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Updated: May 28, 2025
For the purpose of my tale you are to view him as Tunbridge did at this particular time: as a handsome and formal person, twenty-eight years old or thereabouts, of whom nobody knew anything quite definite beyond the genealogic inference to be drawn from a smatch of the brogue save that after a correspondence of gallantries, of some three weeks' duration, he was the manifest slave of Miss Dorothy Allonby, and had already fought three duels behind Ormerod House, with Will Pratchet, Lord Humphrey Degge, and Sir Eugene Harrabie, respectively, each one of whom was a declared suitor for her hand.
On the box of the third carriage sat Sam Smatch, fiddle in hand, playing away most lustily, and occasionally firing off a bow or stern-chaser of jokes at the other carriages with a peculiar loud cackling laugh which none but negroes can produce.
"He was just beginning to get the use of his sea-legs," as Paul observed; and it was his great amusement and that of the boy's other guardians, as well as of Sam Smatch, and occasionally of the other men, to teach him to employ them. They would sit on the deck in a circle, and, stretching out their arms, let him run about between them.
'Yours I know already, and round-head as you are, you have some smatch of honour in you. With an air of condescension he held out his hand, which his adversary, oppressed with a sense of the injury he had done him, did not refuse. Richard hurried home, and to the stable, where he saddled his mare.
"We hear as how we are to get alongside an enemy and to take her, and we've been thinking how we are to get little Billy safe aboard if the Terrible, bless her old ribs! was for to take it into her head to go down; and we thinks as how if he was to have a bodyguard, whose business was to keep round him and look after him, seeing as how Sam Smatch can't do that same by himself, that it would be the best thing for the youngster we can arrange."
As was intended, it was repeated to the men, and soon passed along the decks, all joining heartily in the wish that, they might thus have the chance of punishing the enemy. "But what is to be done with little Billy True Blue?" inquired Sam Smatch. "He can't board with the rest, I guess." "No, Sam; but we will have a bodyguard for him," observed Peter Ogle.
Of course Sam Smatch would be one; but then by himself he would not be of much use, as his wooden leg might chance to stick in a hole and stop his progress. At last they agreed to refer the matter to the Captain, and to get him to tell off a body of men for that purpose. Paul Pringle was selected to be the bearer of the message. Hat in hand, he stood before his Captain.
Among all, none seemed to anticipate a battle with greater satisfaction than Will Freeborn. His spirits rose higher by far than they had done since the death of his wife; and that evening, when Sam Smatch struck up a hornpipe on the forecastle, no one footed it more merrily than did he. "All right," observed Paul, "I'm glad Will's himself again.
Whether the cessation of the roar of the guns made Sam Smatch careless, is uncertain; but just as a ninety-gun ship was bearing down on the gallant Fame, who should appear on the quarterdeck but little Billy True Blue! At that moment the Frenchmen let fly a crashing broadside, speedily returned by the crew of the Fame.
Sam Smatch now acted the part of a good Samaritan towards him. He got him up on the lower-deck, and then went and called the doctor, and said that he had found him bruised all over and apparently out of his wits. The doctor ordered him to be put into a hammock in the sick-bay. Sam, however, first got him washed and cleaned, and gave him some food, which considerably revived him.
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