Page:Stevenson and Quiller-Couch - St Ives .djvu/428

 "Yes, sir—leastways"

"Now, see here. Mister First Officer Colenso, junior, it's a shortish trip between this and the yard-arm, and it may save yon some superfluous lying if I tell you that in August last year, the Lady Nepean, packet. Captain Colenso, outward bound for Halifax, met the Hitchcock, privateer, off the Great Bank of Newfoundland, and beat her off after two hours' fighting. You were on board of her?"

"I tended the stern gun."

"Very good! The next day, being still off the Banks, she fell in with Commodore Rodgers, of the United States frigate President, and surrendered to him right away."

"We sank the mails."

"You did, my man. Notwithstanding which, that lion-hearted hero treated you with the forbearance of a true-born son of freedom." Captain Seccombe's voice took an oratorical roll. "He saw that you were bleeding from your fray. He fed you at his hospitable board; he would not suffer you to be denuded of the least trifle. Nay, what did he promise?—but to send your father and his crew and passengers back to England in their own ship, on their swearing upon their sacred honour that she should return to Boston harbour with an equal number of American prisoners from England. Your father swore to that upon the Old and New Testaments, severally and conjointly; and the Lady Nepean sailed home for all the world like a Iamb from the wolf's jaws, with a single American officer inside of her. And how did your dog-damned government receive this noble confidence? In a way, sir, that would have brought a blush to the cheek of a low-down attorney's clerk. They repudiated. Under shelter of a notification that no exchange of prisoners on the high seas would count as valid, this perjured tyrant and his