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Not so Paul, who seemed to have made up his mind that they must be taken. "Jezebel Brandywine, you are but a widowed old lady, I calculate. I shall never see the broad, smooth Chesapeake again no more peach brandy for Paul;" and folding his arms, he set himself doggedly down on the low tafferel. Little did I think at the time how fearfully the poor fellow's foreboding was so soon to be fulfilled.
The press of canvass she was carrying laid her over, until her copper sheathing, clear as glass, and glancing like gold, was seen high above the water, throughout her whole length, above which rose her glossy jet black bends, surmounted by a milk white streak, broken at regular intervals into eleven goodly ports, from which the British cannon, ugly customers at the best, were grinning, tompion out, open mouthed at us; and above all, the clean, well stowed white hammocks filled the nettings, from tafferel to cathead oh! that I had been in one of them, snug on the berth deck!
Jack mounted on the breech of one of the guns, and looked over the bulwarks at the dispositions that had been made about the wreck. The tafferel of the schooner actually came in sight, when a little swell passed over it, leaving it for an instant in the trough.
The tafferel is not six inches below the surface of the water, and half an hour of heaving will bring the starn in sight." "Your work seems ingeniously contrived to get up one extremity of the vessel, Don Esteban," returned the Mexican; "but are you quite certain that the doubloons are in her?"
She was very heavily rigged, with her main mast raking over the tafferel, and full of men. I noticed she had a long gun on a pivot, and several carronades mounted. Presently there was a good deal of whispering amongst the group of half a dozen gentlemen who were with me in the lookout, who, from their conversation, I soon found were underwriters on the schooner outside.
But as soon as he felt the pain occasioned by the book in his jaws, he plunged towards the bottom of the sea with such violence, as to render the very tafferel hot, by the rapidity of the cord gliding over it.
"Fire!" shouted the captain, while a blue light he had just ignited threw a pale unearthly glare over the ship's tafferel, and showed us our new and unexpected enemy It was the pirate's boat, which she had dropped during the partial obscurity I spoke of, intending to board us a-head herself, while the boat's crew attacked us astern.
At last I caught sight of what I made sure was it a fine large vessel just casting off her moorings. The tafferel was green. Three masts yes, that must be it and the gilt figure-head of Hercules. To be sure, it had a three-pronged pitchfork in its hand instead of a club; but that might be my uncle's mistake, or perhaps Hercules sometimes varied his weapons.
In a quarter of an hour, most of that part of the stern which was within five or six feet of the tafferel, rose above the water, coming fairly in view. Spike now shouted to the men to "pall!" then he directed the falls to be very gradually eased off, in order to ascertain if the shores would still do their duty.
Presently we were alongside the corvette, and the next moment we stood on her deck, holystoned white and clean, with my stanch friend Captain Transom and his officers, all in full fig, walking to and fro under the awning, a most magnificent naval lounge, being thirty two feet wide at the gangway, and extending fifty feet or more aft, until it narrowed to twenty at the tafferel.
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