tiger which he is willing to coax, while firmly intending
to control--“my dear Captain, hear reason! Your charges would be
suppressed--pigeon-holed! The influence of Mr. Adams with the Marine
Committee is supreme. It could, let me tell you, accomplish much more
than merely silence your charges. It could go further, and force a
resolution of confidence in Captain Salton-stall.”

“Then,” retorts Captain Paul Jones, inveterate as iron, “I’ve still a
shot in my locker. I shall publish his cowardice over my own name;
I shall placard every street corner; for I think the American
people entitled to know the sort of servant they have had in Captain
Saltonstall. They shall not risk a good ship and a brave crew, with a
coward in the dark; and so I tell you!”

“Captain Jones,” observes General Washington, who, cool and unruffled,
is a contrast to the disturbed Mr. Morris, “Captain Jones, as a
gentleman, you realize what would be the result of a public charge of
cowardice against Captain Saltonstall?”

“He would challenge you instantly!” breaks in Mr. Morris.

“Precisely!” says Captain Paul Jones, with just the preliminary glimmer
of battle in his hard brown eyes. “As you say, sir, he would challenge
me. And having challenged me, I should take pleasure in doing my best to
kill him. I got a pair of Galway duelling pistols out of the _Bideford_;
they were coming to Lord Howe. If I can lure Captain Saltonstall to the
field, it shall go hard, but with one of those Irish sawhandles I rid
the American navy of him. Once I have him at ten paces, it will take
something more than the influence of Mr. Adams to bring him safely off.”

Mr. Morris’ brow colors; General Washington takes the situation more
at ease. He even gives way briefly to a shadowy smile; for the great
patriot, while not so inflammable, is quite as combative as any Captain
Paul Jones of them all.

“You have taken advice on this?” asks General Washington, following
a pause, during which everybody has had time to more or less digest
Captain Paul Jones’ unique plan for improving the American navy. “I do
not suppose you have gone to this decision without counsel?”

“Sir; I am, as you know, both prudent and conservative--no one more
so. Certainly, I’ve taken counsel. I went to General Cadwalader; he
expresses himself as in hearty accord with me. Indeed, it is understood
between us that he shall act for me in any affair I may have with
Captain Saltonstall.”

At the mention of General Cadwalader, General Washington smiles openly,
while Mr. Morris groans and throws up his hands.

“Bless me! Cadwalader!” exclaims Mr. Morris, when he can command his
tongue. “The worst firebrand in the country! Cadwalader, forsooth!
who has ever had but one word of advice for every man--‘Fight!’” Then,
abruptly descending upon Captain Paul Jones with all the authority of
a father addressing a favorite but rebellious son: “Paul; listen! You
believe me your friend?”

“Indubitably! I have no better friend.”

“Then let me tell you, Paul: In the name of that friendship this thing
must end--absolutely end. If you’ve drawn up any accusation of cowardice
against Captain Saltonstall, you must burn it and forget the whole
affair. You must dismiss this subject from your mind. In Cadwalader you
have invited the wrong kind of advice. I now give you the right kind.
The General will tell you so; your friend, the Marquis, will tell you
so. And forasmuch as you value my friendship you must obey me.”

Mr. Morris in his earnestness lays a paternal hand on the shoulder of
Captain Paul Jones, his manner a composite of coax and command. Before
the latter, who is visibly shaken by the friendly determination of Mr.
Morris, can frame reply, Lafayette--who has been scrupulous to maintain
a polite silence from first to last--interferes.

“Our good friend, Mr. Morris,” interjects Lafayette, “has been so
generous as to refer to me. I could not have said a word without; since
what you discuss is private and personal to yourselves as Americans, and
of a character that forbids me, a Frenchman and an alien even though a
friend, voicing my views. However, since Mr. Morris has so complimented
me as to make his appeal in my name, I must--in all respect and
friendship for Captain Jones, whom I admire--unite my voice with his.
The more readily since I can take it upon myself to promise Captain
Jones that if he will cross to France, with a letter I shall give him
to my king, a fighting ship of frigate strength shall be his within the
month.”

As he concludes, Lafayette, a blush reddening his cheek--for he is only
a boy--extends two hands to Captain Paul Jones as though, fearful of
having said too much, he would mutely apologize. Captain Paul Jones
seizes the hands with a warmth equal to the other’s; and the incident,
capping as it does the fatherly opposition of Mr. Morris, puts an end to
that beautiful plan, so full of dire promise for Captain Saltonstall,
which in their mutual belligerencies Captain Paul Jones and the fire-fed
Cadwalader have formulated.

“Say that you will go to France, my friend!” urges the impulsive young
Frenchman; “say that you will go! I will exhaust Auvergne, and all of
France besides, but you shall have the promised ship.”

At this, General Washington interferes.

“Forbear, my dear Marquis!” says he. “Captain Jones shall go to France.
But he shall go with an American crew, in an American ship, flying the
American flag.” Then, to Captain Paul Jones: “Do me the honor, Captain,
to hold yourself in readiness to obey any summons I may send. Believe
me, I shall count myself as one without influence, if you do not hear
from me within the week.”

Let us glance ahead two years for the final word of Captain Saltonstall.
Captain Paul Jones, with his hard-won prize, the crippled _Serapis_,
creeps into the Texel, and the earliest story wherewith the Dutch
regale him is how Captain Saltonstall, weak, forceless, incompetent, has
surrendered the new, thirty-two-gun frigate, _Warren_, to the English
in Penobscot Bay. Captain Paul Jones hears the disgraceful news with set
and angry face.

“I have just learned the miserable fate of the _Warren_,” he writes to Mr.
Morris; “and hearing it I reproach myself. If I had obeyed the dictates
of my sense of duty on a Philadelphia day you will recall, instead of
yielding to the persuasions of the peacemakers, our flag might still be
flying on the _Warren!_”




CHAPTER XI--THE GOOD SHIP RANGER

Four days of listless waiting go by, and Captain Paul Jones again finds
himself and Mr. Morris closeted with General Washington.

“Captain Jones,” says the latter, speaking with a kindly gravity, “Mr.
Morris and I have so pushed your affairs with the Marine Committee that
to-morrow Congress will pass a double resolution, adopting a new flag,
the stars and stripes, and appointing you to command the _Ranger_.”

“The Ranger!” exclaims Captain Paul Jones, beginning to glow. “Thanks,
General; a thousand thanks! And to you also, Mr. Morris, whom I shall
never forget! The Ranger! I know her! She is being sparred and rigged
at Portsmouth! New, three hundred tons; a beauty, too, they tell me!
Gentlemen, I am off at once to Portsmouth! I must see to stepping her
masts and mounting her batteries myself.”

Captain Paul Jones, all eagerness, is on his feet, and even the wise,
age-cold Mr. Morris begins to catch his fire.

“Right!” cries Mr. Morris; “you shall start to-morrow!”

“Captain Jones,” interrupts the General, laying a large detaining hand
on the other’s arm, “you will go to Portsmouth and look after your ship.
Also, while your destination is France, you must wait for orders to
sail. I may have weighty despatches for the French King--news that will
shake Europe.”

June is as cool in Portsmouth as it is in Philadelphia. Cooler; for the
New Hampshire breeze has in it the chill smell of those snows that lie
unmelted in the mountains. Captain Paul Jones comes unannounced, eyes
dancing like those of a child with a new toy, and seeks the wharf where
the __Ranger__ is being fitted to her spars. From a convenient coign he
looks the _Ranger_ over, and evinces a master’s appreciation.

“Nose sharp! Plenty of dead-rise! Lean lines!” he murmurs. “With the
wind anywhere abaft the beam, she should race like a greyhound! All,
she’s a beauty, fit to warm the cockles of a sailor’s heart! See to the
sheer of her!--as delicate as the lines of a woman’s arm!”

Up comes a sturdy figure with an air of command, an officer’s hat on his
head, a ship-carpenter’s adz in his hand.

“This is Captain Jones?”

“Captain Paul Jones, sir.”

“Pardon me for not first giving my name. I’m Elijah Hall, who is to sail
second officer with you in yon _Ranger_.”

Captain Paul Jones and Lieutenant Hall fall into instant and profound
confab of a deeply nautical complexion, a confab quite beyond a
landsman’s comprehension, wherein such phrases as “flush-decks,” “short
poop-deck,” “bilges,” “futtocks,” and “knees” abound, and are reeled
off as though their use gives our two ship-enthusiasts unbridled
satisfaction. At last Lieutenant Hall remarks, pointing to three long
sticks:

“There’re her masts, sir. They were taken out of a four-hundred-ton
Indiaman, and are too long for a three-hundred-ton ship like the
_Ranger_. I was thinking I’d cut’em off four feet in the caps.”

“That would be a sin!” exclaims Captain Paul Jones, voice almost
religious in its fervent zeal. “Three as fine pieces of pine as ever
came out of Norway, too! I’d be afraid to cut’em, Mr. Hall; it would
give the ship bad luck. I’ll tell you what! Fid them four feet lower in
the hounds; it will amount to the same thing, and at the same time save
the sticks.”

Captain Paul Jones goes at the congenial task of fitting out the
_Ranger_ with his usual day-and-night energy. When he finds her
over-sparred, with her masts too long, he still refuses to cut them
down, but shortens yard and bowsprit, jib-boom and spankerboom. He
doesn’t like the Marine Committee’s armament of twenty six-pounders, and
proceeds to mount four six-pounders and fourteen long nines.

“One nine-pounder is equal to two six-pounders,” says Captain Paul
Jones; “and, since it’s I who must put to sea in the _Ranger_, and not
the Marine Committee, nine-ponnders I’ll have, and say no more about
it.”

The New Hampshire girls, on the Fourth of July, come down to the
_Ranger_, and present Captain Paul Jones a flag--red, white, and
blue--quilted of cloth ravished from their virgin petticoats. The
gallant mariner makes the New Hampshire girls a speech.

[Illustration: 0143]

“That flag,” cries he, “that flag and I, as captain of the _Ranger_,
were born on the same day. We are twins. We shall not be parted life or
death; we shall float together or sink together!”

These brave words, in the long run, find amendment. The petticoat flag
of the pretty New Hampshire girls is the flag which, two years later,
flies from the _Richard’s_ indomitable peak when Captain Paul Jones
cuts down the gallant Pierson and his _Serapis_. After that fight off
Scarborough Head, Captain Paul Jones writes to the pretty New Hampshire
girls--for he ever remembers the ladies--recounting the last destiny of
their petticoat ensign. He is telling of the _Richard’s_ death throes,
as viewed from the blood-slippery decks of the conquered _Serapis_:

“No one was now left aboard the Richard but my dead. To them I gave the
good old ship to be their coffin; in her they found a sublime sepulcher.
She rolled heavily in the swell, her gun-deck awash to the port-sills,
settled slowly by the head, and sank from sight. The ensign gaff, shot
away in the action, had been fished and put in place; and there your
flag was left flying when we abandoned her. As she went down by the
head, her taffrail rose for a moment; and so the last that mortal
eye ever saw of the gallant _Richard_ was your unconquered ensign. I
couldn’t strip it from the brave old ship in her last agony; nor could I
deny my dead on her decks, who had given their lives to keep it flying,
the glory of taking it with them. And so I parted with it; so they took
it for their winding sheet.”

At last the _Ranger_ is ready for sea; and still those belated
despatches from General Washington for the French King do not come. One
cold October day a horseman, worn and haggard, rides into Portsmouth.
Stained, dust-caked, reeling in his saddle, he calls for Captain Paul
Jones.

“Here,” responds that gentleman. “What would you have?”

“I come from General Washington,” cries the man. “Burgoyne has
surrendered! Here are your despatches for France!”

Captain Paul Jones takes the packet, stunned for the moment by the
mighty news.

“And now for food and drink,” says the man faintly, as with difficulty
he slips to the ground. “One hundred and eighty miles have I rode in
thirty hours. It was the brave news kept me going; the thought of those
beaten English held me up like wine.”

“One hundred and eighty miles!” cries Captain Paul Jones. “Thirty
hours!”

The man points to his mount, where it stands with drooping head and
quivering flank.

“That is the tenth I’ve had. Horse flesh and hard riding did it!”

Ten minutes after the despatches are put in his hands, Captain Paul
Jones is aboard the _Ranger_. Then comes the tramp of forty feet about
the capstan. Twenty powerful breasts are pressed against the capstan
bars, and the _Ranger_ is walked up to its anchors, while aloft the
brisk top-men are shaking out the sails.

“Anchor up and down, sir!” reports Boatswain Jack Robinson, who has left
his Polly at home, while he sails with the _Ranger_.

“Anchor up and down!” repeats Captain Paul Jones. “Bring her home!”

With a “Heave ho!” the _Ranger_‘s anchors are pulled out of Portsmouth
sands. Captain Paul Jones himself takes the wheel and pays off its head
before the breeze, already bellying the foresails.

“Give her every stitch you have, Mr. Hall,” says Captain Paul Jones. “We
must be clear of the Isles of Shoals by daybreak.”

“And then?” asks Lieutenant Hall.

“East, by south, half east! And Mr. Hall, day and night, blow high, blow
low, spread every rag you’ve got. Burgoyne has surrendered. Either
I shall tear the sticks out of the _Ranger_, or spread that news in
France in thirty days.”

“More haste, less speed!” murmurs the prudent Lieutenant Hall; and so,
having eased his mind like a true seaman, he goes forward heatedly to
spread sail.

The top-heavy little _Ranger_, with her acre of canvas, heels over
until, with decks awash, she glides eastward like a ghost.

“Pipe all hands aft, Mr. Bo’sen!” commands Captain Paul Jones.

Boatswain Jack Robinson puts his whistle to his lips, and sends a shrill
call singing through the ship. The crew come scampering aft; all save
a contingent aloft, who race down by the backstays, claw under claw,
as might so many cats. Some of our old friends of the _Providence_
are there--the aquatic Scipio and Cato, with the little red Indian
port-fire, Anthony Jeremiah.

“My men,” cries Captain Paul Jones, “we’re off for France. We shall meet
nasty weather, for it’s the beginning of winter, and I shall steer the
northern course. It is to be a case of crack-on canvas, foul weather or
fair: and, since the ship is oversparred and cranky, we must mind her
day and night. To make all safe, the watch shall be lap-watched, so as
to keep plenty of hands on deck. This will double your work, but I shall
also double your grog. Now, my hearties, let every man among you do
his duty by flag and ship. Burgoyne has surrendered, and it’s for us to
carry the word to France.”

“Shipmates,” observes Boatswain Jack Robinson, judgmatically, as the
hands go tumbling forward, “shipmates, the old _Ranger_ is a damned
comfortable ship. ‘Double watches, double work!’ says the skipper; but
also ‘Double grog!’ says he. Wherefore, I says again, the old _Ranger_
is a damned comfortable ship.”

Eight bells now, breakfast; and the Isles of Shoals are vanishing over
the _Ranger_‘s stern. Suddenly a boyish voice strikes up:

               “So now we had him hard and fast,

               Burgoyne laid down his arms at last,

               And that is why we brave the blast,

               To carry the news to France.”

Captain Paul Jones pauses in his short quarterdeck walk, cocks his ear,
and listens. The hoarse crew take up the chorus:

               “Heigh ho! carry the news!

               Go carry the news to London,

               Tell old King George how he’s undone.

               Oh, ho! carry the news!”

Boatswain Jack Robinson, observing Captain Paul Jones listening, becomes
explanatory.

“Only a bit of a ditty, Cap’n; the same composed by Midshipman Hill,
d’ye see, in honor of this here cruise. A right good ballid, too, I
calls it; and amazin’ fine for a lad of twenty, who hardly knows a
reef-point from a gasket.”

Vouchsafing this, Boatswain Jack Robinson rolls forward with walrus
gait, chanting as he goes in a voice tuned by storms and broken across
capstan bars, the hoarse refrain:

               “Oh, ho! carry the news!”

And so the good ship _Ranger_ plows eastward on her course. Eighteen
hours out of twenty-four, Captain Paul Jones holds the deck. In the end
he has his reward. Just thirty days after the _Ranger_‘s anchors kissed
the Portsmouth sands good-by, they go splashing into the dull waters of
the Loire.




CHAPTER XII--HOW THE “RANGER” TOOK THE “DRAKE”

Four months slip by; it is April, and the idle _Ranger_ rides in the
harbor of Brest. Morose, sore with inactivity, Captain Paul Jones seeks
out Doctor Franklin at the philosopher’s house in Passy.

“This lying by rusts me,” Captain Paul Jones is saying as he and Doctor
Franklin have a turn in the garden. The latter likes the thin French
sunshine, and gets as much of it as he may. “Yes, it rusts me--fills me
with despair!”

“What would you do, then?” asks Doctor Franklin, his coarse, shrewd face
quickening into interest. “Have you a cruise mapped out?”

“Now I thought, if you’ve no objections, I’d just poke the _Ranger_‘s
nose into the Irish Sea, and take a look at Whitehaven. You know I was
born by the Solway, and the coast I speak of is an old acquaintance.”

“I see no objection, Captain, save the smallness of your ship.”

“That is easily answered; for I give you my word, Doctor, the little
_Ranger_ can sail round any English ship on the home station. I shall be
safe, no fear; for what I can’t whip I can run from.”

“Have you spoken to my brother commissioners?”

Doctor Franklin looks up, a grim, expectant twinkle in his gray eyes.
Captain Paul Jones cracks his fingers in angry impatience.

“Forgive me, Doctor, if I’m frank to the frontiers of rudeness. Of what
avail to speak to Mr. Dean, who is asleep? Of what avail to speak to
Mr. Lee, who surrounds himself with British spies like that creature
Thornton, his private secretary? I ask you plain questions, Doctor, for
I know you to be a practical man.”

The philosopher grins knowingly.

“Please do not speak of British spies to Commissioner Lee, Captain
Jones. My task in France is enough difficult as it stands.”

“And on that account, Doctor, and on that alone, I have so far refrained
from saying aught to Mr. Lee. But I tell you I misdoubt the man. His
fellow Thornton I know to be in daily communication with the English
admiralty! he clinks English gold in his pockets as the wage of his
treason. This, were there no one save myself to consider, I should say
in the face of Arthur Lee; ay! for that matter in the face of all the
Lees that ever hailed from Virginia. I tell you this, Doctor, for your
own guidance.” Then, following a pause: “Not that it sets politely with
my years to go cautioning one so much my superior in age, wisdom and
experience.”

The philosopher glances up from the violets.

“Possibly, Captain Jones, I have already given myself that caution.
However, concerning your proposed cruise: I shall leave all to
your judgment. Certainly, our warships, as you say, were meant for
battle-work, and not to waste their lives junketing about French ports.”

“One thing, doctor,” observes Captain Paul Jones, at parting: “Tell your
fellow commissioners that I’ve cleared for the west coast of Ireland,
with a purpose to go north-about around the British islands. If you let
them hear I’m off for Whitehaven, I give you my honor that, with the
spy Thornton selling my blood to the English admiralty, I shall have the
whole British fleet at my heels before I reach St. George’s Channel.”

Captain Paul Jones, in command of the _Ranger_, drops in at Whitehaven.
With twenty-nine of his lads he goes ashore of a dripping morning, pens
up the sleepy garrisons of the two forts, and spikes their guns. Then,
having spikes to spare, he makes useless a shore battery, while the
ballad-mongering Midshipman Hill, with six men, chases inland one
hundred coast guardsmen and militia.

Captain Paul Jones, waxing industrious, attempts to burn the shipping
which crowds the tidal basin at Whitehaven. In these fire-lighting
efforts he succeeds to the extent of five ships; after which he rows
out to the _Ranger_. Thereupon the people and militia, who crowd the
terror-smitten hills round about, come down into their town again.

Captain Paul Jones crosses now to the north shore of the Solway for
a morning call upon the Earl of Selkirk. He schemes to capture that
patrician, and trade him back to the English for certain good American
sailors whom they hold as prisoners. The plan falls through, since
the noble earl is not at home. In lieu, the _Ranger_‘s crew take unto
themselves the Selkirk plate, which Captain Paul Jones subsequently buys
from them, paying the ransom from his own purse, and returns with his
compliments gallantly expressed in a letter to the earl.

From the Solway, the little _Ranger_ stands west by north across the
Irish Sea. Off Carrickfergus she finds the _Drake_, an English sloop
of war that is two long nines the better than the _Ranger_ in her
broadsides, and thirty-one men stronger in her crew. To save trouble,
the _Ranger_ is hove to off the mouth of Belfast Lough, and waits for
the _Drake_ to come out. This the English ship does slowly and with
difficulty, being on the wrong side of wind and tide.

“The sun is no more than an hour high,”

The Story of Paul Jones suggests Lieutenant Wallingford wistfully.
“Shouldn’t we go to meet them, sir?”

