Then he said to Terence: "Prisoners! Go forward and make yourself useful;" and he pointed towards the forecastle.
Terence gave a yell of despair, threw his hat down on the deck and, in
a volley of Portuguese, begged the captain to let them go. The latter, however, only waved his hand angrily; and two sailors, coming up, seized Terence by the arms and dragged him forward. Ryan was called upon deck, and also ordered forward. He too remonstrated, but was cut short by a threatening gesture from the captain.
For a time they preserved an appearance of deep dejection, Terence tugging his hair as if in utter despair, till Ryan whispered:
"For heaven's sake, Terence, don't go on like that, or I shall break out in a shout of laughter."
"It is monstrous, it is inhuman!" Terence exclaimed, in Portuguese. "Thus to seize harmless fishermen, who have so narrowly escaped drowning; the sea is less cruel than these men. They have taken our boat, too, our dear good boat. What will our mothers think, when we do not return? That we have been swallowed up by the sea. How they will watch for us, but in vain!"
Fortunately for the success of their story, the lugger hailed from a northern French port and, as not one on board understood either Spanish or Portuguese, they had no idea that the latter was the language in which the prisoners were speaking. After an hour of pretended despair, both rose from the deck on which they had been sitting and, on an order being given to trim the sails, went to the ropes and aided the privateersmen to haul at them and, before the end of the day, were doing duty as regular members of the crew.
"They are active young fellows," the captain said to his first mate, as he watched the supposed Spaniards making themselves useful. "It was lucky for them that they had a fair store of provisions and water in their boat. We are very short handed, and they will be useful. I would have let them go if it had not been for the boat but, as we have only one left that can swim, it was too lucky a find to give up."
The craft had been heading north when Ryan had first seen her, and she held that course all day. Terence gathered from the talk of the sailors that they were bound for Brest, to which port she belonged. The Frenchmen were congratulating themselves that their cruise was so nearly over, and that it had been so successful a one. From time to time a sailor was sent up into the cross trees, and scanned the horizon to the north and west. In the afternoon he reported that he could make out the upper sails of a large ship going south. The captain went up to look at her.
"I think she is an English ship of war," he said, when he descended to the deck, "but she is a long way off. With this light wind we could run away from her. She will not trouble herself about us. She would know well enough that she could not get within ten miles of us, before it got dark."
This turned out to be the case, for the lookout from time to time reported that the distant sail was keeping on her course, and the slight feeling of hope that had been felt by Terence and Ryan faded away. They were placed in the same watch, and were below when, as daylight broke, they heard sudden exclamations, tramping of feet overhead, and a moment later the watch was summoned on deck.
"I hope that they have had the same luck that we had, and have run into the arms of one of our cruisers," Terence whispered in Portuguese to Ryan, as they ran up on deck together.
As he reached the deck the boom of a cannon was heard, and at the same instant a ball passed through the mainsail. Half a mile away was a British sloop of war. She had evidently made out the lugger before the watch on board the latter had seen her. The captain was foaming with rage, and shouting orders which the crew hurried to execute. On the deck near the foremast lay the man who had been on the lookout, and who had been felled with a handspike by the captain when he ran out on deck, at the first alarm. Although at first flurried and alarmed, the crew speedily recovered themselves, and executed with promptitude the orders which were given.
There was a haze on the water, but a light wind was stirring, and the vessel was moving through the water at some three knots an hour. As soon as her course had been changed, so as to bring the wind forward of the beam, which was her best point of sailing, the men were sent to the guns; the first mate placing himself at a long eighteen pounder, which was mounted as a pivot gun aft, a similar weapon being in her bows. All this took but four or five minutes, and shot after shot from the sloop hummed overhead.
The firing now ceased, as the change of course of the lugger had placed the sloop dead astern of her; and the latter was unable, therefore, to fire even her bow chasers without yawing. It was now the turn of the lugger. The gun in the stern was carefully trained and, as it was fired, a patch of white splinters appeared in the sloop's bulwarks. A cheer broke from the French. The effect of the