Captain Paul Jones shakes his head.

“We’ve better water here,” says he. “Besides, the moon will be big;
we’ll fight them by the light of the moon.”

Slowly, reluctantly, the _Drake_ forges within hail. She is in doubt
about the _Ranger_.

“What ship is that?” cries the _Drake_.

Captain Paul Jones puts his speaking-trumpet to his lips.

“The American ship _Ranger_,” he replies. “Come on; we’re waiting for
you.”

Without further parley, broadside answers broadside and the battle is
on.

Both ships head north, the _Ranger_ having the weather-gage. This last
gives Captain Paul Jones the nautical upperhand. In ship-fighting, the
weather-gage is equivalent to an underhold in wrestling.

There is a swell on, and the two ships roll heavily. They shape their
course side by side, keeping within musket-reach of each other. The
breeze is on the starboard quarter, and a little faster than the ships.
By this good luck, the smoke of the broadsides is sent drifting ahead,
and the line of sight between the ships kept free. On they crawl,
broadside talking to broadside; only the Americans are smarter with
their guns, and fire three to the _Drake_‘s two.

Twilight now invests the scene in gray, as the sun sinks behind the
close, dark Irish headlands to the west. Night, cloudless and serene,
comes down; the round, full moon shines out, and its mild rays mingle
and merge with the angry glare of the battle-lanterns. Captain Paul
Jones from his narrow quarterdeck watches the Drake through his night
glass.

“Good! Very good!” he murmurs, as the _Drake_‘s foremast is splintered
by a round shot. Then, to the Salem man who has the wheel: “Bring us a
little closer, Mr. Sargent; a little closer in, if you please.”

Captain Paul Jones again rivets his glass upon the _Drake_. An
exclamation escapes him. It comes upon him that his gunners are having
advantage of the roll of the ships, and time their broadsides so as to
catch the _Drake_ as, reeling to port, she brings up her starboard
side. By this plausible manouvre, those sagacious ones who train the
_Ranger_‘s guns are sending shot after shot through and through
the _Drake_, between wind and water, half of them indeed below the
water-line. Captain Paul Jones, through his glass, makes out the
black round shot-holes; they show as thick as cloves in the rind of a
Christmas ham.

“Why!” he exclaims, “this doesn’t match my book! I must put a stopper on
such work.”

Shutting up his glass, Captain Paul Jones leaps from the after
flush-deck down among his sailors. Drunk with blood, grimed of powder,
naked to the waist, the black glory of battle in their hearts, they
merrily work their guns. It is as he beheld from the after-deck. The
_Ranger_ rolls to port as the _Drake_, all dripping, is fetching up her
starboard side.

“Fire!” cries the master-gunner, and “Fire!” runs the word along the
battery.

The long nines respond with flame and bellow!

Then they race crashingly inboard with the recoil, and are caught by the
breeching tackle. With that the smoky work is all to do over again.
The brawny sailor men--from Nantucket, from Martha’s Vineyard, from
Sag Harbor, from New London and Barnstable and Salem and Boston and
Portsmouth they are--shirtless and shoeless, barefoot and stripped to
the belts, ply sponge and rammer. Again each black-throated gun is ready
with a stomachful of solid shot.

“Show ‘em your teeth, mates!”

The guns rattle forward on their carriages. The quick port-tires
stand ready, blowing their matches. There is a brief pause, as the
master-gunner waits for that fatal downward roll to port which offers
and opens the _Drake_‘s starboard side almost to the keel.

“Ah! I see, Mr. Starbuck,” begins Captain Paul Jones sweetly, addressing
the master-gunner. “Your effort is to hull the enemy.”

“Fire!” cries the master-gunner, for just then the _Ranger_ is reeling
down to port, while the _Drake_ is coming up to starboard, and he must
not waste the opportunity.

The long nines roar cheerfully, spouting fire and smoke. Then comes that
crashing inboard leap, to be caught up short by the tackle. Again the
sponges; again the rammers; with the busy shot-handlers working in
between. And all the while the little powder monkeys, lads of eleven and
twelve, go pattering to and fro, with cartridges from the magazines.

“Why, yes, sir!” responds the master-gunner, now finding time to reply
to the comment of Captain Paul Jones; “as you says, we’re trying to hull
her, sir.”

Captain Paul Jones makes out three new holes below the Brake’s
plankslieer, the hopeful harvest of that last broadside.

“May I ask,” demands Captain Paul Jones, who as a mere first effect of
battle never fails of a rippling amiability, “may I ask, Mr. Starbuck,
your design in thus aiming below the water-line?”

“Saving you presence, Captain, we designs to sink the bitch.”

“Precisely! That is what I surmised! To a quick seaman like yourself,
Mr. Starbuck, a word will do. I don’t want her sunk, d’ye see! I want to
bring her into France as an object-lesson, and show the Frenchmen what
Americans can do. Under the circumstances, Mr. Starbnck, I shall be
obliged if you let her hull alone. It will take Mr. Hitchburn, our
carpenter, a week as it is “--this comes off reproachfully--“to stop the
holes you’ve already made. And so, Mr. Starbnck, from now on comb her
decks and cut her up in the spars as much as ever you like; but please
keep off her hull.”

“Ay, ay, sir!” says the master-gunner, saluting. Then: “Pass the word
that we’re to leave her hull alone. Cap’n has set his heart on catching
her alive.”

With that the plan of attack finds reversal, the _Ranger_ firing as she
comes up to port and when only a narrow streak of the Drake’s starboard
beam is visible above the waves.

Captain Paul Jones remains among the sailors, canvassing in a gratified
way the results of this change. While thus engaged, port-fire Anthony
Jeremiah grins up at him, meanwhile blowing his match to keep it
lighted.

“You enjoy yourself, I see, Jerry,” remarks Captain Paul Jones, who,
as observed, is never so affable as when guns are crashing, blood is
flowing, and splinters flying.

“Me like to hear the big guns talk, Captain,” responds the Indian. “It
gives Jerry a good heart.”

Captain Paul Jones again swings his glass on the Drake. He is just in
time to see her fore and main topsail-yards come down onto the caps by
the run. The last broadside does that. In an instant, he is running aft.

“Down with your helm, Mr. Sargent!” he roars. “Pull her down for every
ounce that’s in you, man!”

Quartermaster Sargent, thus encouraged, climbs the wheel like a
squirrel; the _Ranger_‘s topsails shiver; then, yielding to her helm,
she slowly luffs across the helpless stern of the Drake.

“Aboard with those sta’board tacks!” shouts Captain Paul Jones. Then,
turning again to the wheelman: “Steady, Mr. Sargent; keep her full!”

There is a skurry across the _Ranger_‘s decks, as the men rush from the
port to the starboard battery.

“Stand by, Mr. Starbuck,” calls ont Captain Paul Jones, “to rake her as
we cross her stern.”

“Ay, ay, sir!” returns the master-gunner. “She shall have it for’ard and
aft, as my old gran’am shells peas cods!”

“Steady, Mr. Sargent!” and again Captain Paul Jones cautions the alert
wheelman. “Keep her as she is!”

The guns are swung, and depressed so as to tear the poor _Drake_ open
from stern-post to cutwater at one discharge. The _Ranger_ gathers head;
slowly she makes ready to cross her enemy’s stern so close that one
might chuck a biscuit aboard. It is a moment fraught of life and death
for the unhappy _Drake_.

With her captain and first officer already dead, the situation proves
beyond the second officer, on whom the responsibility of fighting or
surrendering the ship devolves. His sullen British soul gives way; and
he strikes his colors just in time to avoid that raking fire which would
else have snuffed him off the face of the sea.

“Out-fought, out-manoeuvred, and out-sailed!” exclaims Captain Paul
Jones.

Lieutenant Hall, flushed of combat, comes up.

“We have beaten them, Captain!” exults Lieutenant Hall.

“We’ve done more than that, Mr. Hall,” responds Captain Paul Jones. “We
have defeated an aphorism, and made a precedent. For the first time in
the history of the sea, a lighter ship, with a smaller crew and a weaker
battery, has whipped an Englishman.”




CHAPTER XIII--THE DUCHESS OF CHARTRES

It is a notable gathering that assembles at Doctor Franklin’s house in
Passy. Mr. Adams and his wife have just arrived, and the doctor presents
them to Madame Brillon and Madame Houdetot, already there.

“Mr. Adams is but recently come from America,” the doctor whispers. “He
takes Mr. Dean’s place as a member of our commission.”

Madame Houdetot talks with Mrs. Adams; and because of her bad English
and the other’s bad French they get on badly.

“Mr. Lee sends his compliments,” observes Mr. Adams, loftily, to Doctor
Franklin, “and regrets that he cannot come. He heard, I understand, that
Captain Paul Jones is to be here, and does not care to meet him.”

“No?” responds the doctor, evincing scanty concern at the failure
of Mr. Lee to come. “Now I do not wonder! I hear that Captain Jones
thrashed Mr. Lee’s secretary in a tavern at Nantes, and our proud Mr.
Lee, I suppose, resents it.”

“Thrashed him!” exclaims Mr. Adams, in high tones; “Captain Jones seized
a stick and beat him like a dog, applying to him the while such epithets
as ‘liar!’ and ‘spy.’ Mr. Lee’s secretary has left France through fear
of him.”

The portly doctor lifts his hands at this; but underneath his
deprecatory horror, hides a complacency, a satisfaction, as though the
violence of Captain Jones will not leave him utterly unstrung.

“He fights everybody,” says the good doctor, resignedly; “on land as
well as on sea. Nor can I teach him the difference between his own
personal enemies, and the enemies of his country.”

“He seems a bit unruly,” observes the pompous Mr. Adams; “a bit unruly,
does this Captain Jones of yours. I’m told he sold the _Drake_, and what
other ships were captured on his recent cruise, in the most high-handed,
masterful way.”

“What else was he to do? When a road becomes impassable, what is your
course? You push down a panel of fence and go cross-lots. Captain Jones
had two hundred prisoners to feed, besides his own brave crew of one
hundred and eighteen. We had no money to give him. Were they to starve?
I’m not surprised that he sold the ships.”

“I’m surprised that the Frenchmen bought them,” returns Mr. Adams.
“Captain Jones could give no title.”

Doctor Franklin’s keen eyes twinkle.

“He could give possession, Mr. Adams. And let me tell you that in
France, as everywhere else, possession is nine parts of the law.”

Madame Brillon draws Mr. Adams aside, while Doctor Franklin welcomes
the beautiful royal girl--the Duchess de Chartres; to whom he later
presents Mr. Adams and Mrs. Adams. Madame Houdetot leaves Mrs. Adams
with the girl-Duchess and talks aside with Doctor Franklin.

“I did not know,” she whispers, with an eye on the girlish Duchess,
“that you received calls from royalty.”

“The Duchess de Chartres has been with her great relative, the king,
upon the business of Captain Jones. She comes to meet the captain, whom
we every moment expect.”

“She is in love with him!--madly in love with him!” says Madame
Houdetot. “All the world knows it.”

The doctor, who at seventy-two is a distinguished gallant, smiles
sympathetically.

“Did I not once tell you that Captain Jones, the invincible among men,
is the irresistible among women!”

“Something of the sort, I think. But you have heard of the duchess and
your irresistible, invincible one, had you not?”

“My dear madam, I am a diplomat,” replies the doctor, slyly. “And it is
an infraction of the laws of diplomacy to tell what you hear.”

“They have been very tender at the duchess’s summer house near Brest.”

“And the husband--the Duke de Chartres!”

“A most excellent gentleman! A most admirable husband of most
unimpeachable domestic manners! Believe me, I cannot laud him too
highly! Every husband in Prance should copy him! He honors his wife,
and--stays aboard his ship, the _Saint Esprit_.” After a pause the
gossipy Madame Houdetot continues: “No doubt the duke considers his
wife’s rank. Is the great-granddaughter of the Grande Louis to be held
within those narrow lines that confine the feet of other women?”

“Who is this Mr. Adams?” asks Madame Brillon, coming up. “Is he a great
man?”

Doctor Franklin glances across where the austere Mr. Adams is stiffly
posing, with a final thought of impressing the sparkling Duchess de
Chartres.

“Rather he is a _big_ man,” replies the philosopher. “Like some houses,
his foundations cover a deal of ground; but then he is only one story
high. If you could raise Mr. Adams another story, he would be a _great_
man.”

The good doctor goes over, and becomes polite to Mrs. Adams; for the
enlightenment of that lady of reserve and dignity, he expands on France
and the French character. Suddenly the door is thrown open, and all
unannounced a queer figure rushes in. She is clad in rumpled muslin and
soiled lutestring. Her hair is frizzed, her face painted, her cap awry,
and she is fair and fat and of middle years. This remarkable apparition
embraces Doctor Franklin, kisses him resoundingly, first on the left
cheek then on the right, crying:

“My flame!--my love!--my Franklin!”

The seasoned doctor receives this caressing broadside steadily, while
the desolated Mrs. Adams sits round-eyed and stony.

“It is the eccentric Madame Helvetius,” explains Madame Brillon in a low
tone to Mrs. Adams. “They call her the ‘Rich Widow of Passy.’ She and
the good doctor are dearest friends.”

“Eccentric!” Mrs. Adams perceives as much, and says so.

Doctor Franklin returns to Mrs. Adams, whom he suspects of being hungry
for an explanation, while the buoyant Madame Helvetius, as one sure of
her impregnable position, wanders confidently about the room.

“You should become acquainted with Madame Helvetius,” submits the doctor
pleasantly. “Wise, generous, afire for our cause--you would dote on
her.”

Mrs. Adams icily fears not.

“Believe me; you would!” insists the doctor. “True! her manners are of
her people and her region. They are not those of Puritan New England.”

Mrs. Adams interrupts to say that she has never before heard so much
said in favor of Puritan New England.

“And yet, my dear Mrs. Adams,” goes on the good doctor, as one
determined to conquer for Madame Helvetius the other’s favorable
opinion, “you would do wrong to apply a New England judgment to our
friend. Her exuberance is of the surface.” Then, quizzically: “A mere
manner, I assure you, and counts for no more than should what she is
doing now.”

Mrs. Adams lifts her severe gaze at this to Madame Helvetius. That
amiable French woman is in rapt and closest converse with Mr. Adams,
hand on his shoulder, her widowed lips to his ear. Mr. Adams is standing
as one frozen, casting ever and anon a furtive glance, like an alarmed
sheep, at Mrs. Adams. For an arctic moment, Mrs. Adams is held by the
terrors of that spectacle; then she moves to her husband’s rescue.

Madame Helvetius comes presently to Doctor Franklin.

“What an iceberg!” she remarks, with a toss of the frizzed head towards
Mr. Adams. “Does he ever thaw!” Then, as her glance takes in Mrs. Adams:
“Poor man! He might be August, missing her. It is she who congeals him.”

And now he, for whom they wait, is announced--Captain Paul Jones. He
has about him everything of the _salon_ and nothing of the sea. His
amiable yet polished good breeding wins on Mrs. Adams, and even the
repellant wintry Mr. Adams is rendered urbane. Captain Paul Jones
becomes the instant centre of the little assemblage. And yet, even
while he gives his words to the others, his glances rove softly to the
girl-Duchess, who stands apart, as might one who for a space--only for
a space--permits room to others. The girl-Duchess is polite; she grants
him what time is required to offer his greetings all around. Then, in
the most open, obvious way, as though none might criticise or gainsay
her conduct, she draws him into a secluded corner. They make a rare
study, these two; he deferential yet dominant, she proud but yielding.

“Did you see the king?” he asks.

“See him? Am I not, too, a Bourbon?” This comes off with fire.

“Surely! Of course you saw him!” responds Captain Paul Jones, recalling
his manner to one of easy matter-of-fact. “Your royal highness will
pardon my inquiry.”

The girl-Duchess objects petulantly to the “Royal Highness.”

“From you I do not like it,” she says. “From you”--and here comes a
flood of softness, while her black eyes shine like strange jewels--“from
you, as you know, my friend, I would have only those titles that,
arm-encircled, heart to heart, a man gives to the one woman of his sou’s
hope.”

Her voice sinks at the close, while her eyes leave his for the floor.
His presence is like a gale, and she bends before him as the willow
bends before the strong wind. Meanwhile, as instructive to Mr. Adams,
the loud Doctor is saying:

“No, sir; you must have a wig. No one sees the king without a wig.”

“We talked an hour--the king and I,” goes on the girl-Duchess,
recovering herself. “I read him your letter; he was vastly interested.
Then I told him how the _Ranger_ had been called to America. Also I drew
him pictures of what you had done; and how bravely you had fought,
not only your enemies, but his enemies and the enemies of France. And,
oh!”--here again the black eyes take on that perilous softness--“I can
be eloquent when I talk of you!”

Captain Paul Jones looks tender things, as though he also might be
eloquent, let him but pick subject and audience. Altogether there is
much to support the gossip-loving Madame Houdetot, in what she has said
concerning that summer house at Brest. The voice of the good Doctor
again takes precedence.

“Until then, it had been an axiom of naval Europe that no one on even
terms, guns and men and ship, could whip the British on the ocean.”

The Doctor and Mr. Adams are discussing the _Ranger_ and the Drake, a
topic that has been rocking France.

“Yes,” goes on the girl-Duchess, with a further dulcet flash of those
eyes, fed of fire and romance, “you are to have a ship. Here is the
king’s order to his Minister of Marine--the shuffler De Sartine. Now
there shall be no more shuffling.” She gives Captain Paul Jones the
orders. “The ship is the _Duras_, lying at l’Orient.”

“The _Duras!_” exclaims Captain Paul Jones. “An ex-Indiaman!--a good
ship, too; she mounts forty guns.” Then, as his gaze rests on Doctor
Franklin, laying down diplomatic law and fact to Mr. Adams, who listens
with a preposterously conceited cock to his head: “What say you, my
friend--my best, my dearest friend! Let us re-name the _Duras_ for the
good Doctor. Shall we not call it the _Bon Homme Richard_?”

The girl-Duchess looks her acquiescence as she would have looked it to
any proposal from so near and sweet and dear a quarter. Thus the
_Bon Homme Richard_ is born, and the _Duras_ disappears. The Doctor,
unconscious of the honor done him, is saying to Madame Helvetius, whose
fat arm is thrown across his philosophic shoulder:

“With pleasure, madam! It is arranged; I shall dine at your house
to-morrow.”

The girl-Duchess and Captain Paul Jones hear nothing of these prandial
arrangements for the morrow. They are again conversing; and, for all
they talk constantly, they say more with their eyes than with their
lips.

“Lastly,” and here the words of the girl-Duchess grow distinct, “your
ship, they tell me, will need refitting. That will take money, my
friend; and so I hand you this letter to my banker, Gourlade,
instructing him to put ten thousand louis to your credit.”

Captain Paul Jones puts the letter of credit aside.

“You do not understand!” he says. “De Chaumont has----”

“You _must_ take it!” interrupts the girl-Duchess, her eyes beginning
to swim. “You shall not put to sea, and risk your life, and the ship not
half prepared!”

“I shall more easily risk my life a thousand times, than permit you to
give me money.”

As Captain Paul Jones says this, a resentful red is burning on his brow.
Doctor Franklin breaks in from over the way, with:

“You should not too much listen to Mr. Lee, sir. I tell you that the
French merchants have offered to send Captain Jones to sea as admiral
of an entire fleet of privateers, and he refused. Have my word, sir; the
last thing he thinks on is money.”

The girl-Duchess is gazing reproachfully at Captain Paul Jones. At last
she speaks slowly and with a kind of sadness:

“I do not give you money--do not offer it. What! money and--you! Never!”
 Then proudly: “I give my money to the Cause.” After this high note is
struck, the flash dies down; the black eyes again go wavering to the
floor, while the voice retreats to the old soft whisper. “It is my heart
--only my heart that I give to you.”

The strident, unmollified tones of Mr. Adams get possession of the
field. He is condemning the French press.

“They declare, sir,” he is saying, “that I am not the celebrated Mr.
Adams; that I am a cipher, a fanatic and a bigot.”

Doctor Franklin laughs. “What harm is there in the French papers, sir?”
 he returns. “Give them no heed, sir, give them no heed!”

Madame Brillon makes preparations to depart; Madame Houdetot, Mrs.
Adams and the rest adopt her example. And still the girl-Duchess holds
Captain Paul Jones to herself:

“I am to have one evening--one before you go?” she pleads; and her tones
are a woman’s tones and deeply wistful; and are not in any respect the
tones of a Bourbon.

“One evening? You shall have every evening--ay! and every day.”

“Remember!” and as she makes ready to go the girl-Duchess takes firmer
command of her manner and her voice; “remember! You have promised to lay
an English frigate at my feet.”

“That I shall do; or lay my bones away in the Atlantic!”

The girl-Duchess shivers at this picture, and as though for reassurance
steals her slim hand into his.

“Not that!” she pleads. His strong brown fingers close courageously on
the slender ones. “I cannot bear the thought! In victory or defeat, come
back!” Then, sighing rather than saying: “Come back to me--my untitled
knight of the sea!”




CHAPTER XIV--THE SAILING OF THE “RICHARD”

Captain Paul Jones goes down to l’Orient to begin the overhaul and
refit of the _Richard_. The ship is twenty years old, and he finds it
shaken and worn by time and weather. It is not a good ship, not a
ship on which a prudent commander would care to stake his life and
reputation; but it is the best he can get, and Captain Paul Jones
accepts it, shrugging his shoulders. He has been so beaten upon by
disappointments, so carked and rusted by delays, since his old ship
_Ranger_ spread its sails for home, and left him as it were an exile
on French shores, that rather than further endure such heart-eating
experiences he is ready to embrace the desperate. As the work of
refitting progresses, Doctor Franklin comes over from Passy.

“The ship is old, Doctor,” says Captain Paul Jones, as he and Doctor
Franklin canvass the situation. “That, however, is the least of my
troubles. What causes me most uneasiness is the crew. Out of a whole
muster of three hundred and seventy-five, no more than fifty are
Americans.”

“Then you do not trust the French? Surely you don’t mean to say they are
not brave men?”

“Brave enough--the French; but that is not the point. They are not good
water fighters. By nature they are too hysterical, too easily excited,
to both sail and fight a ship. Those English whom we go to meet are born
water dogs, stubborn and cool; and the only ones afloat who, man for
man, may match them are Americans.”

“And of Americans you have but fifty?”

“Only fifty.” Then, with a heartfelt oath: “I would give my left hand to
have back my old crew of the _Ranger_.”

Captain Paul Jones begins pacing to and fro, his thoughts running
regretfully on the _Ranger_, and those stout hearts with whom he fought
the _Drake_. But the _Ranger_ and those stout, tarry ones are half a
world away; and in the end he returns perforce to the _Richard_, and
what poor tools in the way of crew are offered him by Fate. There is,
too, a matter of gravity which he desires to lay before the Doctor’s
older and more prudent judgment. For Captain Paul Jones, so unmanageable
by others, defers to the sagacious Doctor, and accepts his opinions and
follows his commands with closed eyes.

“This Captain Pierre Landais, Doctor,” he begins, “who is to sail the
_Alliance_ in my company?”

“Yes?” interrupts the Doctor.

“You know him?--you have confidence in him?”

The Doctor purses his lips, but says never a word.

“Then I’ll tell you what I think!” cries Captain Paul Jones, who reads
distrust in the good Doctor’s pursed but silent lips; “I’ll tell you
what I think, and what I’ll do. Already I’ve had some dealings with this
Landais. The fellow is mad--vanity-mad. Jealous, insubordinate, he has
twice taken open occasion to disobey my orders. This I have stomached in
silence--being on French shores. I now warn you that as soon as I find
myself in blue water, at a first sign of rebellion against my authority,
I’ll clap the fellow in irons. By heaven! I’ll string him to his own
yard arm, sir; make a tassel of him for the winds to play with, if it
be required to preserve a discipline which his example has already done
much to break down.”

Doctor Franklin meets this violent setting forth concerning the
recalcitrant Landais with a negative gesture of unmistakable emphasis.

“You must do nothing of the kind, Paul!” he replies. “Captain Landais,
as you say, is doubtless mad--vanity-mad. But he is also French; and we
must do nothing to estrange from our cause French sympathy and French
assistance. I urge you to bear with Landais in silence, rather than
jeopardize us with King Louis.”

Captain Paul Jones growlingly submits. “It will result disastrously,
Doctor,” he says. “We shall yet suffer for it, mark my word.” Then,
disgustedly: “I marvel that the Marine Committee in Philadelphia should
turn over to such a madman a brisk frigate like the _Alliance_.

“Your friend, the Marquis de Lafayette, had something to do with it, I
think. You observe that on his present visit to France, it is Landais
with his _Alliance_ who brings him.”

Captain Paul Jones says no more, but seems to accept Landais as he
accepts the _Richard_, desperately. His final comment shows the uneasy
complexion of his thought.

“We shall do the best we can, Doctor,” he says.

“Young as I am, I have lived long enough to know that one can’t have all
things ordered as he would.”

Captain Paul Jones, now commodore, clears for the Irish coast on a
bright, clear day in June. Besides the _Richard_, he has with him the
_Alliance_, thirty-two guns, Captain Landais; the _Pallas_, twenty-eight
guns, Captain Cottineau; and the _Vengeance_, twelve guns, Captain
Ricon. Four days later he returns limping into l’Orient for repairs,
the _Richard_ having been fouled by the _Alliance_ through the criminal
carelessness or worse of Captain Landais.

The breast of the young commodore is on fire with anger over the delay,
and the vicious clumsiness that caused it. He burns to destroy Landais,
as the mean reason of his troubles, but the thought of Doctor Franklin
restrains him. Also, as events unfold, that enforced return to l’Orient
proves of good fortune, and he forgets his chagrin in joy over the
flattering new turn in his affairs. Doctor Franklin has succeeded in
bringing about an exchange of prisoners, and barters to the British
admiralty one hundred and nineteen Englishmen, captured in the _Drake_
and other prizes taken by the _Ranger_, for one hundred and nineteen
Americans held by King George. While Commodore Paul Jones is curing the
damage done the _Richard_ by the evil Landais, those exchanged Americans
are landed under a cartel in Nantes. He goes down to Nantes and enlists
one hundred and fifteen of them for the _Richard_.

Before Commodore Paul Jones weighs anchor for a second start, he goes
over to Passy for a final word with Doctor Franklin. The pair walk in
the Doctor’s favorite garden, now a wilderness of foliage and flowers,
the Doctor serene, the boy commodore cloudy, taciturn and grim. His
resolution has set iron-hard to do or die; the cruise shall be a
glorious one or be his last. Doctor Franklin asks about his plans.

“I shall make for the west coast of Ireland,” says he, “and go north
about the British islands. Wind and weather favoring, I may sack a town
or two by way of retaliation for what the foe has done to us. They will
find that I have not forgotten Lord Dunmore, and my ruined plantation by
the Rappahannock.”

“The waters you will sail in are alive with British ships of war. With
your poor force it seems a desperate cruise.”

“Desperate, yes; but, Doctor, we are in no shape to play cautious. We
are weak; therefore we must be reckless.”

“It is a strange doctrine,” muses the Doctor. “And yet I will not say
but what it smells of judgment. I have faith in you, Paul; it teaches me
to hope that, when next I greet you, I shall greet a victor.”

“Doctor,” returns Commodore Paul Jones, and his tones are grave with
meaning, “I shall not disappoint you. Nor do I care to conceal from you
my resolution. When I sail, I sail looking for battle; and I shall not
hesitate to engage an enemy superior to my force. The condition of our
cause is such that, to sustain it, we need a striking, ay! a startling
naval success, and I shall do all I know, fight all I know, to bring
it to pass. More; my mind is made up: If I fail, I fall; I shall return
victorious or I shall not return.”

It is daybreak on a day in middle August when Commodore Paul Jones, with
the _Richard_ as flagship of the little squadron of four, puts the Isle
of Groaix astern, and points for the open ocean. His course is west
by north, so as to weather Cape Clear, and fetch the Irish coast close
aboard. With winds light and baffling, the squadron’s pace is slow; it
is nine days out of France before Cape Clear is sighted. Then it creeps
northward along the Irish coast, Commodore Paul Jones vigilant and
alert. He takes a prize or two, and one after the other sends into
French ports the British ships _Mayflower_ and _Fortune_. The young
commodore’s brow begins to clear; those prizes comfort him vastly. At
least the cruise shall not be registered as altogether fruitless.

It is the last day of August; the Hebrides lie off the _Richard_‘s
starboard beam. A stiff gale from the northwest sets in, and the
squadron is driven east by north under storm staysails. This dovetails
with the desires of Commodore Paul Jones; wherefore he welcomes the
gale as friendly weather. Also, it gives him a chance to try out the
_Richard_, which shows lively with the wind abaft the beam, but dull
to the confines of despair when sailing on a wind. Close-hauled, the
_Richard_ makes more lee than headway.

“Which means, Dick,” says Commodore Paul Jones judgmatically, to
Lieutenant Richard Dale--“which means, Dick, that we must have the
weather-gage before we lock horns with an enemy.”

Off Cape Wraith, Commodore Paul Jones is so fortunate as to take two
further prizes. He turns them over to Captain Landais, with orders to
send them into Brest. The Frenchman, who only receives an order for the
purpose of breaking it, sends them into the port of Bergen, where the
Norwegians promptly turn them over to the English, on an argument that
they do not officially know of any government called the United States.

Commodore Paul Jones works slowly and cautiously southward along the
east coast of Scotland. Off the Firth of Forth he decides to attack the
Port of Leith, and stands in for that fell purpose. An adverse gale,
seconded by off-shore currents, comes to the rescue of the threatened
Scotchmen; in the teeth of his best seamanship Commodore Paul Jones and
his squadron are driven out to sea. Thus the chance passes, and the sack
of Leith is abandoned. It is a sore setback to the hopes of Commodore
Paul Jones; but it lifts a load from the Scottish heart, to whom
the Stars and Stripes have brought visions of pillage and torch and
desolation. The news flies over England; beacons burn on each headland;
while every semaphore is telling that the dreaded Paul Jones is hawking
at the English coasts. The word causes a tremendous loss of British
sleep.

Off Spurn Head our industrious young commodore sinks one collier and
chases another ashore. Being full of curiosity, he takes a peep into
the mouth of the Humber, and discovers a frightened fleet of British
merchant vessels. The merchantmen are in a flutter at the sight of the
_Richard_‘s dread topsails; the frigate that it conveying them has its
work cut out, to nurse them into anything like calmness.

Following the look into the Humber, that sets so many timid merchantmen
to shivering, Commodore Paul Jones puts out to sea under doublereefs.
He plans to stand off and on throughout the night, and swoop on those
tremblers, like a hawk on a covey of quail, with the first gray streaks
of dawn. The frigate will doubtless fight, but the optimistic young
commodore reckons on making short work of that man-of-war. In the
middle watch the little brig _Vengeance_ runs under the _Richard_‘s lee,
bringing word of a nobler quarry. The Baltic timber fleet, fifty sail in
all, convoyed by the _Serapis_ and the _Countess of Scarboro_ has just
put into Bridlington Bay.

At this good news, Commodore Paul Jones gives up his designs touching
the frightened covey of merchantmen in the Humber. He prefers the Baltic
timber ships with the _Serapis_, the difference between the one and
the other being the difference between deer and hare. He orders the
_Vengeance_ to stand out to sea, find the _Alliance_, and tell Captain
Landais to join him off Scarboro’ Head.

“But do not,” says he to Captain Ricon, “give Captain Landais this notice
in the guise of an order. He would make a point of disobeying, and seize
on its reception as a pat occasion for insulting you.”

While the _Vengeance_ stands eastward in search of the _Alliance_,
Commodore Paul Jones signals the __Pallas__ to follow, and turns his
bows for Scarboro’ Head, then forty miles away.

The _Richard_, the little _Pallas_ close to its heels, cracks on canvas
throughout the night. The winds are mere puffs and catspaws; still, slow
as is their speed, daylight finds them within throwing distance of their
destination. They are the wrong-side of the weather, however, and the
whole day is wasted in beating inshore against the wind. Our young
commodore must do all the work; for the English merchantmen, as though
faint with fear at the sight of him, refuse to come out; while
the _Serapis_ and its consort stick close to them in their role of
guardships. The sun goes down, night descends, and as yet our young
commodore has not been able to get within reach of the foe; for at
beating to windward the _Richard_ is as dull as a Dutchman.

When darkness comes, it unlooses a land breeze. With that the
merchantmen take heart of grace, and resolve to dare all and run for it.
They rush out of Bridlington Bay, wind free, like a flock of seagulls.
What is a fair wind for them is a headwind for the _Richard_ and
_Pallas_; with no one to molest them, the fifty timber ships show a
clean pair of heels. Commodore Paul Jones makes no effort to chase; it
would be seamanship thrown away. Besides, the _Serapis_ has laid its
sails aback, and is waiting to hear from him; while the _Countess
of Scarboro_ guarding the flanks of the fugitive timber ships, seems
eagerly willing to try conclusions with the _Pallas_.

The temptation is too great; Commodore Paul Jones makes no least effort
to resist it. Signaling the _Pallas_ to close with and pull down the
smaller ship, with his own eye on the _Serapis_, he begins manoeuvring
for the upper hand. The sea is as smooth as glass; a great harvest moon
shoots up in the cloudless sky. As when the _Ranger_ fought the _Drake_,
it is to be a fight by the light of the moon.

The _Richard_ tacks starboard and port, the _Serapis_ lying in wait.
Decks cleared, guns shotted and run out, magazines open, men stripped
and at their quarters, both ships are as ferociously ready as bulldogs.
Commodore Paul Jones scans the _Serapis_ through his glass.

“How heavy is he, Commodore?”

It is Dr. Brooke, surgeon of the _Richard_, who puts the question. He
has been laying out his instruments and bandages in the cockpit, in
readiness for a hard night’s work, and now pokes his nose on deck for a
last breath of fresh air.

“Is that you, Doctor?” returns Commodore Paul Jones. The amiable tones
bespeak that bland urbanity which is his dominant characteristic on the
threshold of battle. “It’s the _Serapis_; a forty-four-gun ship of the
Rainbow class, six months off the stocks.”

It should be observed that Commodore Paul Jones’ pet study is the
British navy, and he knows more about it--ships, guns, and men--than
does the king’s admiralty itself.

“Forty-four guns! Rainbow class!” repeats the worthy doctor, who himself
is not without a working knowledge of ships and their comparative
strengths. “Then she’s a stronger ship, with heavier metal, than the
_Richard_?”

“As three is to two, Doctor,” replies Commodore Paul Jones, shutting up
his glass and preparing for action. “None the less, we shall fight them
and beat them just the same.”

Aboard the _Serapis_, Captain Pearson is holding his glass on the
_Richard_, not a cable’s length away. Suddenly the _Richard_ wears
and backs its topsail, thereby bringing its broadside to bear upon the
_Serapis_.

“That was a clever manoeuvre!” remarks Captain Pearson, admiringly,
to Lieutenant Wright, who stands by his side. “It holds for him the
weather-gage, and makes it impossible for me to luff across his hawse,
without exposing my ship to be raked.”

“Who is he?” asks Lieutenant Wright; for the _Serapis_ is just home
from Norway, and the word that set all England to lighting beacons and
doubling coast-guards has not reached it.

“Who is he?” repeats Captain Pearson, soberly. “He is Paul Jones; and,
my word for it, Lieutenant, there is work ahead.”




CHAPTER XV--THE “RICHARD” AND THE “SERAPIS”

The ships are slowly closing, watchful as wrestlers striving for holds,
the _Richard_ edging down with the wind, the _Serapis_ holding on.

“What ship is that?” hails Captain Pearson.

There is no reply.

“What ship is that?” comes the second hail.

The response is a storm of solid shot from the _Richard_‘s flaming
broadside.

As the _Richard_ goes into action, Commodore Paul Jones swings his glass
along the eastern horizon. The _Pallas_ is going down the wind, in hot
pursuit of the _Countess of Scarboro_, yawing and firing its bow-chaser
as it runs; while far out to sea lies the traitor Landais, sulking or
skulking, it matters little which, his coward topsails just visible
against the moonlit sky-line.

With the wind aft, the _Richard_ and the _Serapis_ head northwest, both
on the port tack. The moon makes the scene as light as day; the sea is
as evenly smooth as a ballroom floor. The _Richard_ goes over on the
starboard tack, the _Serapis_ holding as she is; the ships approach each
other, the _Richard_ keeping the weather-gage. For twenty minutes it is
broadside and broadside as fast as men may handle sponge and rammer. As
in the hour of the _Drake_ and _Ranger_, the Yankees show smarter with
their guns.

When the battle begins, the _Richard_ has to its broadside three
eighteen-pounders, as against the _Serapis_’ ten. With the first fire,
two of the _Richard_‘s three explode, killing half the men that serve
them, and tearing open the main gun-deck immediately above. Lieutenant
Mayrant, who has command in the gunroom where the three eighteens
are mounted, reports the disaster to Commodore Paul Jones. The
latter receives the news beamingly, as though it were the enemies’
eighteen-pounders, and not his own, that have been put out of action.

“Then we have only the twelve-pounders and the long nines to fight
him with,” says Commodore Paul Jones. “It is now a thirty-two-gun ship
against a forty-four. We shall beat him; and the honor will be the
greater.” Then, observing Lieutenant Mayrant to be severely wounded
in the head, he becomes concerned for that young gentleman. “Better go
below to Brooks,” says he, “and have your wounds dressed.”

“I must get square for Portsea jail first,” replies Lieutenant Mayrant,
who is of those exchanged ones enlisted at Nantes.

Lieutenant Dale, forward with the twelve-pounders, comes aft to ask about
the exploded eight guns.

“They were rotten when the Frenchmen sold them to us,” says Lieutenant
Dale bitterly.

“Ay!” responds Commodore Paul Jones. “I’d give half the prize money I
shall get from yonder ship to have those Frenchmen here.” Meanwhile the
_Serapis_--not yet a prize--is fiercely belching flame and smoke, while
her shot tear the vitals out of the _Richard_.

The ships have been fighting half an hour--rough broadside work; the
_Richard_ with its lighter metal has had the worst of the barter. They
have sailed, or rather drifted, a mile and a half, edging closer to one
another as they forge slowly to the north and west.

The _Serapis_, being the livelier ship, has fore-reached on the
_Richard_, and Captain Pearson sees the chance to luff across the
latter’s bows. Having torn the _Richard_ open with a raking broadside,
Captain Pearson will then go clear around the Yankee, put the _Serapis_
upon the starboard tack, and claim in his turn the weather-gage. It is
a brilliant thought, and Captain Pearson pulls down his helm to execute
it. Already he sees victory in his fingers. He is radiant; it will make
him a Knight Commander of the Bath.

While Captain Pearson is manoeuvring for that title, the hot broadside
dispute proceeds with unflagging fury. Only the _Richard_ is beginning
to bleed and gasp; those ten eighteen-pounders of the _Serapis_
overmaster its weaker batteries. Also, by this time they are doubly
weak; for more than half of the _Richard_‘s twelve-pounders have been
dismounted, and the balance are so jammed with wreckage and splinters
as to forbid them being worked. Lieutenant Dale reports the crippled
condition of the _Richard_‘s broadside to Commodore Paul Jones, where
the latter stands on the after-deck, in personal command of the French
marines, whose captain has crept below with a hurt knee.

“We have but three effective twelve-pounders left,” says Lieutenant
Dale.

“Three?” retorts Commodore Paul Jones, cheerfully. “Now, well-aimed and
low, Dick, much good damage may be worked with three twelve-pounders.”

Lieutenant Dale wipes the blood and sweat and powder-stains from his
face, salutes, and goes back to his three guns; while Commodore Paul
Jones, alive to the enemy’s new manouvre, takes the wheel from the
quartermaster.

To check the ambitious Pearson in his efforts to luff across his
forefoot, Commodore Paul Jones pays off the _Richard_‘s head a point.
The check is not alone successful, but under the influence of that
master hand, the _Richard_ all but gets the _Serapis_’ head into
chancery.

Being defeated in his luff, Captain Pearson next discovers that his
brisk antagonist has put him in a dilemma. If he holds on, the _Richard_
will run him down; he can already see the great, black cutwater rearing
itself on high, as though to crush him and cut him in two. If he pays
off the head of the _Serapis_, and avoids being run down, the _Richard_
will still foul and grapple with him. Lieutenant Mayrant’s bandaged head
shows above the _Richard_‘s hammock nettings, as, with grappling irons
ready for throwing, he musters a party of boarders--cutlass and pistol
and pike--to have them in hand the moment the ships crash together. That
title of Knight Commander of the Bath, and the star and garter that
go with it, do not look so near at hand. Also, the _Serapis_, at this
closer range, begins to feel the musket-fire from the _Richard_‘s
tops. One after another, three seamen are shot down at the wheel of the
_Serapis_.

In this desperate emergency, Captain Pearson, good sailorman that he is,
neither holds on nor pays off, but with everything thrown aback attempts
to box-haul his ship. It may take the sticks out by the roots, but
he must risk it. The chance is preferable to being either run down or
boarded.

The _Serapis_ is a new ship, fresh from the yards, and her spars and
cordage stand the strain. Captain Pearson backs himself slowly out of
the trap. He grazes fate so closely that the _Richard_, answering some
sudden occult movement of the helm, runs its bowsprit over the larboard
quarter of the _Serapis_, into its mizzen rigging.

“Stand by with those grappling irons!” shouts Commodore Paul Jones.

Lieutenant Mayrant throws the grapples with a seaman’s accuracy;
they catch, as he means they shall, in the mizzen backstays of the
Englishman. But the ships have too much way on. The _Richard_ forges
ahead; the _Serapis_, every sail flattened, backs free; the lines
part. Before Lieutenant Mayrant can take his jolly boarders over the
_Richard_‘s bows, the ships have swung apart, and fifty feet of open
water yawn between them.

The _Serapis_ falls to leeward; at the end of the next five minutes both
ships are back in their old positions, with their broadside guns--or
what are left of them--at that furious work of hammer and tongs.

At this crashing business of broadsiding, the _Richard_ has no chance,
and Commodore Paul Jones--a smile on his dauntless lips, eyes bright and
glancing like those of a child with a new toy--stands well aware of it.
He must board the Englishman, or he is lost. As showing what Captain
Pearson’s eighteen-pounders can do, the _Richard_‘s starboard
battery--being the one in action--shows nine of its twelve-pounders
dismounted from their carriages; while, of the one hundred and
forty-three officers and men who belong with the main gun-deck battery
under Lieutenant Dale, eighty-seven lie dead and wounded. The gun-deck
itself, a-litter with dismounted guns and shot-smashed carriages and
tackle, is slippery with blood, and choked by a red clutter of dead and
wounded sailors.

Commodore Paul Jones turns to his orderly,

Jack Downes. “Present my compliments to Lieutenant Dale,” says lie, “and
ask him to step aft.”

Bloody, powder-grimed, Lieutenant Dale responds.

“Dick,” observes Commodore Paul Jones, “he’s too heavy for us. We must
close with him; we must get hold of him. Bring what men you have to the
spar-deck, and serve out the small arms for boarding.”

The breeze veers to the west, and freshens up a bit. This helps the
_Richard_ sooner than it does the _Serapis_; Commodore Paul Jones,
having advantage of it, wears and makes directly for his enemy. This
move, like a stroke of genius, brings him within one hundred feet of
the _Serapis_, directly between it and the wind. It is his purpose
to blanket the enemy, and steal the breeze from him. He succeeds; the
_Serapis_ loses way.

It is now the turn of Commodore Paul Jones to go across his enemy’s
forefoot, and retort upon the _Serapis_ that manouvre which Captain
Pearson attempted against the _Richard_. But with this difference:
Captain Pearson’s purpose was to rake; Commodore Paul Jones’ purpose is
to board; for he lias now no guns wherewith to rake.

The _Serapis_ is held as though in irons, canvas a-flap, by the blanket
of the _Richard_‘s broad sails. Slowly yet surely, like the coming of
a doom, the _Richard_ forges across the other’s head. The design of
Commodore Paul Jones is to lay the _Serapis_ aboard, lash ship to ship,
and sweep the Englishman’s decks with his boarders. These, armed to the
teeth, as ready for the rush as so many hunting dogs, Lieutenant Mayrant
is holding in the waist.

The _Richard_ is half its length across the bows of the _Serapis_--still
helpless, sails a-droop! Suddenly, by a twist of the helm, Commodore
Paul Jones broaches the _Richard_ to on the opposite tack, and doubles
down on his prey. It is the beginning of the end. The jib-boom of
the _Serapis_ runs in over the poop-deck of the _Richard_; a turn is
instantly taken on it with a small hawser by Lieutenant Dale, who makes
all fast to the _Richard_‘s mizzen-mast. The ships swing closer and
closer together; at last the two rasp broadside against broadside, the
_Richard_ still holding its way. As they grind along, the outboard
fluke of the _Serapis_’ starboard anchor catches in the Richard’s
mizzen-chains. First one, then another gives way; the third holds, and
the ships lie together bow and stern. Commodore Paul Jones is over
the side like a cat; the next moment he lashes the _Serapis_ to the
_Richard_, and the death-hug is at hand.




CHAPTER XVI--HOW THE BATTLE RAGED

Commodore Paul Jones drops overboard his cocked hat. Orderly Jack
Downes rushes into the cabin and gets another. Returning, he offers it
to Commodore Paul Jones, who waves it away with a laugh.

“Chuck it through the skylight, Jack,” he says; “I’ll fight this out in
my scalp.” Then, glancing forward at the sailors, naked to the waist:
“If it were not for the looks of the thing, I’d off coat and shirt, and
fight in the buff like yonder gallant hearties.”

There is a sudden smashing of the _Richard_‘s bulwarks, a splintering of
spars; a sleet of shot, grape and solid and bar, tears through the ship!
In the wake of that hail of iron comes the thunder of the guns--loud
and close aboard! Commodore Paul Jones looks about in angry wonder; that
broadside was not from the _Serapis_!

“It’s the _Alliance!_” cries Lieutenant Dale, rushing aft. “Landais is
firing on us!”

Not half a cable-length away lies the Alliance, head to the wind,
topsails back, half hidden in a curling smother of powder-smoke. There
comes but the one broadside. Even as Commodore Paul Jones looks, the
traitor’s head pays slowly off; a moment later the sails belly and fill,
and the Alliance is running seaward before the wind. Commodore Paul
Jones grits out a curse.

“Landais! Was ever another such a villain out of hell!”

The villain Landais makes off. There is no time for maledictions;
besides, a court-martial will come later for that miscreant. Just now
Captain Pearson, with his _Serapis_, claims the attention of Commodore
Paul Jones.

The tackle takes the strain; the lashings, and that fortunate starboard
anchor of the _Serapis_, hold the ships together. Captain Pearson sees
the peril, and the way to free himself.

“Cut away that sta’board anchor!” he cries. Then, as a seaman armed with
a hatchet springs forward, he continues: “The ring-stopper, man! Cut the
shank-painter and the ring-stopper; let the anchor go!”

Commodore Paul Jones snatches a firelock from one of the agitated French
marines. Steadying himself against a backstay, he raises the weapon to
his shoulder and fires. The ball goes crashing through the seaman’s head
as he raises his hatchet to cut free the anchor. Another leaps forward
and grasps the hatchet. Seizing a second firelock, Commodore Paul Jones
stretches him across the anchor’s shank, where he lies clutching and
groaning and bleeding his life away. As the second man goes down, those
nearest fall back. That fatal starboard anchor is a death-trap; they
want none of it! Commodore Paul Jones, alert as a wildcat and as bent
for blood, keeps grim watch, firelock in fist, at the backstay.

“I turned those hitches with my own hands,” says he; “and I’ll shoot
down any Englishman who meddles with them.”

The French marines, despite the hardy example of Commodore Paul Jones,
are in a panic. Their Captain Cammillard is wounded, and has retired
below. Now their two lieutenants are gone. Besides, of the more than one
hundred to go into the fight, no more than twenty-five remain. These,
nerve-shattered and deeming all as lost, are fallen into disorder and
dismay. The centuries have taught them to fear these sullen English. The
lesson has come down to them in the blood of their fathers who fought at
Crécy, Poitiers, Blenheim, Ramillies, and Malplaquet that these bulldog
islanders are unconquerable! Panic grasps them at the moment of all
moments when Commodore Paul Jones requires them most.

Seeing them thus shaken and beaten in their hearts, Commodore Paul
Jones--who knows Frenchmen in their impulses as he knows his own face in
a glass--adopts the theatrical. He rushes into their midst, thundering:

“Courage, my friends! What a day for France is this! We have these dogs
of English at our mercy! Courage but a little while, my friends, and the
day is ours! Oh, what a day for France!” As adding éclat to that day for
France, Commodore Paul Jones snatches a third firelock from the nearest
marine, and shoots down a third Briton who, hatchet upraised, is rushing
upon that detaining anchor. Following this exploit, he wheels again upon
those wavering marines, and by way of raising their spirits pours forth
in French such a cataract of curses upon all Englishmen and English
things that it fairly exhausts the imagination of his hearers to keep
abreast of it.

Pierre Gerard, the little Breton sailor who, with Jack Downes, acts as
orderly to Commodore Paul Jones, is swept off his feet in admiration of
his young commander’s fire and profane fluency. Little Pierre takes fire
in his turn.

“See!” he cries, addressing Jack Downes, who being from New Hampshire
understands never a word of Pierre’s French, albeit he takes it in,
open-mouthed, like spring water; “See! He springs among them like a
tiger among calves! Ah, they respond to him! Yes, in an instant he
arouses their courage! They look upon him--him, who has bravery without
end! Name of God! To see him is to become a hero!”

It is as the excitable little Pierre recounts. The French marines,
lately so cowed, look upon Commodore Paul Jones to become heroes. With
shouts and cries they crowd about him valorously. He directs their fire
against the English, who man the long-nines in the open waist of the
_Serapis_. The fire of the recovered Frenchmen drives those English from
their guns. Thereupon the French go wild with a fierce joy, and are all
for boarding the _Serapis_. Commodore Paul Jones has as much trouble
restraining them from rushing forward as he had but a moment before to
keep them from falling back.

Captain Pearson has never taken his eyes from that fatal starboard
anchor, holding him fast to the _Richard_. There it lies, his own
anchor--the key-stone to the arch of his ruin! If it take every English
life aboard the _Serapis_, it must be cut away! He orders four men
forward in a body, to cut shank-painter and ring-stopper.

There comes an instant volley from the recovered French marines, led by
Commodore Paul Jones, who fires with them. Before that withering volley
the four hatchet-men fall in a crumpled, bloody heap. The fatal anchor
still holds; the ships grind side by side.

Captain Pearson orders forward more men, and still more men, to cut away
that anchor, which is as an anchor of death, tying him broadside and
broadside to destruction. Fourteen men die, one across the other, under
the fire of Commodore Paul Jones and his French marines--each of
the latter being now a volcano of fiery valor! The last to perish is
Lieutenant Popplewill; he dies honorably at the hands of Commodore Paul
Jones himself, who sends a musket ball through the high heart of the
young dreadnought just as he reaches those fatal fastenings.

While this labor of death and bloody slaughter goes on above, the
smashing work of the _Serapis_’ eighteen-pounders has not ceased between
decks. As the two ships come together, the lower-tier gun crews of the
_Serapis_ are shifted from the port to the starboard batteries. They
attempt to run out the guns, and are withstood by the port-lids, which
refuse to be triced up, the _Richard_ grinding them so hard and close as
to hold them fast.

“What!” cries Lieutenant Wright, who has command of the _Serapis_’
eighteen-pounders; “the ports won’t open? Open them with your
round-shot, then, my hearties! Fire!”

And so the broadside of the _Serapis_ is fired through its own planks
and timbers, to open a way to the _Richard_.

“There!” cries Lieutenant Wright exultantly, “that should give your guns
a chance to breathe, my bucks! Now show us how fast you can send your
iron aboard the Yankee!”

The English broadside men respond with such goodwill that they literally
cut the _Richard_ in two between decks with their tempest of solid
eighteen-pound shot.

While this smashing battery work goes forward, hammer and anvil, the
_Serapis_’ twelve-pounders are tearing and rending the _Richard_‘s
upper decks, piling them in ruins. Every twelve-pounder belonging to
the _Richard_ is rendered dumb. Only three long-nines remain in service.
These are mounted on the quarter-deck, under the eye of Commodore Paul
Jones.

“Suppose, Mr. Lindthwait, you train them on the enemy’s mainmast!” he
observes to the midshipman, under whose command he places the three
long-nines. “Try for his mainmast, young man! It will be good gunnery
practise for you; and should you cut the stick in two, so much the
better.”

Midshipman Lindthwait serves his trio of long nines with so much relish
and vivacious accuracy that he soon has the mainmast of the _Serapis_
cut half away. Leaving him to his task, Commodore Paul Jones again takes
his French marines in hand, uplifts their souls with a fresh torrent of
anti-English vituperation, and keeps them to the business of clearing
the enemy’s deck.

One of the nine-pound shot of the industrious Lindthwait, flying low,
strikes the main hatch of the _Serapis_, and slews the hatch cover to
one side. It leaves a triangular opening, eighteen inches on its longish
side, at one corner of the hatch. Commodore Paul Jones has his hawklike
eye on it instantly. He points it out to midshipman Fanning and gunner
Henry Gardner.

“There’s your chance, my lads!” he cries. “Sharp’s the word now! Lay
aloft on the main topsail yard, with a bucketful of hand-grenades,
and see if you can’t chuck one into her belly. A few hand-grenades,
exploding among their eighteen-pounders below decks, would go far
towards showing these English the error of their ways.”

Off skurry Midshipman Fanning and Gunner Gardner, with three sailors
close behind. A moment later they are racing up the shrouds like
monkeys, two ratlins at a time. Buckets of hand-grenades go with them,
while Lieutenant Stack rigs a whip to the maintop to send them up a
fresh supply.

The five lie out on the main topsail yard, like a quintette of
squirrels, midshipman Fanning, a bright lad from New London, getting the
place of honor at the earring. The three sailors pass the hand-grenades,
gunner Gardner fires the fuse with his slow match, while midshipman
Fanning, perched at the farthest end of the yard, hurls them at that
eighteen-inch triangle, where the hatch cover of the _Serapis_ has been
shifted.

Sixty feet below the hand-grenade quintette, Commodore Paul Jones is
again dealing out profane encouragement to his marines, for their ardor
sensibly slackens the moment he takes his eye off them. They do good
work, however--these Frenchmen! Under their fire the upper deck of the
_Serapis_ becomes a slaughter-pen. One after another, seven men are shot
down at the Englishman’s wheel. This does not affect the _Serapis_;
since, locked together in the death grapple, both ships are adrift, and
have paid no attention to their helms for twenty minutes. Still, it does
the Frenchmen good to shoot down those wheelmen. Also, it mortifies
the pride of the English; for to be unable to stay at one’s own wheel is
in its way a disgrace.

While Commodore Paul Jones is uplifting his Frenchmen, and improving
their small-arm practice, orderly Jack Downes, who has been forward to
Lieutenant Dale with an order, comes rushing aft.

“Lieutenant Dale, sir, reports six feet of water in our hold; and coming
in fast, sir!”

Orderly Jack Downes touches his forelock, face as stolid aw a statue’s,
and not at all as though he has just reported the ship to be sinking.
Commodore Paul Jones smiles approval on stolid Jack Downes; he likes
coolness and self-command. Before he can speak, Lieutenant Mayrant comes
aft to say that the _Richard_ is on fire.

“Catches from the enemy’s wadding,” says Lieutenant Mayrant. “For you
must understand, sir, that when the enemy’s eighteen-pounders are run
out, their muzzles pierce through the shot-holes in our sides--we lay
that close! As it is, they’ve set us all ablaze.”

“But you’ve got the flames in hand?” Commodore Paul Jones puts the
question confidently. He is sure that Lieutenant Mayrant wouldn’t be by
his side at that moment unless the fire is under command.

“Lieutenant Stack, with ten men to pass the buckets, sir, are attending
to it. It’s quite easy, the water in our hold being so deep. They have
but to dip it up and throw it on the fire.”

“Good!” exclaimed Commodore Paul Jones. “Now that’s what I call making
one hand wash the other. We put out the flames that are eating us up
with the water that is sinking us.”




CHAPTER XVII--THE SURRENDER OF THE “SERAPIS”

Master-at-arms John Burbank looks over the _Richard_‘s side, and makes
a discovery. The ship has settled three feet below its trim. Thereupon
he loses his head, which was never a strong head, but somewhat thick,
and addled:

“The ship is sinking!” he shouts; then, being a humanitarian, he tears
off the orlop-hatch, and calls to the two hundred prisoners shut up
below to save themselves.

At the invitation of Humanitarian Burbank, the prisoners rush up. Fifty
of them have gained the deck when Commodore Paul Jones perceives them.
Pulling a pistol from his belt, he charges forward.

“Who released these prisoners?” he demands.

“The ship is sinking, sir,” replies Humanitarian Burbank. “I released
them to give them a chance for their lives.”

Eye ablaze, Commodore Paul Jones snaps his pistol in the face of
Humanitarian Burbank. Fortunately for that philanthropist, the priming
has been shaken out; while the flint throws off a shower of sparks, the
pistol does not explode. Upon its failure to fire. Commodore Paul Jones
clubs the heavy weapon, and fells Humanitarian Burbank to the deck. The
latter comes to presently, to find himself disrated on the ship’s books,
and his addled pate more addled than before. As Humanitarian Burbank
falls to the deck, Commodore Paul Jones makes a dash for the prisoners,
who, two abreast, are pushing up from the deck below.

“Under hatches with them!” he cries.

This rouses Midshipman Potter, who brings up a half dozen cutlass
men, and those of the prisoners not yet on deck are held below. The
orlop-hatch is again fitted to its place, and Commodore Paul Jones
breathes freer. Two hundred prisoners loose about his decks is not what
he most desires.

“Set them to the pumps, Dick,” he says, addressing Lieutenant Dale.
“Give them plenty of work.” Then, to the fifty prisoners who gained
the deck: “Now, my men, to the pumps, all of you! I’ll have no idlers
about!”

The prisoners go to the pumps readily enough--all save a stubborn
merchant captain, whose ship was captured by the _Richard_ off the port
of Leith.

“Don’t ye go a-nigh the pumps, mates!” sings out the stubborn one. “Let
the damned Yankee pirate sink!”

“Obey the Commodore, sare!” pipes up little Pierre Gerard, presenting
a pistol at the head of the mutineer. “Obey the Commodore, or I shoot,
sare!”

The stubborn Scotch captain does not understand little Pierre’s broken
English, but the pistol is easily construed. For reply, he makes a quick
grab at the weapon. Little Pierre, not to be caught napping, shoots
him promptly through the head. As the stubborn one drops lifeless,
the little Breton wheels on Commodore Paul Jones, lays his hand on his
heart, and makes an apologetic bow.

“I shoot heem, sare, to relieve you of a disagreeable duty,” says little
Pierre.

The other prisoners are not unimpressed by the fate of the stubborn one,
and set to work briskly, if not cheerfully, at the clanking pumps.

As Commodore Paul Jones reaches the quarterdeck, following the incident
wherein Humanitarian Burbank performs, and the stubborn Scotch captain
dies, the ensign-gaff of the _Richard_ is shot away, and the virgin
petticoat flag of the pretty New Hampshire girls trails overboard. This
gives rise to a misunderstanding. Gunner Arthur Randall, missing the
ensign, and his hopes being somewhat low at the time, calls out to the
Englishman:

“Cease firing! We’ve surrendered!”

Captain Pearson, on the quarter-deck of the _Serapis_, hears the cry.
There could have come no more welcome news! Captain Pearson would have
heard gunner Randall if the latter had spoken in a whisper! Face aglow
with joy, Captain Pearson hails the _Richard_:

“Do you surrender?” he demands.

Commodore Paul Jones leaps to the rail of the _Richard_, and sustains
himself by one of the afterbraces.

“Surrender?” he repeats, his brow dark with rage. “Surrender? I would
have you to know, sir, that we’ve just begun to fight!”

Back to the deck springs Commodore Paul Jones, while the face of Captain
Pearson is stricken old and white. For the earliest time he realizes
the desperate heart of that unconquerable one who has him in a
death-grapple, and a premonition of his own defeat pierces his heart
like a dagger of ice. As Commodore Paul Jones regains the deck, he
observes Boatswain Jack Robinson who has waddled aft. The cloud of anger
fades from his brow, and he breaks into a loud laugh that is tenfold
worse than the cloud.

“Eh, Jack, old trump! What say you to quitting?” he cries.

“Why! as to surrenderin’, Commodore,” says Boatswain Jack Robinson,
refreshing himself with a huge chew of tobacco, “I’m for sinkin’
alongside an’ seein’ ‘em damned first! Sink alongside, says I; an’ if
the grapplin’ tackle holds, we’ll take ‘em with us to Davy Jones, d’ye
see! An’ that’ll be a comfort!”

“There’s the heart of oak!” returns Commodore Paul Jones, in vast
approval of Boatswain Jack Robinson’s turgid views; “and when we’re
next ashore in New London, old shipmate, I’ll tell Polly all about it.
Meanwhile, our ensign’s trailing astern. Set it aboard by the halyards,
fish and splice the gaff, and put it back in its place. Give the
Englishmen a sight of that red, white and blue flag, Jack; it takes the
fight out of ‘em.”

“Ay, ay, sir!” responds Boatswain Jack Robinson, as he begins the task
of recovering and replacing the ensign. “That flag does seem to let the
whey out of a Britisher.”

This is gratuitous slander on the parts of both Commodore Paul Jones and
Boatswain Jack Robinson; for those villified ones have been fighting
for hours, and are still at it with the quenchless valor of so many
mastiffs.

There is that at hand, however, that will daunt their iron courage and
feed even their stout hearts to dismay. High up at the weather earring
of the _Richard_‘s main topsail yard, Midshipman Fanning has been
faithfully practicing with hand-grenades at that inviting triangular
hole, where the hatch-cover of the _Serapis_ was shot-slewed to one
side. It is not an easy mark, that black, three-cornered hole, and thus
far Midshipman Fanning has missed. It is now that success crowns his
work; a smoking, spitting hand-grenade goes cleanly through, and fetches
up on the _Serapis_‘s lower gun deck. The explosion instantly occurs; it
is as though the fuse were carefully timed for it.

If this were all it would be bad enough, but worse comes with it.
There are scores of cartridges cumbering the deck to the rear of the
batteries; for the powder monkeys of the _Serapis_, earning their pay
and allowances, have been bringing powder from the magazines much faster
than the gunners can burn it in their eighteen-pounders. The exploding
hand-grenade sets off this powder. There is a blinding sheet of flame; a
report like smothered thunder; the deck of the _Serapis_ is all but torn
from its timbers! Fifty of the crew are killed or crippled, while
the slewed hatch-cover is blown overboard. No trouble now to hit that
yawning black hatchway. With such a target there can be no talk of
missing, and Midshipman Fanning and gunner Gardner, from their high
perch on the main topsail yard, fill the stomach of the _Serapis_ with
a bursting, death-dealing shower. And so the end comes tapping at the
door.

Lieutenant Mayrant, with his boarding party, stands waiting the signal.
Commodore Paul Jones notes the devastation wrought by Midshipman
Fanning’s hand-grenades.

“Boarders away!” he cries.

Lieutenant Mayrant and his men go swarming over the hammock nettings
of the _Serapis_, the red Indian port-fire, Anthony Jeremiah, among the
foremost.

As Lieutenant Mayrant reaches the deck of the _Serapis_, an English
sailor thrusts him through the thigh with a pike. Lieutenant Mayrant
shoots the pikeman though the heart. The latter falls dead, pike
rattling along the deck.

“Remember Portsea jail, lads!” shouts Lieutenant Mayrant, as he strides
limpingly across the body of the dead pikeman. “Remember Port-sea jail!”

Nine in ten of the boarding party are of those ones exchanged at Nantes.
With savage cries, they shout back, “Remember Portsea jail!” and the
work of their vengeance is begun.

Commodore Paul Jones has his eyes on Lieutenant Mayrant and his
boarders. His attention is claimed by orderly Jack Downes, who plucks
him by the elbow.

“Beg pardon, sir!” says orderly Jack Downes. “Captain Landais with the
_Alliance_.”

Sure enough, the _Alliance_ for a second time has crept down upon them,
unnoticed in the heat and absorbing fury of the fray. The consort ship
is wearing across the _Richard_‘s bows. What will Landais do? Does he
come as friend or foe? The Frenchman has his answer ready, and pours
a broadside into the _Richard_ as he crosses. Then he sheers off, and
again heads for the open ocean. That coward broadside kills and wounds
Master’s Mate Caswell and seven men. Commodore Paul Jones is rigid with
rage and wonder.

“The man is mad!” says Lieutenant Dale.

“I cannot understand!” returns Commodore Paul Jones. “There is still his
crew! Why don’t they clap him in irons, or cut him down?”

There is a shout from the deck of the _Serapis_. Captain Pearson, his
last hope gone, has struck his colors with his own hand. The shout is
from the wounded Lieutenant Mayrant, who hails Lieutenant Dale.

“Stop the firing, sir,” cries Lieutenant May-rant, for the Richard’s
top-men are still blazing away merrily. “He has struck his flag. Come on
board, and take possession!”

Lieutenant Dale leaps to the deck of the beaten _Serapis_. He sends
Captain Pearson aboard the _Richard_. Downcast, eye full of dejection,
Captain Pearson approaches Commodore Paul Jones. “With bowed head,
saying never a word, he tenders the conqueror his sheathed sword.
Commodore Paul Jones takes it and gives it to Midshipman Potter, who is
at his elbow.

“I accept your sword, Captain,” says Commodore Paul Jones. “And I bear
testimony that you have worn it to the glory of the English navy.”

Captain Pearson makes no response. Bowed of head, mute of lip, he stands
before Commodore Paul Jones, despair eating his heart.




CHAPTER XVIII--DIPLOMACY AND THE DUTCH

Commodore Paul Jones goes aboard the beaten _Serapis_. “Cut free that
sta’board anchor!” he cries. The piled dead and wounded are lifted
aside, and that fatal anchor, which for two hours of blood has been as
the backbone of battle, goes splashing into the ocean. The ships rock
apart; as they separate, Commodore Paul Jones takes a sharp survey of
the _Richard_. The survey brings little hope; his good ship that has
fought so well for him lies in the water four smothering feet below its
trim.

“There are eight feet of water in the hold,” replies Lieutenant Dale,
whom he hails. “The pumps choke; there’s no chance to save the ship.”

Then arises a sudden rending and tearing aboard the _Serapis_; there is
a great swish! and a snapping of cordage. It is the mainmast crashing to
port, a tangle of ropes and spars.

“Beg pardon, sir,” says a voice at the elbow of Commodore Paul Jones.
“I’d have had it down an hour ago, but there was neither wind nor swell
to help me. I had to cut it in two shot by shot to drop it, sir.”

Commodore Paul Jones breaks into a smile. “Ah, yes; I remember, Mr.
Lindthwait! I set you at that mainmast with the three long nines. I wish
now that I’d given you another target. However, you did extremely well.
It should teach you, too, my lad, that a nine is as good as an eighteen,
if you’ll only go close enough. That’s it; there’s the whole secret of
success in war. Be sure and go close enough, and you will conquer.”

Midshipman Lindthwait salutes respectfully, and lays away that golden
rule of the battle art in his memory.

The removal of the _Richard_‘s wounded is begun. The calm, windless sea
assists; at last no one is left aboard the shot-pierced _Richard_ but
the dead.

Sixty lionhearts, who gave their lives for victory, are laid side by
side on the deck. The petticoat flag flies proudly from the ensign
gaff. Commodore Paul Jones, from the deck of the _Serapis_, watches the
_Richard_ to the last. The tears dim his sight, and he is driven more
than once to dash them away; for a sailor loves his ship as though it
were a woman.

The _Richard_ settles by the head; the stern is lifted clear of the
water. Then, as though seized by some impulse, the _Richard_, bows
first, dives for the bottom of the sea. The last that is seen, as the
stout old ship goes down, is the virgin petticoat flag of the pretty
Portsmouth girls. Commodore Paul Jones, bare of head, tears blinding his
eyes, waves a last farewell.

“Good-bye, my lads!” he cries. “And you, too, my _Richard_; good-bye!”

The _Pallas_ comes up, breeze aft. The little ship throws its head into
the wind, and Captain Cot-tineau hails Commodore Paul Jones.

“I have the honor, sir,” says Captain Cottineau, “to report the enemy’s
surrender of his ship.”

Captain Cottineau points with his speaking-trumpet to the _Countess of
Scarboro_ a furlong astern, the stars and stripes above the Union Jack.

Commodore Paul Jones congratulates Captain Cottineau, and tells him to
make sail for Dunkirk with his prize. Captain Cottineau, observing the
helpless _Serapis_, its deck a jungle of cordage and broken timbers,
replies that if Commodore Paul Jones doesn’t mind he’d sooner stand by.
Commodore Paul Jones doesn’t mind, and so Captain Cottineau, with the
_Pallas_ and the captured Scarboro stands by. The loyalty of Captain
Cottineau flushes the bronzed cheek of Commodore Paul Jones. It is a
change from the villain Landais! Ah, yes! Landais! The brow of Commodore
Paul Jones turns black with anger; for a moment he forgot the scoundrel.
He runs his glass along the horizon to seaward. There is no sign of
the Alliance. Long ago the traitor Landais turned his recreant bows for
France.

An off-shore gale springs up; adrift and helpless, the _Serapis_ is
carried seventy miles towards the coast of Norway. This is fortunate; it
carries the ship outside the search of those twenty frigates and ships
of the line, which are already furiously ransacking the English coast in
quest of Commodore Paul Jones.

The wind veers to the southwest, and blows a hurricane. The Serapis is
all but thrown upon the coast of Denmark, and has work to keep afloat.
With one hundred and six wounded, and the dead who went down with the
_Richard_, Commodore Paul Jones is short of hands to work his ship. At
the best, no more than one hundred and fifty are fit for duty. In the
end the battered _Serapis_ makes the Texel, and a common sigh of relief
goes up from those seven hundred and twelve souls--crew and wounded and
prisoners--who are aboard the ship.

And now Commodore Paul Jones must lay aside his sword for chicane,
abandon his guns in favor of diplomacy. His anchors are hardly down
in Dutch mud, before Sir Joseph Yorke, English Ambassador to Holland,
demands the _Serapis_ from the Dutch authorities. Also, he declares that
they must arrest Commodore Paul Jones “as a rebel and a pirate.”

The Dutch display a wish to argue the case with Sir Joseph, while
Commodore Paul Jones double-shots his guns and runs them out; for
much in the way of repairs has been effected aboard the _Serapis_, and
although it can’t sail it can fight.

Sir Joseph, at the grinning insolence of the _Serapis_’
broadsides--ports triced up and muzzles showing--almost falls in an
apoplectic fit. Purple as to face, he sends a second time to the Dutch,
to learn whether or no he is to have the _Serapis_ and the rebel and
pirate Paul Jones.

For five days the Dutch drink beer, smoke pipes, and think the matter
over. Then they tell Sir Joseph that, while they don’t know what to call
Commodore Paul Jones, they have decided not to call him a pirate. Rebel,
he may be; but in that role of rebel King George and Sir Joseph must
catch him for themselves. The most the Dutch will do is order the
_Serapis_ to leave the Texel. At this the empurpled Sir Joseph becomes
more empurpled than ever. It is the best he can get, however; and
since, during the night, a fleet of British men of war, hearing of the
whereabouts of Commodore Paul Jones, have invested the mouth of the
Helder and are waiting for him to come out, he begins to be a trifle
comforted. If the Dutch will but drive the “rebel” from the port,
it should do nicely; the English fleet outside will snap him up at a
mouthful.

Commodore Paul Jones refuses to be driven out. He sits stubbornly by his
anchors, decks cleared, guns shotted, boarding nettings up--an insult
to the purple Sir Joseph and a frowning defiance to the Dutch! The Dutch
and Sir Joseph look at him, and then at each other. They agree that
he is either the most exasperating of rebels, or the most insolent of
pirates, or the most impertinent of guests, according to their various
standpoints.

Meanwhile, the French Ambassador is bestirring himself. He makes a
stealthy visit to Commodore Paul Jones. The French king has sent him,
post-haste, a commission as Captain in the French marine. The French
Ambassador tenders the commission. Upon accepting it, Commodore Paul
Jones can run up the French flag. The Dutch will respect the tri-color,
and there will come no more orders for the _Serapis_ to quit the Texel.

Commodore Paul Jones declines the French commission. Neither will he
run up the French flag. “I am an officer of the American Navy,” says he,
“and the French tri-color no more belongs at my masthead than at General
Washington’s headquarters. I shall stand or fall by the Stars and
Stripes. Also, here at the Texel I stay, until I’m ready to leave; that
I say in the teeth of Dutchman and Englishman alike.”

When this hardy note goes ashore, the Dutch look solemn, Sir Joseph
retires with the gout, while the English outside the mouth of the
Hel-der, stand oft and on, gnashing their iron teeth.




CHAPTER XIX--NOW FOR THE TRAITOR LANDAIS

While the Dutch and Sir Joseph are debating as to whether Commodore
Paul Jones is a rebel, a pirate or a disagreeable guest, that gentleman
discovers Landais, with the Alliance, tucked away in a corner of the
Texel. Headwinds, and an overplus of English on the high seas, have
forced the miscreant into the Helder, and he finds himself as much
cooped up as does Commodore Paul Jones. Indeed the miserable Landais is
in a far more serious predicament; for, aside from the English
outside, waiting at the Helder’s mouth like terriers at a rat-hole, the
formidable Paul Jones is inside with him, and Landais fears the latter
as no Frenchman ever feared the English.

The alarms of Landais are well grounded; Commodore Paul Jones opens
negotiations at once. He sends word to Landais to give command of the
_Alliance_ to Lieutenant Degge, and at once leave the ship. The word is
supplemented by the assurance that at the end of twenty-four hours he,
Commodore Paul Jones, shall come aboard the Alliance. Should he then
find Landais, he will be put in irons.

“Why not arrest the scoundrel at once?” pleads Lieutenant Dale.

“He is a Frenchman, Dick,” returns Commodore Paul Jones, “and I fear to
worry Doctor Franklin.” Then, assuming a look of cunning, vast and deep:
“Wait until my diplomacy unfolds itself. You will find that I have the
wisdom of the serpent.”

Lieutenant Dale grunts disgustedly. He cares nothing for the wisdom of
the serpent, less for any spun-glass diplomacy. What he wants is the
Landais blood directly; and says as much.

“Remember,” he goes on, “this murderer Landais killed Caswell with that
last felon broadside!”

“I shall forget nothing,” returns Commodore Paul Jones.

At the end of twenty-four hours, Commodore Paul Jones boards the
_Alliance_. He finds Lieutenant Degge in command; the craven Landais has
slipped ashore with all his belongings. Commodore Paul Jones is the
last man he cares to face. The latter tells Lieutenant Degge to clap the
irons on Landais, should he return, and signal the _Serapis_.

“You must understand, sir,” responds Lieutenant Degge, “that my crew
is honeycombed with mutiny. Captain Landais brought about a conspiracy;
two-thirds of the ship’s company are in it.”

“Make me out a list of the leaders, and muster them aft.”

Lieutenant Degge gives Commodore Paul Jones the names of twenty. These
are called aft--lowering and sullen. Commodore Paul Jones orders them
transferred to the _Serapis_.

“I’ll send you an even number to take their places,” he says to
Lieutenant Degge. “Meanwhile, my old sea-wolves will lick them into
patriotic shape. Should they fail, you may find some half dozen of the
ringleaders at least, dangling from my yardarms.”

The caitiff Landais, driven from his ship, fumes and blusters. He tries
to see the French Ambassador, and is refused. Then he sends a challenge
to Commodore Paul Jones.

Lieutenant Dale finds the latter mariner in his cabin, blandly
triumphant.

“There,” he cries, tossing the Landais challenge over to Lieutenant
Dale--“there, Dick, read that! You will then see what I meant by
telling you to wait until my diplomacy had had time to unfold.”

“But you don’t mean to fight the creature?” and Lieutenant Dale glances
up from his reading, horrified.

“Fight him; and kill him, sir! Why not? Do you suppose for a moment that
poor Caswell is to go unavenged?”

“But think what you do! You can’t fight this fellow! The man is to be
court-martialed.”

“Ah, yes, Dick! But observe; I’ve as yet refrained from making formal
charges against him. So far as the books go, he rates as well as you or
I.”

Commodore Paul Jones gets this off with inexpressible slyness, as one
who discloses the very heart of his cunning.

“But my dear Commodore,” returns Lieutenant Dale, desperately, “the
thing is impossible! This Landais is not a gentleman! He is the
commonest of blacklegs.”

“Dick! Dick!” remonstrates Commodore Paul Jones; “you do him an
injustice! Technically at least you wrong him. You should summon up more
fairness. Now, here is how I look at it:” Commodore Paul Jones grows
highly judgmatical. “I follow the law, which says that a man is supposed
to be innocent until he’s shown to be guilty. Influenced by this, which
to my mind breathes the very spirit of justice, I make it an unbreakable
rule, in matters of the duello, to regard every man as a gentleman
unless the contrary has been explicitly demonstrated. No, Dick”--this
solemnly--“Landais, whatever you or I may privately think, has still his
rights. I shall fight him, Dick.”

Commodore Paul Jones sends Lieutenant May-rant ashore, as his
representative, to accept the Landais challenge.

“I should have sent you, Dick,” he explains to Lieutenant Dale, who
inclines to the cloudy because he had been slighted; “but, to tell the
truth, I couldn’t trust you. Yes; you’d have cut in between us, and
fought him in my stead. And the fact is, if you must have it, I’ve set
my heart on killing the rogue myself.”

Lieutenant Mayrant finds Landais, vaporing and blustering.

“Pistols; ten paces,” says Lieutenant May-rant. “Time and place you may
settle for yourself.”

“Pistols!” exclaims Landais, his face a muddy gray. Pistols and Paul
Jones mean death. With a gesture, as though dismissing an unpleasant
thought, he cries: “I shall not fight with pistols! They are not
recognized in Prance as the weapons of a gentleman!”

“They are in America,” retorts Lieutenant Mayrant. “Neither shall you
palter or split hairs! Pistols it shall be; or I tell you frankly that
the officers of the _Serapis_, ay! the very foc’sel hands, will beat
you and drub you for a cowardly swab, wherever they come across you.”

Landais does not respond directly to this. He walks up and down,
stomaching the hard words in silence. For he perceives, as through an
open window, that the hidden purpose of Lieutenant Mayrant is to pick
a quarrel with him. At last Landais makes it clear that under no
compulsion will he fight with pistols. Neither will he give the hopeful
Mayrant an opening to edge in a challenge for himself. After a fruitless
hour the latter, sad and depressed, returns aboard the _Serapis_.

“Nothing could have been handled more delicately,” he reports to
Commodore Paul Jones; “but, do my best, sir, I couldn’t coax the rascal
to the field.”

The next day Lieutenant Dale, making a flimsy excuse about wishing to
see the French secretary, goes ashore. He is using a crutch; for, like
Lieutenant Mayrant, he was wounded in the battle. He finds the crutch
inexpressibly convenient. Having hunted down Landais, whom he finds in a
change house, he uses it to belabor that personage, giving him the while
such descriptives as “dog!” “spy!” “liar!” “coward!” The heavy Dutchmen,
quaffing their beer, interfere to save Landais from the warlike
Lieutenant Dale. That night Landais starts post for Paris, to the mighty
disappointment of Commodore Paul Jones.

“You told me you wanted to see the French secretary. It wasn’t fair
of you, Dick!” is all Commodore Paul Jones says, when he learns of the
doings of Lieutenant Dale and his crutch in the change house.

“Well!” grumbles Lieutenant Dale defensively, “so I did want to see the
French secretary; although I’ve now forgotten what it was all about. The
sight of that dastard drove it from my head.”

The French Ambassador again boards the _Serapis_. He bears orders from
De Sartine, the French Minister of Marine, and a letter from Doctor
Franklin, full of suggestions which have the force of orders. The
_Pallas_ is a French ship, and the _Scarboro_ captured by it, is a
French prize. The _Serapis_, prize to the _Richard_, also a French ship,
is by the same token a French prize. The French flag must be hoisted
on these ships, and the trio made over to the French Ambassador. The
_Alliance_, an American built ship, the King of France doesn’t claim.
He recommends, however, that it run up French colors, as a diplomatic
method of quieting Dutch excitement, which is slowly but surely rising.
Doctor Franklin’s letter sustains the French claim to the _Pallas_, the
_Scarboro_ and the _Serapis_. He leaves Commodore Paul Jones to settle
flags for the _Alliance_ as he may deem best. The Ambassador makes, in
this connection, a second tender of a Captain’s commission in the French
Navy.

“No,” responds Commodore Paul Jones bitterly, “I shall not accept it.
King Louis shall have the _Serapis_, the _Pallas_ and the _Scarboro_
since Doctor Franklin so orders. The _Alliance_ and I, however, shall
remain American.”

Commodore Paul Jones gives the French Ambassador possession of the
_Serapis_. Also, he waxes sarcastic, and intimates that it is the only
way by which the French could have gotten the _Serapis_ into their
hands. This piece of wit does him no good, when later he asks it
back from De Sartine. Sullen and dogged, he prepares to go aboard the
Alliance, and orders the crew of the _Serapis_ to follow.

Again the French Ambassador interferes. What French subjects are on
the musters of the Alliance and _Serapis_ must be left in his charge.
Commodore Paul Jones is to have none but Americans.

At this some sixty Danes speak up. They may not be Americans, but at
least they are not French. Making this announcement, the gallant Scands
refuse the orders of the French Ambassador, and pack their kits for the
_Alliance_. These Danes are of the true viking litter, with yellow hair
and steel-gray eyes. Their action comes like balm to the sore heart of
Commodore Paul Jones. Later when he musters his reorganized crew aboard
the _Alliance_, and makes them a brief talk, he speaks of the desertion
of the French. He is interrupted by a youth--small and light and
delicate. The youth steps out from among the sailors, and with him come
four others. The youth bows half-way to the deck.

“No,” he says--“no, Monsieur le Commodore, not all the French have
desert. I, Pierre Gerard, am still with you--I, and my four bold
comrades, who are brave men.”

“They wants to stay, sir,” vouchsafes Boatswain Jack Robinson, coming
forward to the aid of little Pierre and his companions. “An’ so, d’ye
see, since I always likes to encourage zeal, I stows ‘em away in the
long boat till that frog-eatin’ Ambassador is over the side. An’ so,
here they be, game as pebbles, an’ a credit to the sta’board watch.”

All his prisoners and wounded have been put ashore, under arrangements
with the Dutch and the gouty Sir Joseph. Aboard the _Alliance_,
Commodore Paul Jones finds himself at the head of four hundred and
twelve war-hardened wolves of the sea, American blood to a man, all save
the sixty vikings, and little Pierre with his four.




CHAPTER XX--AIMEE ADELE DE TELISON

It is Christmas day. Out of the furious southwest blows a storm. The
English ships, guarding the mouth of the Helder, are driven from their
stations, and carried far out to sea. Tired of the Texel, with its
French and English and Dutch, Commodore Paul Jones, taking advantage
of the English scudding seaward before the gale, runs out with the
_Alliance_, and lays her nose for the English coast, in the very face of
the weather.

Being Christmas day, when Commodore Paul Jones puts the Dutch coast
astern, there is plum duff and double grog aboard the _Alliance_. These,
and the blue water beneath their fore-foot, mightily cheer the hearts
of the crew. The exuberance takes shape in a way grateful to the soul
of Commodore Paul Jones. A missive, borne by the tarry hand of Boatswain
Jack Robinson, finds him during the larboard watch. As Boatswain
Robinson rolls aft, the whole crew follow him, a respectable distance in
the rear.

“It’s a deppytation,” explains Boatswain Robinson, pulling his
forelock--“a deppytation of the entire ship’s company down to cooks an’
cabin-boys, an’ be dammed to ‘em! They sets forth their views in a round
robin, which I hereby tenders.”

Boatswain Robinson holds out a square of dingy bown paper. It is signed
by every member of the crew, beginning with the redoubtable Robinson.
Commodore Paul Jones reads the round robin, which is written in black
sprawling characters, while Lieutenant Dale who comes up holds a ship’s
lantern. Thus runs the document, the compilation whereof has exhausted
the forecastle.

“We respectfully request you, sir, to lay us alongside any single-decked
English ship to be found in these seas, or any double-decked ship under
a fifty.”

“My lads,” says Commodore Paul Jones, when he finished reading the round
robin, “this is what I like. Our ship is a thirty-six, our biggest gun a
twelve-pounder. You say ‘lay her alongside a fifty gun ship, with her
lower tier of eighteen-pounders. I promise that I’ll do my best. I’ll
cruise between St. George’s Channel and the Bay of Biscay two full
weeks, looking for what you ask. Still, I must tell you that, while I’ve
plenty of hope, I’ve little expectation. This is winter weather, lads,
and the chances of our finding a fight are slim. If we find one,
however, I shall, by way of compliment, take you over the Englishman’s
hammock nettings myself; for I hold you, man and boy, to be as stout a
crew as ever primed pistol or laid cutlass to grindstone, and one that
it’s an honor to lead. Mr. Bo’sen, pipe the men for’ard. Mr. Dale will
give orders for another ration of grog all’round. And so, shipmates, I
give you a Merry Christmas!”

The _Alliance_ goes looking for a British fifty. But nothing comes of
it. Between wind and snow and biting weather, the ships have deserted
the open ocean, like wild fowl, for the friendly sheltering warmth of
the ports. When the two weeks are up, four weeks more are added to
the cruise by common consent. Stores, however, are running low, and
following six weeks futile looking about, Commodore Paul Jones stands in
for the Isle au Grroaix, and anchors in the harbor of l’Orient.

It is February fourteenth, the day of sweet St. Valentine. Also, it is
among the coy and blushing possibilities, that sweet Saint Valentine has
been lying in wait for him; for our sailor, home from sea, finds in the
hands of his agent a pretty note, which in its sequence is to carry him
into the midst of much tenderness and flowery happiness.

The note is from his good friend, the Marchioness de Marsan. The
Marchioness asks Commodore Paul Jones, when he is next in l’Orient and
can spare himself from his ship, to visit her at her palace. Weary with
the sea, sore from the loss of the _Serapis_, the summons falls in with
his tired humor. He leaves the _Alliance_ in charge of Lieutenant Dale,
and goes with what haste he may to his friend the Marchioness. That good
noblewoman kisses him on both cheeks.

“It is for your victory!” she says. “France is a-quiver with it!”

As Commodore Paul Jones is about to reply, a girl of twenty enters the
room.

“Aimee de Telison, Commodore,” says the Marchioness, presenting him.
Then aside: “She is my ward--my godchild! Is she not beautiful?”

“Beautiful! Skin pink and white! Teeth like pearls or rice! Damask lips,
eyes deep and lustrous and large! Hair a flood of red gold! In form a
little rounded goddess! Beautiful!”

Thus run the thoughts of the sailor, as the sweetness and witchery of
the vision carries his senses along.

“Aimee de Telison!” he repeats in a whisper. “Who is she?”

The Marchioness hesitates; then she returns in the same guarded tones:

“Who is she? She is the daughter of a King.”




CHAPTER XXI--ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

Presently the beautiful Aimee quits the room, and the good Marchioness
de Marsan tells her story.

“There is surely no reason why you shouldn’t know, my dear Commodore,”
 she says; “since all France knows. Aimee’s mother is of the de
Tiercelins--a noble house, but impoverished. As a girl the mother was
ravishingly lovely. This was in the days of Monsieur le Bel and
the Parc-aux-Cerfs. The old king saw Mademoiselle de Tiercelin; the
Pompadour did not object. Aimee was born; and presently her mother,
whom the king called his ‘de Bonneval,’ was put away with a pension.
The Bonneval’s father talked loudly, and was sent to the Bastile as a
‘Russian spy.’ One may say what one will in the Bastile; the walls are
thick and have no ears. The Pompadour looked after poor de Bonneval and
the little Aimee. She married the mother to a gentleman named Telison.
The Pompadour died; the king died; Aimee was sixteen. Her stepfather de
Telison, and her mother de Bonneval neglected her. They said ‘She is
a Bourbon. Let the Bourbons provide.’ So I, who am her godmother, took
Aimee. That was four years ago; and now it is as though she were my own
child in very fact--I love her so.”

“But the present king?”

“Thus far he has done nothing for Aimee. She goes to court; her position
is recognized; the king is kind. But you know the cold Savoy blood?--it
is stingy! However, that is now of little moment so far as Aimee is
concerned, for I am rich.”

Commodore Paul Jones is established at the palace of the good Marsan.
Sailors are swift to love; the image of Aimee fits into his heart as
into a niche that was made for it.

The second day he calls on the Duchess de Chartres--the beautiful
girl-Duchess. He wears a guilty feeling at the base of his conscience.
Fortunately his cheek is tanned by wind and weather, and the guilty
feeling does not show.

The girl-Duchess is with her husband, the Duke de Chartres, who has quit
the sea for the shore, his man-of-war for his palace. The girl-Duchess
receives Commodore Paul Jones in something of a formal manner, which
is a relief to him. His manner is also formal, which is not a relief to
her. The Duke, who makes a specialty of democracy, greets him with bluff
cordiality as a brother sailor. He congratulates him on beating the
“English dogs,” whom he hates professionally. Commodore Paul Jones is
modest in his replies. For he is not thinking of the _Serapis_, but
on Aimee; and, with the eyes of the girl-Duchess upon him, that guilty
feeling overlays all else.

The girl-Duchess watches him through halfshut lids. She almost guesses
the truth; for she knows of the good Marsan, and Aimee. Besides, she is
a woman, and clairvoyant in matters of the heart.

After an hour with the Duke and the girl-Duchess, Commodore Paul Jones
goes back to the good Marchioness de Marsan and to Aimee. As an excuse
for his own idleness, he travels down to l’Orient and, albeit the
_Alliance_ is as fit as a fiddle, sets Lieutenant Dale, “Dick the
practical,” to overhauling the ship from truck to keel. Then he returns
to the good Marsan and Aimee.

Now he spends sunny hours in the beautiful Aimee’s company, and his
love creeps and grows upon him like ivy on a wall. The conqueror is
conquered; the invincible is overthrown. As for Aimee, her blue eyes
become a deeper blue, her pink cheeks take on a warmer pink when he is
near. And the good Marsan sees it all, and does not interfere. For she
is versed in the world and its ways; and this is France; and after life
comes death.

When the ardent sailor would be too ardent, Aimee represses him; the
barrier of her modesty is as a barrier of ice between them. Thereupon he
loves her the more, and refreshes his soul with Shakespeare:

                   “Chaste as the icicle

               That’s curdled by the frost of purest snow,

                   And hangs on Dian’s temple.”

Commodore Paul Jones goes down to l’Orient again. Not so much to see
after the _Alliance_, as to pique his love and give it edge. For absence
makes the flame burn brighter, and Aimee bursts upon him with a new
charm when he has been away.

For all his lovelorn case, however, he makes arrangements for his two
pets, Lieutenants May-rant and Fanning, to go privateering for the
French, and gives them nearly one hundred and fifty of his fiercest
sea-wolves to bear them company.

“Why keep them rusting ashore,” says he, “like good blades in their
sheaths! No; let the lads sail forth with letters of marque, and make
their fortunes.”

The _Serapis_ is held by the French as a king’s prize, and de Sartine
pays Commodore Paul Jones twelve thousand dollars as his share. There
are other thousands from other prizes, and, after a French sort, he
finds himself rich.

When, following his visit to l’Orient, he returns to the good Marsan,
that estimable lady is discovered in a state of much excitement. The
Duchess de Chartres has “commanded” the presence of Commodore Paul Jones
at her palace.

The prospect does not overcome him. He receives it with steadiness,
although privily a-quake because of that feeling of guilt. The good
Marsan’s excitement is supplanted by wonder to see him take his honors
so coolly.

“Ah, these Americans!” she thinks. Then, out loud: “She is a Bourbon,
my Commodore! No one below the blood royal has ever received such a
summons.”

In spite of the uplifted palms of the good Marsan, her “Commodore”
 refuses to be impressed. He will go; since no one should decline the
“command” of royalty. But he will go calmly--hiding of course his sense
of guilt, and spreading the skirts of his conscience very wide to hide
it.

Aimee hears that he is to go, and cannot avoid a little flutter of
alarm. She knows her beautiful kinswoman, the girl-Duchess--knows the
spell and the power of her. It gives the tender Aimee a dull ache of the
heart. A lone feeling of helplessness overwhelms her, as fears rise up
for her poor love that, in so short a space, has become the one
sweet thing in life. True, she herself is a Bourbon! But with the bar
sinister. How then shall she, obscure and poor and by the left hand,
hope to sustain herself in the heart of her lover against the wiles
and siren wooings of one who is at once the most legitimate, the most
beautiful, and the most wealthy woman in France! The tears gather in the
soft eyes.

The good Marsan goes from the room; for she has a deal of sympathy and
good sense. Commodore Paul Jones, when now the two are alone, draws
Aimee to him, and dries those tears in ways that lovers know. For the
first time he folds her in his arms and kisses her lips.

“Perhaps it is also the last time,” she thinks sadly.

And the gallant lover, as though he reads her thoughts, kisses her
again, and vows by sword and ship to love her always.

Commodore Paul Jones finds the Duchess de Chartres in spirits. She and
the Duke give him a suite of apartments that has heretofore been sacred
to Bourbon occupation alone. At this the sensation that rocks the Court
is profound.

It even reaches the rabbit-faced king--weak rather than dull--at
Versailles, and gives him a shock. He draws down the uncertain corners
of his undecided mouth, says naught, and goes out under the trees to
feed his squirrels. He would be wiser were he to go out into the starved
highways and byways of his oppressed realm, and feed his subjects. Did
he do so, he might even yet avoid that revolution, which is slowly yet
terribly preparing itself in the ante-chamber of Time.




CHAPTER XXII--THE FÊTE OF THE DUCHESS DE CHARTRES

The Duke and Duchess de Chartres give a grand banquet in honor of
Commodore Paul Jones. The Duchess asks Doctor Franklin, whom she
esteems, and calls “Monsieur le Sage” for his wisdom. Also, to please
the worthy doctor, she has Madame de Houdetot, and the rest of his Passy
friends, including the vivacious Madame Helvetius.

“Only,” says the Duchess, who has weaknesses that favor washtubs--“only
I trust that our ‘Rich Widow of Passy’ will wear a fresh frock, if only
to give us something to, talk about.”

The good Marsan and Aimee are among the guests. Indeed, it is to see
Aimee and Commodore Paul Jones together that has caused the Duchess
de Chartres to order the fête. She will bring the pair beneath her
eyes--the young Aimee, and the “Commodore,” who has become formal. She
will then know the best and worst of their hearts.

The Duchess is right in this assumption; for you may no more hide love
than smoke. With half-watchfulness, she readily surprises their secret.
Still she is gay and light; for her heart is the heart of a Bourbon, and
the heart of your Bourbon is never a breakable.

She seats Commodore Paul Jones on her right, which is the thing
expected. Aimee is on his other hand; which last excites his
suspicions--having that guilty feeling--while attracting the attention
of nobody else. Over across is the wise Franklin, who finds himself
vastly at home between the Houdetot and the rosy Helvetius, who is a
marvel of tidiness.

The Duchess pays a deal of polite attention to Commodore Paul Jones.

“I cannot think, my dear Commodore,” she cries, “how, with your ship
on fire, and sinking under your feet, you had courage to continue the
fight.”

“Your royal highness forgets. To surrender would have meant a
postponement of the bliss of meeting you.”

“Now, Bayard himself,” returns the Duchess, “could have said nothing so
knightly!”

Aimee glows at this. In the face of her fears, she still likes to hear
her lover-hero praised.

“There is a promise!” exclaims the Duchess.

Commodore Paul Jones reddens through the tan. What is coming! There is
much of royal recklessness in the Duchess’ royal blood; she will now and
then say a bold thing.

“You promised,” she goes on, “to lay an English frigate at my feet.”

Commodore Paul Jones is relieved. More, he is pleased, since the Duchess
gives him a chance to be dramatic. He sends for his servant, who brings
him a slim morocco case.

“Your royal highness,” he says, unbuckling the morocco case; “I shall
be better than my word. I lay at your feet, not a frigate truly, but a
forty-four gun ship of two decks. Here is the token of it--the sword of
as brave a sailor as ever sailed.”

Commodore Paul Jones presents the Duchess with the vanquished sword of
Captain Pearson, which he has taken from the morocco case. The Duchess,
who has not foreseen this return to her sally, is deeply stirred. She
receives the sword, and presses the gold scabbard to her lips.

“It is dear to me as the sword of a conquered Englishman!” she cries,
turning with swimming eyes upon the company. “It is doubly dear when it
comes from my Achilles of the ocean!”

There is a buzz of admiration about the tables. Aimee herself is in a
dream of happiness; for she has alarms but no jealousies, and the glory
of her lover is her glory.

Before the guests break up for departure, Doctor Franklin and Commodore
Paul Jones have a word together.

“I have asked for it,” says the Doctor, “and de Sartine leads me to
think that, as soon as the ship is refitted, the king will give you the
_Serapis_.”

Commodore Paul Jones brightens to a sparkle.

“I could do wonders with so stout a ship,” he replies.

“I think you may count on it,” goes on the Doctor. “Indeed, when I
remember in what manner the French came by the _Serapis_, I cannot see
how the king is to refuse.”

“Should I get it, I’ll put Dick Dale in command of the _Alliance_. There
shall be no second Landais you may be sure!”

“Speaking of the _Alliance_,” returns the Doctor, “I shall send it to
America as soon as the overhaul is finished, with certain munitions of
war I’ve collected.”

Commodore Paul Jones’ pulse begins to beat uneasily. Antony does not
want to leave his Cleopatra. What the Doctor next says, sets him to
renewed ease.

“Lieutenant Dale might better take the _Alliance_ across. You will be
needed here, if we are to coax the king into giving you the _Serapis_.
There will be time for the _Alliance_ to return before the _Serapis_ is
refitted.”

Doctor Franklin tells how he has formally relieved Landais from
all command, and ordered him to report to the Marine Committee in
Philadelphia, on charges of cowardice and treason. Also, Commissioner
Arthur Lee has been called home; Congress has become suspicious of his
work.

“The man’s a greater traitor than Landais!” cries Commodore Paul Jones
heatedly.

“Without expressing myself on that point,” observes the Doctor, eye
a-twinkle, “the situation produced by Mr. Lee’s recall, makes another
reason why Dale should sail with the _Alliance_ and you stay here. Mr.
Lee, I understand, has decided to take passage home in the _Alliance_.”

It is the next day; the Duchess summons Commodore Paul Jones to the
morning-room, where she sits alone in the spring sunshine.

“Your love is like your ship, my friend,” she observes. “It goes
voyaging from heart to heart, as the other does from port to port. No,
not a word! I promise that you shall not break my heart. Come, I will
show you what makes me safe--safe even from that terrible heart-rover
and sea-rover, that buccaneer of the ocean and of love, the invincible
Paul Jones.”

She smiles; but there is that about the smile which reminds one of
the hard glitter of a rapier. She rings a bell, says a low word, and
presently a little round-faced boy is brought in. He is the baby son of
the Duchess. Commodore Paul Jones has heard of the little boy; but this
is his earliest glimpse of him.

He is a handsome child, and Commodore Paul Jones gazes upon him with
admiration. The boy is to grow up and, fifty years later, sit on the
French throne as the “Citizen King.” This, however, is a secret of the
future, and neither the mother nor Commodore Paul Jones, as they look on
the small, round face, is granted a least glint of it. Released by the
nurse, little Louis Philippe toddles across to Commodore Paul Jones,
pudgy hands outstretched. The latter catches him up and kisses him. At
this the eyes of the Duchess soften with mother-love.

“See!” she remarks, and a sigh and a laugh struggle for precedence on
her lips--“See! he is like all of us. He loves you!” She becomes grave.
“There is my resource!” she goes on. “My friend, I will let you into
a secret. No man’s treason, not though he be the bewildering Paul
Jones”--this with a tinge of wicked emphasis--“can break a mother’s
heart. No; she takes refuge in her child, and finds his kisses sweeter
than a lover’s.”

She takes the boy out of his hands, and kisses the little face again and
still again. Commodore Paul Jones says no word of protest, explanation
or defence. The Duchess is taking her revenge; he knows it, and thinks
her entitled to it. Moreover, he is beginning in his own heart to be
relieved, and the guilty feeling that gnaws his conscience is sensibly
dulled.

The nurse returns and takes the boy. The Duchess gives the little face a
last kiss. Then her glance comes back to Commodore Paul Jones.

“Yes, my friend,” she says; “love your red-haired Aimee, since you love
her; I can give you up; for even though you leave me, you leave me a
Bourbon. And yet I feel a small jealousy--just a little stab! For that
stab, my friend, you must pay. No one harms a Bourbon, and escapes
unpunished.” This is said half quizzically, half seriously. “Yes, I
shall have my revenge. I intend that you shall marry Aimee.”




CHAPTER XXIII--THE WEDDING WITHOUT BELLS

Doctor Franklin journeys down to Lyons, on some secret errand of his
own; he will be gone a week. Commodore Paul Jones, at home with the good
Marsan, drunk with love, forgets the blue of the ocean in the blue of
Aimee’s eyes. One sun-filled afternoon he is disturbed by Lieutenant
Dale, who stalks in with a scowl on his usually steady face.

“What is it, Dick?” asks Commodore Paul Jones, alive in a moment.

“Something too deep for me, Commodore, or I shouldn’t be here with the
tangle. Commissioner Lee, with Landais, has taken the _Alliance_.”

“What?”

“It’s as I say. Lee declares that Doctor Franklin had no authority to
depose Landais. He, Lee, has restored him to command, and the pair have
possession of the ship.”

“What did you do?”

“I did nothing. I’m a sailor, and pretend to no knowledge of the limits
of Mr. Lee’s authority. Speaking for myself, I refused to serve with
Landais; and Lieutenants Stack, McCarty and Lunt, and Midshipman
Lindthwait did the same. We came ashore, and Bo’sen Jack Robinson at
the head of sixty of the crew came with us.” Commodore Paul Jones,
while Lieutenant Dale talks, is thinking. What is to be done! Manifestly
nothing. Doctor Franklin is out of reach. Without the Doctor’s authority
no one can meddle with Arthur Lee, who still has his powers as a
commissioner. Besides, there’s the _Serapis_; it is only a question
of weeks when he, Commodore Paul Jones, will be given its command.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Dale and the others can disport themselves ashore,
as he does. Let Lee and Landais keep the _Alliance_, since they already
have it.

“You’ve done right, Dick,” he says. “Stay ashore then, and keep the
lads together; we’ll wait for the _Serapis_. Also, King Louis has given
Doctor Franklin the _Ariel_, a ship-sloop the size of the old _Ranger_.
When I take the _Serapis_ to sea, Dick, you shall sail Captain of the
_Ariel_.”

Lieutenant Dale goes his way, and Commodore Paul Jones returns to Aimee,
pleased in secret to think he may continue unhindered to sun himself
in her smiles. It grinds a bit to think of the “dog Landais,” and the
“traitor Arthur Lee,” in control of the _Alliance_. Still, all will come
right; for is he not to have the _Serapis_? And while he waits, there
is Aimee; and love is even sweeter than war. So he goes back to his
goddess, with her deep eyes and red-gold hair, and puts such caitiff
creatures as Lee and Landais outside his thoughts. It is for Congress to
deal with them.

Commodore Paul Jones is not permitted to forget Lee and Landais. Within
the hour, he is again called from the side of Aimee by his friend Genet,
a noble upperling in the French foreign office.

“I come to tell you,” says Genet, “that Captain Landais and Monsieur Lee
have got the _Alliance_.”

“I know!”

“They are to sail in three days.”

“Lieutenant Dale has told me.”

“He did not tell you that we have issued orders to Thevenard, who
commands the forts at the barrier, to sink the _Alliance_, should she
try to put to sea.”

“Sink the _Alliance_!” Commodore Paul Jones is thunderstruck. “My dear
Genet, you jest.”

“No jest, my friend. The orders have been given. Should the _Alliance_
attempt to pass the harriers, Thevenard will fire on it with all his
hundreds of big guns, and snuff it out like a candle. It is by request
of your Doctor Franklin.”

“Do you tell me that Doctor Franklin asks you to sink the _Alliance_?”

“He has asked us--for he had some inkling of the designs of Lee and
Landais--to prevent them sailing away with the ship. We know of but one
way to do that. We must sink it, since we have no ship here to arrest
them. So we gave the orders to Thevenard. Those orders, however, we did
not impart to Doctor Franklin; and, in good truth, I tell them to you
now, not as a French official, but as a friend.”

“This must be stopped!” cries Commodore Paul Jones, his habits of
decision and iron promptitude reassumed in a moment. “What! Sink two
hundred brave, good men, to punish a pair of traitors? Never!”

Genet, who makes a cult of red tape, shrugs his shoulders and spreads
his hands.

“It is too late,” he says. “There is Doctor Franklin’s request. I cannot
countermand the orders to Thevenard until he withdraws his request.”

“I shall see Thevenard!”

Two hundred and eighty miles in fifty-four hours! An unprecedented
thing! And yet Commodore Paul Jones does it, and rides into l’Orient
in time to prevail on General Thevenard, who is his friend and his
worshipper, to let the _Alliance_ pass free. The forts would else
have sunk the ship with their tons upon tons of metal. He saves the
_Alliance_ by a narrow margin of hours, and Lee and Landais shake out
their sails for America.

“They go to disgrace and grief,” thinks Commodore Paul Jones, consoling
himself for their escape. Then he considers how he has saved the lives
of more than two hundred honest sailors, who have fought well for flag
and country, and is consoled in earnest.

Commodore Paul Jones is surrounded by surprises. He is met on the road,
while returning to his Aimee, by a message from the Duchess de Chartres.

“Come instantly to me!” it says.

There is a look of mingled sorrow and resentment, with over all a hue
of humor, on the Duchess’ bright face when she welcomes Commodore Paul
Jones.

“The Marchioness de Marsan and I have arranged it,” she says, and her
glance is wicked and amused.

“Arranged what?”

“Your marriage, my friend! I congratulate you! You and your red-haired,
blue-eyed one are to wed.”

“With all my heart, then!” says he, turning wicked, too. Manlike, it
offends his vanity that one who has pretended to love him so deeply
should be now so ready to give him to another. “I could wish no fairer
fate.”

“But the wedding must be secret.”

“Secret! Believe me, I shall tell all France.”

“And ruin the blue-eyed one! Hear me, my Commodore--once my beloved,
ever to be my friend! I have had a world of trouble in your affairs.
I arranged with the Marsan; but only by agreeing that the marriage be
buried in secrecy. You know much of the sea; little of the shore when
all’s said. Should the king hear of Aimee as your wife, he would drive
her from court.”

“May I ask why!” and his cheek begins to burn angrily.

“You forget that Aimee is a Bourbon,” returns the Duchess, with a
fashion of malicious satisfaction. He has deserted her for his Aimee; it
is her revenge to irritate his pride. “You are a valorous man, and the
king makes much of you. Besides, you beat the English, whom he fears
and hates. And yet he does not forget that you are a peasant--as I did.
Marry Aimee, my friend--. marry a Bourbon, even a Bourbon by the left
hand, and King Louis will bolt the doors of France in both your faces.
Indeed, the Bastile might be the end of it for your Aimee.”

“I think your royal highness sees unnecessary ghosts,” he replies, with
a sneer. Just the same, that linking of the Bastile and Aimee alarms
him. “Without pausing to question the king’s powers touching Bastiles
and French doors, I may tell you he has already heard that I love Aimee.
Doctor Franklin, himself, told me.”

“Love Aimee! Yes; love her as much and to what limit you will! The king
will never resent that. But do not let the whisper that you have married
Aimee reach the kingly ear. Can you not understand! Here, I will put it
in the abstract. A Princess may have a _liaison_ with a peasant, and in
the shadow of that dishonor she will remain forever a Princess. Should
the Princess, in some gust of virtue, be swept into a marriage with the
peasant, she becomes instantly a peasant. It is one of those strange
cases, my friend, where the word ‘wife’ is a stain and the word
‘mistress’ no stain at all.”

It is midnight; two candles burn dimly on the altar of “Our Lady of
Loretto.” The great chapel is dark and vacant; the feeble light does
not reach the vaulted roof, and the groined arches disappear upward in a
thick blackness.

At the altar stands a priest. Near the rail is gathered a group of four,
the Duchess de Chartres, the good Marchioness de Marsan, Aimee--heart
a-flutter, her pink cheeks hidden in a veil--and Commodore Paul Jones.
The priest draws the Duchess aside.

“Your royal highness,” he whispers, pleadingly, “I am afraid.”

“Afraid of whom, pray?”

“The king, your royal highness.”

The Duchess makes an angry motion with her hand, while her little
boot smites the stone floor and sends an echo through the room’s vast
emptiness.

“Father Joseph, observe! You are my almoner. Through your hands I give
fifty thousand louis to the poor of Paris, and keep you in fatness
besides. It is I, not the king, whom you should fear.”

And so, before the flickering altar candles, Commodore Paul Jones weds
Aimee Adele de Telison. In the book which the Duchess and the good
Marsan sign as witnesses, Father Joseph, with a pen that shakes a
little, records the nuptials of “Monsieur le Joignes and Mademoiselle
Adele de Bonneval.” For “de Bonneval” was the dead King’s name for
Aimee’s mother in the days of Monsieur le Bel and the Parc-aux-Cerfs.




CHAPTER XXIV--THAT HONEYMOON SUB ROSA

The Duchess kisses Aimee, and the good Marsan drives back to her
palace with the blissful ones through the black midnight Paris streets.
Commodore Paul Jones is in a trance of happiness. Aimee creeps into
his arms and whispers “Mon Paul,” and the surrender of the _Serapis_ is
forgotten, as a thing trivial and transient, in the surrender of this
girl with the glorious red-gold hair.

Summer runs away into autumn, and the brown tints of October show in
the trees. The honeymoon has been one of secrecies and subterfuges,
and perhaps the tenderer and sweeter because _sub rosa_. Commodore Paul
Jones tears himself now and again from Aimee’s arms to urge the business
of the _Serapis_. He is seconded by Aimee, to whom his glory is as dear
as his love.

Doctor Franklin tells the king that he should give Commodore Paul Jones
the ship, and is referred to de Sartine. The oily minister slips away
from the proposal, and the king sends Commodore Paul Jones a “Sword of
Honor” and the title of “Chevalier.” The impatient sailor bites his lip,
and gives the plaything sword to Aimee.

“I asked for a ship, not a sword,” says he. “As for ‘Chevalier,’ since
I’m already a Commodore, it looks like promotion down-hill.”

“The king,” explains Doctor Franklin, “does not, I fear, forgive your
refusal of his captain’s commission when you lay at the Texel.”

“And I,” he returns, “continue to regard that offer of a commission as a
piece of royal impertinence.”

Commodore Paul Jones determines to bring the king to a decision. He
walks in the royal gardens with his ally, Genet, and comes upon the king
feeding his interminable squirrels. The king--for democracy is becoming
a fashion--greets Commodore Paul Jones with outstretched hands.

“But do not tell me,” concludes the king, “that you come for a ship.”

“It is to ask for the _Serapis_, sire.”

The poor king rubs his head, his vague lip twitches, while the unlocked
jaw multiplies the feebleness of his weak face.

“Chevalier, I cannot,” he returns. In a tone of pathos, he continues:
“Congratulate yourself, my friend, that you are not a king. You would be
compelled to have ministers, and they would make a slave of you--as they
have of me.”

“It is over,” says Commodore Paul Jones, to Doctor Franklin. “There is
no hope of the _Serapis_.”

“Take the _Ariel_, then, and return to Philadelphia,” replies the
Doctor. “There is the _America_, seventy-four guns, building on the
Portsmouth stocks. I’ve written the Marine Committee to give you that.”

Commodore Paul Jones holds Aimee close. He kisses her dear lips. “In the
spring I shall return, my love,” he promises. “Three little months, and
you are in my arms again.”

Aimee whispers something, and then buries her face in his breast. The
blush she is trying to hide spreads and spreads until it covers the back
of the fair neck, and the red of it is lost in the roots of the red-gold
hair.

“Good!” he cries in a burst of joy, holding her closer. “Good! Now I
shall have something to dream of and return to.”

It is a raw, flawy February day when Commodore Paul Jones lands in
Philadelphia. Arthur Lee, with his poisonous mendacities, has preceded
him. He is called before the Marine Committee, to reply to a list of
questions, that in miserable effect amount to charges. Anger eating
his heart like fire, he answers the questions, and is then voted a
resolution of thanks and confidence.

Knowing no other way, he seeks a quarrel with Arthur Lee, the fiery,
faithful Cadwalader at his elbow. Mad Anthony Wayne, acting for him,
meets Arthur Lee informally. The latter does not like the outlook.

“Who is he?” exclaims Arthur Lee, inventing a defensive sneer. “Either
the son of a Scotch peasant or worse, and a man who has changed
his name. By what right does such a person demand satisfaction of a
gentleman!”

“Permit me to suggest,” returns Mad Anthony, beginning to bristle, “that
I shall regard a refusal to fight, based on the ground you state, as
a personal affront to myself. More; let me tell you, sir, that he who
shall seek to bar Paul Jones from his plain rights, on an argument aimed
at his gentility, will get nothing by his pains but the name of coward.”

“You think so!” responds Arthur Lee, his sneer somewhat in eclipse at
the stark directness of Mad Anthony.

“I know so, sir. When you speak of Paul Jones, you speak of the
conqueror of the _Drake_ and the _Serapis_. Also, when you deal with me,
you deal with one who is the equal of any Lee of your family, sir.”

Mad Anthony blows through his warlike nose ferociously, and Arthur Lee
is silent. Meanwhile, the excellent Cadwalader, ever painstaking in
matters of bloodshed, prepares a challenge, which he intends shall be a
model for succeeding ages, when studying the literature of the duello.

It is at this pinch that the peace-loving Morris, helpless and a bit
desperate, brings the weight of General Washington to bear upon the
combative one. The “Father of his Country” succeeds where Mr. Morris
has failed, and silences all talk of a duel. As a reward for that
gentleman’s eleventh-hour docility, he prevails upon Congress to give
Commodore Paul Jones command of the half-built _America_, in accord with
the request of Doctor Franklin, already in its dilatory hands.

Commodore Paul Jones goes to Portsmouth to oversee the launching and
the equipment of his new seventy-four. Disappointment dogs him; for Lord
Cornwallis surrenders, and Congress, in a fit of foolish generosity,
presents the America to France, as a slight expression of its thanks for
the part she played in the capture of that English nobleman. Commodore
Paul Jones sees his just-completed seventy-four, over which he has
toiled like a poet over his verse, and wherein he was to presently sail
away to conquer fresh honors for himself and his Aimee, hoist the French
flag and receive a French captain on its quarter-deck. Steadying himself
under the blow, with a grim philosophy which he has begun to cultivate,
he goes back to Philadelphia. He finds letters from France awaiting him;
one is from his Aimee, written in a tremulous, wavering hand. It must
have borne wonderful news, for in his reply he says:

“Present my compliments to your sister. Tell her to exert her tenderest
care toward you and her sweet little godson. Also cover him with kisses
from me.”




CHAPTER XXV--CATHERINE OF RUSSIA

Commodore Paul Jones, nervously irritable with the loss of the
_America_, asks leave of Congress to go as a volunteer with the French
fleet, which hopes to find and fight the English in the West Indies.
Congress consents, and he sails southward with Captain Vaudreuil, to
fight yellow fever, not English, and return much shaken in health. As a
solace and a recuperative, he sends divers cargoes of oil to Europe on a
speculation, and makes forty thousand dollars. All the time he is pining
to get back to Paris, his Aimee, the good Marsan, as well as Aimee’s
sister’s “sweet little godson,” that must “be covered with kisses.” He
is detained by his accounts with the government and his claims for prize
money. After heart-breaking delays, his affairs are adjusted; again he
finds himself outward bound for France. His Aimee meets him with kisses
sweet as heaven. He unlocks her white arms from his neck, and asks in a
whisper:

“Where is he?”

“He is dead!” she says, with a rush of tears.

Then she carries him to a quiet cemetery, and, taking his hand, leads
him to a little grave, upon which the new grass has not grown two weeks.
There is a tiny headstone of pale granite, and on it the one word:

“Paul.”

His gaze is long and steadfast as he holds fast by his Aimee’s hand.
Then his tears are united with hers; they stand bowed above the little
grave.

Commodore Paul Jones and his Aimee, while ever together, formally
conceal the tie that binds them. He has business with the king about
prize money; she has petitions before the king about the blood that
is common to her veins and his; and both the good Marsan and Doctor
Franklin say it is better that the king should not know. And so the king
goes feeding his squirrels and forgetting his people, in ignorance of
what took place on that midnight before the candle-lighted altar of Our
Lady of Loretto. But the wise old world is not so thick, and winks
and smiles and wags its wise old head; and whenever it passes a pretty
cottage in the Rue Vivienne it points and whispers tolerantly. For the
wise old world loves lovers; and because Aimee always officially resides
with the good Marsan when her “Paul” is in Paris, and actually
resides with that amiable gentlewoman when her “Paul” is in London, or
Copenhagen, or elsewhere on the complex business of those prize moneys,
no one finds fault. And so four years of love and truth and sweetness,
four beautiful years, throughout which the birds sing and the sun shines
always, come and go for Commodore Paul Jones and his Aimee; and every
noble door in France swings open at their approach.

The prize money gets into a tangle, and Commodore Paul Jones consults
his friends, Mirabeau and the venerable Malesherbes. Then he visits
America, and is feted and feasted, while his Aimee--each year rounder
and plumper and more bewitching--with the red-gold hair growing ever
redder and more golden--stays in Paris by the side of the good Marsan,
and keeps a loving eye on the vine-clothed cottage in the Rue Vivienne.

Nothing can exceed the honors wherewith Commodore Paul Jones is stormed
upon and pelted while in America. He is banqueted by the Morrises, the
Livingstons, the Hamiltons, the Jays, while--what is more to his heart’s
comfort--he is visited by Dale and Fanning and Mayrant and Lunt and
Stack and Potter and scores of his old sea wolves of the _Ranger_ and
_Richard_, who crowd round him to press his hand. In the end he drinks
a last cup of wine at the Livingston Manor House, rides down to the
foot of Cortlandt Street, and goes aboard the _Governor Clinton_, which,
anchors hove short, awaits him. It is his last glass in America, his
last glimpse of the shores for which he fought so valorously; November
sees him in the Straits of Dover, nineteen days, out from Sandy Hook.

He goes to Paris, and the king has him to lunch at Versailles--a
nine-days’ social wonder, the like of which has not been witnessed by a
staring world since an elder Louis dined Jean Bart. The royal luncheon
over, Commodore Paul Jones again settles down to the dear smiles and the
love of his Aimee, while the aristocracy of France lionizes the one and
worships the other.

One day Mr. Jefferson, now America’s Minister to Versailles, and greatly
the friend of our two love birds, walks in upon them in that little
vine-embowered cottage in the Rue Vivienne. He has big news. The Empress
Catherine asks Commodore Paul Jones to become an admiral in the Russian
navy. The Turks are troubling her; she wants him to sweep these turbaned
pests from the Black Sea.

The cheek of Commodore Paul Jones flushes, his eye lights up. Between
love and war his heart was formed to swing like a pendulum. Now he has
loved for a season, he would like nothing better than another game
with those “iron dice of destiny,” _vide licet_ cannon balls; and where
should be found a fitter table than the Black Sea, or a more eligible
adversary than the Turk? Thus it befalls that his Aimee goes to court
with Madam Campan, the noble daughter of the noble Genet, and translates
English plays into French for the amusement of Versailles; while be,
hot of heart and high of head, as one who snuffeth the battle afar off,
makes a straight wake for St. Petersburg.

Commodore Paul Jones meets the Empress Catherine in her Palace of
Czarsko-Selo. Outside the snow lies thick; for it is April, and winter
is ever reluctant to quit St. Petersburg. He is pricked of curiosity
concerning this Russian Empress, for whom he is to draw his sword. He
hopes--somewhat against hope, it is true, when he recalls her sixty
years--that she will prove beautiful. For he is so much the knight of
romance that he fights with more pleasure for a pretty face than for a
plain one.

The Empress is before him; he can now put his hopes to the test. His
eyes fall upon a thick, gross figure--a woman the antithesis of romance.

Her mouth is coarse, her nose high and hawkish, her forehead full, her
gaze hard and level, her whole face harsh--having been so often
burned and swept of passion. And yet he feels the power of this white,
fire-eyed savage, with her heart of a Phryne and her brain of a Henry
the Eighth. There is so much that is palpable and brutish about her,
however, that he stands off from her contact and remembers with regret
his delicate Aimee of the red-gold locks.

Commodore Paul Jones has been too well trained as a courtier to let fall
the polite mask which he wears, and nothing could be more elaborately
suave than are the manners he assumes. The ferocious Catherine gets some
glimmer of his inward thought for all that. Every inch the Empress, she
is even more the woman. To the day of her death the unpardonable offence
in any male of her species is a failure to fall in love with her. She
receives some chilling touch of her new Admiral’s aversion, and it turns
her into angry ice. Still, if he will not sigh for her, he shall serve
her: so she says to herself. He remains in St.

Petersburg a fortnight; the Empress sees him more than once. When they
are together, they talk of Potemkin, Suwarrow, the Turks, and the Black
Sea.




CHAPTER XXVI--AN ADMIRAL OF RUSSIA

Admiral Paul Jones travels to the mouth of the Dnieper and joins
Potemkin, who is a military fool. Suwarrow, old and cunning and
vigilant and war-wise, is another man. He goes aboard his flagship, the
_Vladimir_, of seventy guns. From the beginning he is befriended by the
grizzled Suwarrow and thwarted by the foppish Potemkin. This latter is
a discarded favorite of Catherine; and, since she is very loyal to a
favorite out of favor, he knows he may take liberties. Old Suwarrow,
over his brandy, tells Potemkin’s story to Admiral Paul Jones.

“He kept the Empress’ smiles for a season,” explains Suwarrow; “when all
of a sudden, having seen Moimonoff, she fills Potemkin’s pockets with
gold and jewels, gives him a two-thousand-serf estate, and bids him
‘travel,’ as she bid twenty of his predecessors travel. ‘In what have I
offended?’ whines Potemkin. ‘In nothing,’ returns the Empress. ‘I liked
you yesterday; I don’t like you to-day; that is all. So you see, my
friend, that you can no longer stay in Petersburg, but must travel!’
This was ten years ago,” continues old Suwarrow. “Potemkin comes down
here, and the Empress puts him in charge, and sustains him in all he
says and does. My dear Admiral, you must get along with Potemkin to get
along with her.”

Admiral Paul Jones is by no means sure that he must get along with
Potemkin, and regrets that he quitted France, which holds his Aimee.
However, being aboard the _Vladimir_, and having to his signal twenty
ships, he resolves to strike one blow for the savage Catherine, if only
to see how a Russian fights and what battering a Turk can stand. It will
give him something to talk of, something by which he may compare the
English and French and Americans, when next at his ease, with Genet or
Jefferson or mayhap King Louis as a fellow conversationist.

The chance comes; Admiral Jones engages the Turkish fleet off Kinburn
Head, and destroys it after sixteen hours’ fighting--sinking some,
burning others, breaking completely the power of the Crescent. The Turks
bear a loss of twenty-nine ships and more than three thousand sailors,
while Admiral Paul Jones loses but three small ships. Having advantage
of the victory, old Suwarrow brings his army across the Boug. At one
blow, Admiral Paul Jones unlocks the Liman and throws it open to the
victorious entrance of old Suwarrow.

Oczakoff falls; Admiral Paul Jones, sick of the cowardice and duplicity
of Potemkin and his parasite Nassau-Siegen, relinquishes his command. He
bids old Suwarrow good-bye, and travels in a manner of lordly leisure,
not at all Russian, but particularly American, back to St. Petersburg
and the Empress. As he bids farewell to old Suwarrow, the latter detains
him:

“Wait!”

Then he takes from one of his camp chests a priceless cloak of sea-otter
and sable, lined with yellow silk, and an ermine jacket, white as snow,
set off with heavy gold frogs.

“Take them, mon Paul,” says the old soldier, pressing them upon Admiral
Paul Jones. “They are too fine for me.” Here he looks complacently
at his threadbare gray coat and muddy boots. “No; were I to wear such
feathers, my soldiers, who are my children, wouldn’t know their old papa
Suwarrow.”

The Empress receives Admiral Paul Jones in her palace of the Hermitage.
She is affable, condescending, appreciative, and assigns him to command
the naval forces in the Baltic. She makes him rich in gold; for, while
the Empress will so far humor Potemkin as to remove Admiral Paul Jones
out of his way, she will not fail of doubly rewarding that mariner for
the victory which Potemkin is now trying to steal.

Admiral Paul Jones grows dissatisfied, however. The Russian nobility
intrigues against him, and de Segur, the French Minister, must come to
his rescue. They steal his letters from Aimee; and, not hearing from his
beloved, he becomes homesick. He tells the Empress that he must go; she
consents when he promises to continue drawing full pay as Admiral. That
agreed to, she allows him leave of absence for two years, and back he
goes to Paris and his Aimee’s arms. He calls on De Segur, the French
Minister, before he starts, and thanks him for his friendship.

“But you will return?” says De Segur.

“Never! I want no more of Russia and its Russians! What is this Court of
Catherine, but a place where vilest purposes are arrived at by agencies
most wretched, and artifices that should disgrace a dog? I am of an
honor unfit for such a place, as silk is unfit for mire. The very people
are without charity or a commonest humanity. They are like the wolves of
their own forests; should they discover one of their brothers, wounded
or stricken down, instead of offering aid, they would fall upon
him--rending and devouring him!”

“Sixteen long months! Sixteen dreary months you have been gone!” says
Aimee, when they are again together at the cottage in the Rue Vivienne.

“They are over, little one,” he replies, “over, never to return. Aside
from being separated from you, which is to be separated from the sun”
 --here he caresses her red-gold hair--“they were the sixteen months most
miserable of my life.”




CHAPTER XXVII--THE HOUSE IN THE RUE TOURNON

And now dawn many days of love and peace and plenty for Admiral Panl
Jones, days in the midst of friends, glad days made sumptuous by a
beautiful woman, who is a king’s daughter crowned with a wealth of
red-gold hair. He has his business, too, and embarks in speculation;
wherein he shows himself as much a sailor of finance as of the sea. The
imperial Catherine refuses to lose him; but pays to the last like an
Empress, bidding him prolong his vacation while he will. He grows rich.
He has twelve thousand pounds in the bank; while in America, Holland,
Denmark, Belgium and England his interests flourish. He sells his
plantation by the Rappahannock for twenty-five hundred dollars--less
than a dollar an acre; for he says that he has no more heart to own
slaves, and the plantation cannot be worked without them.

The little happy cottage in the Rue Vivienne grows small; neither is it
magnificent enough for his Aimee, of whom each day he grows more proud
and fond. So he removes, bag and baggage, to a mansion in the Rue
Tournon. There the rooms are grand, ceilings tall, fireplaces hospitably
wide.

The wide fireplaces will do for winter; just now he swings a hammock
in the back garden, which is thick-sown of trees and made pleasant by a
plushy green May carpet of grass. Here he lolls and reads and receives
his friends. For the careful Aimee counsels rest, and much staying at
home; because he is a long shot from a hale man, having been broken with
that fever in the West Indies, and in no wise restored by the mists and
the miasmas of the Dnieper marshes.

Through the summer the back garden is filled with chairs, and the chairs
are filled by friends. In the autumn, and later when winter descends
with its frosts, the chairs and the incumbent friends gather in a
semicircle about the wide flame-filled crackling fireplaces. There
be times when the wine passes; and the freighted mahogany sideboards
discover that they have destinies beyond the ornamental.

French politics bubbles and then boils; Paris is split by faction.
Mirabeau controls the Assembly; Lafayette has the army under his hand--a
weak, vacillating hand! These two are of the Moderates.

Admiral Paul Jones, coolly neutral in what sentiments go shaking the
hour, has admirers in the parties. They come to him, and talk with him,
and drink his wines in the shade of the back garden, or by the opulent
fireplaces. Robespierre and Danton, as well as Mirabeau and Lafayette,
are there. Also, Bertrand Barère, who boasts that he is not French but
Iberian, one whose forbears came in with Hannibal. Later, Barère will
preach an open-air sermon on the “Life and Deeds of Admiral Paul Jones.”
 Just now in the Assembly he makes ferocious speeches, garnished of
savage expletives culled from the language of the Basques.

Warmest among friends of Admiral Paul Jones is the Thetford corset-maker
Tom Paine, with his encarmined nose and love of freedom. Also Gouverneur
Morris, who has succeeded Mr. Jefferson as America’s Minister in France,
comes often to the Rue Tournon. The pair are with him every day; and
because all three like politics, and no two of them share the same
views, dispute is deep. Aimee of the red-gold hair takes no part in
these discussions, but sits watching her “Paul” with eyes of adoration,
directing the servants, with a motion of the hand, to have a care that
the debaters do not voice their beliefs over empty glasses.

Admiral Paul Jones, while a republican, gives his sympathies to the
king, in whom there is much weakness, but no evil.

“They must not kill the king!” says he.

“And why not?” demands Tom Paine, whose bosom distills bitterness,
and who holds there are no good kings save dead kings. “Has France no
Cromwell? We are both born Englishmen, Paul; our own people ere this
have killed a king.”

“Tom,” cries Admiral Paul Jones, heatedly,

“Cromwell and England should not be cited as precedents here. King Louis
is no Charles; and, as for Cromwell, there isn’t the raw material in all
France to make a Cromwell.”

Gouverneur Morris says nothing, but sips his wine; remembering that,
as the minister of a foreign nation, he should bear no part in French
politics.

The Parisian rabble insult the king, and Lafayette, in command of the
military about the Tuileries, sadly lacks decision. Then comes the “Day
of Daggers;” the poor king, advised by the irresolute Lafayette, yields
to the mob, and the assembled notables are disarmed. The anger of
Admiral Paul Jones is extreme. He breaks forth to his friend Tom Paine:

“Up to this time I’ve been able to find reasons for the king’s
gentleness; but to-day’s action was not gentle, it was weak. I pity
the man--beset as he is by situations to which he is unequal. Lafayette
cannot long restrain the sinister forces that confront him. He has
neither the head nor the heart nor the hand for it. This is a time for
grapeshot. I only wish that I might be in command of those thirty
cannon parked about the palace, and have with me, even for a day, my old
war-dogs of the _Ranger_ and the _Richard_. Believe me, I should offer
the mob convincing reasons in support of conservatism and justice; I
should teach it forbearance at the muzzles of my guns.”

“But the rabble might in its turn teach you,” retorts Tom Paine, with a
republican grin.

“Bah!” he exclaims, snapping contemptuous fingers. “They of the mob are
but sheep masquerading as tigers. One whiff of grapeshot, and they would
disappear.” Then he continues, thoughtfully: “Their saddest trait
is their levity. They are ridiculous even in their patriotism. Their
emblems, representative of the grand sentiments they profess, are as
childish as the language in which they proclaim them is fantastic. There
is the red cap! Borrowed from the gutters, they make it the symbol of
sovereignty! As though a ship were better for being keel up.”

Mirabeau, with his lion’s face, comes in. He is in a fury, and declares
that Lafayette is a practising hypocrite in his pretences of attachment
to the king.

“Hypocrisy!” cries Mirabeau. “That, at least, is a lesson in the school
of liberty he never learned from Washington.”

Others of the Moderates arrive, and join in the conversation.

“You must understand, gentlemen,” observes Admiral Paul Jones warmly,
“that I, in my time, have fought eight years for liberty. But I did not
fight with the decrees of blood-mad Assemblies, or the plots of secret
clubs.”

Those present smile tolerantly; for the mighty Paul is a person of many
privileges, the one man in France who may speak his mind.

“You do not deeply respect the Assembly?” remarks Mirabeau, with a sour
smile.

“The Assembly? What is it? A few who talk all the time, and a great many
who applaud or hiss! Everything about it is theatrical. It struggles for
epigram not principle, and the members would sooner say a smart thing
than save France.”

Paris is turmoil and uproar and tumult. To keep his mind from that
strife which surrounds him, and into which he longs to plunge, Admiral
Paul Jones puts in hours with his secretary, Benoît-André, dictating
his journals. Also, business calls him to London, where he is much
celebrated by the Whigs. He hobnobs with Fox and Sheridan, while Walpole
carries him away to Strawberry Hill. He is with Walpole, when word
arrives that Mirabeau is dead.

“What will be the effect in Paris’?” asks Walpole.

“What will be the effect! It will unchain the worst elements. The
Assembly will now go to every red extreme. While Mirabeau lived, that
strange concourse of evil spirits had a master. He is gone; the animals
are without a keeper.”

Admiral Paul Jones returns to Paris, and finds a letter from Mr.
Jefferson, now Secretary of State. Mr. Jefferson asks him to discover
how far Europe will co-operate to crush out piracy in the Mediterranean.
Also, he explains that President Washington will want the services
of Admiral Paul Jones when he sends an expedition against the Barbary
States.

While he is reading Mr. Jefferson’s letter, a deputation from the
Assembly waits on him, and sets forth informally that it is the present
French purpose to reorganize the navy, and call him, Admiral Paul Jones,
to the command.

“Would you accept?” asks the deputation.

“It would be, gentlemen,” he returns, “the part of prudence, and I think
of modesty, to defer crossing that bridge till I come to it.”

When the deputation goes away, he calls Benoît-André, and sits long into
the night dictating a treatise on reforming the French navy. He
points out how its present inefficiency arises from the fact that, for
centuries, it has been the feeding-ground of a voracious but incompetent
aristocracy, a mere asylum for impoverished second sons, and other noble
incapables. He sends a copy of his treatise to Walpole, who writes him a
letter.

“My dear Admiral,” says he of Strawberry Hill; “let France go. Either
return home to America and rest upon your laurels, or come over to
England, where even those who do not love you admire you. You have
fought under two flags; isn’t that enough? I take your pamphlet to be
simply a bid for a commission in the new French navy, and, because I
love and admire you, I hope it will fail. It will be better so. Your
laurels, won off Flamboro’ Head, will else be turned to cypress, when,
as a French admiral, you become the target of British broadsides, with
none of your stout Yankee tars to stand by and man your guns.”

The winter is at an end; the grass of spring is starting. Admiral Paul
Jones receives a letter from President Washington, who speaks of the
Barbary States, and asks him to give up his commission in the Russian
service. There have been two whose requests with him were ever
final--Franklin and Washington. He does not hesitate, but forwards his
resignation to Catherine. She will not accept, and puts forward old
Suwarrow.

“Do not, my good brother,” writes the old soldier--“do not let any siren
entice you from the service of the Empress. Your Frenchmen are preparing
a stew of mischief that must soon keep all Western Europe busy to save
themselves. That will be Russia’s time. We shall then have a free hand
with the Turk. Our command of the Black Sea is safe. Since you were
there, we have built nine new ships of the line, and six stout frigates.
You shall have them all. Also, I can now protect you from Court
intrigues, which I could not do before. Courtiers, since Ismail, no
longer trouble me; I brush them away like flies. In a new Turkish
campaign, I would be Generalissimo by land and sea; you would be
responsible to no one but me--a situation which, I flatter myself, would
not be intolerable to you. Now, my good brother, the Empress has a copy
of this letter, and agrees with all I say. Make no entanglements in the
west; return to your old papa Suwarrow as soon as you can, and we shall
discuss plans.”

Old Suwarrow’s missive fails of its hoped-for effect. Admiral Paul Jones
gets out President Washington’s letter and reads it again. Then he sends
a polite but peremptory resignation to Catherine, and ends forever with
the Russians.

“But, mon Paul,” says Aimee, who looks over his shoulder, “what a
compliment! England, France, Russia, America--the whole world calls you!
And the answer to all”--here a kiss--“is that you shall stay with your
Aimee until she coaxes back your health.”




CHAPTER XXVIII--LOVE AND THOSE LAST DAYS

Aimee is right. Admiral Paul Jones, never his old sound self since that
last cruise in the West Indies, is ill. Gourgaud says it is his lungs,
and commands him to take care of himself. He obeys by sticking close to
the red-gold Aimee, and the pleasant house in the Rue Tournon, with
its fireplaces in the winter and its tree-shaded back garden in the
summer--summer, when the hammock is swung.

Now a stream of visitors pours in upon him. Even the poor king, in the
midst of his troubles, sends to ask after the health of the “Chevalier
Jones.” At odd hours, when visitors do not overrun him, he dictates his
journals to Benoît-Andre, while Aimee gently swings his hammock with her
white hand.

[Illustration: 0319]

It is a hazy July day; the drone of pillaging bees, busy among the
flowers, fills the back garden in the Rue Tournon. It is one of Admiral
Paul Jones’ “good days;” a-swing in his hammock, he chats with Major
Beaupoil about a recent dinner at which he was the guest of Jacobin
honor.

“It was at the Cafe Timon,” he says, “a favorite rendezvous of the
Jacobins. Believe me, Major, while I cannot speak in highest terms
of the Jacobins, I can of the Cafe Timon. One day I hope to take you
there.”

Gouverneur Morris is announced. He tells Admiral Paul Jones of advices
from Mr. Jefferson, and that Mr. Pinckney has been selected Minister to
St. James.

“What, to my mind,” concludes Mr. Morris, “is of most consequence, Mr.
Pinckney bears with him from President Washington your commission as
an Admiral in the American navy. You are to be ready, you note, to sail
against those Barbary robbers when the squadron arrives.

“I shall not alone be ready,” he returns, “I shall be delighted.” He
springs from the hammock, and takes a quick turn up and down the
garden. The prospect of a brush with the swarthy freebooters of the
Mediterranean animates him mightily.

Other visitors are announced. Barère, Lafayette, Carnot, Cambon,
Vergniaud, Marron, Collot, Billaud, Kersaint, Gensonne, Barbaroux and
Louvet one after the other arrive. Laughter and jest and conversation
become the order of the afternoon; for all are glad, and argue, from his
high spirits, the soon return to health of Admiral Paul Jones. There
has been no more cheerful hour in the Rue Tournon back garden. Corks are
drawn and glasses clink.

The talk leaves politics for religion. “My church,” observes Admiral
Paul Jones--“my church has been the ocean, my preacher the North Star,
my choir the winds singing in the ship’s rigging.”

“And your faith?” asks Major Beaupoil.

“You may find it, my dear Major, in Pope’s Universal Prayer:

               ‘Teach me to feel another’s woe,

                   To hide the faults I see;

               That mercy I to others show,

                   Such mercy show to me.’

“There!” he concludes, “I call that stanza a complete boxing of the
religious compass.”

Gourgaud looks in professionally, and is inclined to take a solemn view
of his patient’s health. He rebukes him for running about the garden
among his guests.

“You should not have permitted it,” says Gourgaud, admonishing Aimee
with upraised finger.

“But he refused to be restrained!” returns Aimee, ruefully.

“Gourgaud!” the patient breaks forth cheerily, “you know the aphorism:
At forty every man is either a fool or a doctor. Now I am over forty;
and, as a fellow-practitioner, I promise you that our patient, Paul
Jones, is out of danger and on the mend.” Then, gayly: “Come, Gourgaud,
don’t croak! Take a glass of wine, man; you frighten Aimee with your
long looks.” Gourgaud takes his wine; but his looks are quite as long as
before.

Abruptly and apropos of nothing, Admiral Paul Jones decides to make his
will.

“Your will!” protests Gouverneur Morris, somewhat aghast. “But you
haven’t been in such health for months.”

“Not on account of my health,” he explains, “but because of those
Barbary pirates.”

Notaries are brought in by Benoît-André, and the will is drawn. The
gallant testator is for giving all to his Aimee.

“The house you already have,” says he; “and also an annuity. Now I leave
you the rest; and Beaupoil shall be executor, with Morris as a witness.
There; it is arranged!”

But it is not arranged. The red-gold Aimee points out that he has
certain nieces and nephews in Scotland and Virginia; they must not
be forgotten. He yields to amendments in behalf of those nieces and
nephews. Then the will is sealed and signed.

“It has eased my mind,” he says, giving the document into the hands
of Major Beaupoil for safe-keeping--“it has eased my mind more than I
supposed possible.” Then, with a look at Aimee: “There will be enough,
_petite_, to take care of you, even though our friends here turn the
country bottom-side up. Luckily, too, the property is in England and
America and Holland, where values stand more steadily than they do in
France.”

Aimee remembers the “Sword of Honor,” given by King Louis for that
victory over the _Serapis_.

“You always declared it should go to your friend, Dale,” she says.

“So I do still!”

Aimee brings the sword. She presses the gilt scabbard to her lips; then
she puts it in the hands of her “Paul.” He half draws the blade, and
considers it with an eye of pride.

“You see this sword?” he remarks to Gouverneur Morris, “Should I die,
carry it with my love to Dick Dale--my good old Dick, who did more than
any other man to help me win it!”

It is nine o’clock; night has fallen. The many friends have gone their
homeward ways. The back parlor of the house in the Rue Tournon is
peaceful and still.

Admiral Paul Jones sits in his cushioned easy-chair reading a volume of
Voltaire. Now and then he addresses to Aimee some comment of agreement
or disagreement with his lively author. Aimee offers no counter
comments, but smiles accord to everything; for her heart is lighter
and her bosom more tranquil than for many a day, as she basks in the
sunshine of new hopes for the restoration of her “Paul.”

Some duty of the house calls Aimee. She leaves her Paul the lamplight
shining on the pages of the book, his loved face in the shadow. She
pauses at the door, her deep, soft eyes full of worship.

Aimee is on the stair returning. An ominous sound reaches her ears!
Her heart grows cold; alarm seizes her by the throat, as though a hand
clutched her! She knows by some instinct that the end has come, and her
“Paul” lies dead or dying! She can neither move nor cry out!

Presently she regains command of herself. With quaking limbs she mounts
the stair. The door of the back drawing-room stands open. The lamp still
burns, but its radiance no longer lights the pages of the philosopher of
Fernay. They fall across the motionless body of her “Paul.” He lies with
head and shoulder resting on a couch, which he was trying to reach when
stricken down.

Aimee gazes for one horror-frozen moment. Then, with a wailing sob, as
from the depths of her soul, she throws her arms about him. She covers
the marble lips with kisses--those dauntless, defiant lips!--while her
thick hair, breaking from its combs, hides, as with a veil of red and
gold, the loved face from the prying lamp.

Napoleon is reading those gloomy despatches which tell of Trafalgar.
Crushing the paper in his hand, he paces the floor, his pale, moody face
swept by gusty emotions of pain and anger and disappointment.

“Berthier, how old was Paul Jones when he died?”

“Forty-five, sire.”

There comes a gloom-filled silence; the gray, brooding eyes seek the
floor in thought. Then the pacing to and fro is resumed, that hateful
despatch still clutched fast in the nervous fingers.

“Berthier: Paul Jones did not fulfil his destiny.”

THE END








End of Project Gutenberg's The Story of Paul Jones, by Alfred Henry Lewis

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