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"You are a mutineer, and but that you showed your courage would have been hung at the yard-arm, as many of your comrades in England were." A cold smile played at Calhoun's lips. "My luck was as great as my courage, I know. I have the luck of Enniscorthy!" At the last words the governor winced, for it was by that touch Calhoun had defeated him in the duel long ago.
I had made my way aft, where I found Clem, and, leaning against a gun, we were talking together of dear old England, wondering when we should get back there, when a sudden squall struck the ship, and the hands were ordered aloft to reef topsails. I sprang aloft with the rest, and lay out on the lee fore yard-arm.
The weather continued fine; the routine of ship's duty and the studies went on without interruption. On the twenty-fourth day out, at three bells in the afternoon watch, a tremendous excitement was created on board. "Land on the port bow!" shouted one of the crew, who had been stationed on the fore yard-arm as a lookout. All on deck sprang into the rigging, to get a sight of the welcome shore.
Had there been a mast standing on the hulk, with a yard fast to it, I could have rigged a rope from the yard-arm and swung myself across in a moment; but the decks being sea-swept, with nothing left standing on them, that way was not open to me; nor could I find a light spar even the flag-staff at the stern being snapt away that I could stretch across from one rail to the other and make a bridge of.
While the Moors were gasping out their last breath in Granada and Ronda, the Turks had wrested the island of Venus from the grasp of the haughty Republic Fainagosta had fallen; thousands of Venetians had been butchered with a ferocity which even Christians could not have surpassed; the famous General Bragadino had been flayed; stuffed, and sent hanging on the yard-arm of a frigate; to Constantinople, as a present to the Commander of the Faithful; and the mortgage of Catherine Cornaro, to the exclusion of her husband's bastards, had been thus definitely cancelled.
During this period the building of ships for the North Atlantic and Newfoundland trade opened new highways for commerce, but the greatest factor in this development was the "reputable business" of privateering, which must not be confounded either with buccaneering or yard-arm piracy.
One of the topmen, Tom Hansard, was at the weather yardarm, and had hold of the earing, which isn't a bit like those gold things our sisters wear in their ears, but is a long rope which helps to reef the sails. Suddenly the ship gave a tremendous lurch, I heard a cry, I looked up, and there was Tom Hansard hanging by one hand to the earing from the yard-arm, right over the foaming ocean.
"I call it a bit steep." A man in the Indian Cavalry broke the silence of the group who were leaning over the side watching the coast fade away. "In England two days after three years of it, and now here we are again. But the sun being over the yard-arm what say you?"
"Here, Bruneau, Gachet!" he exclaimed to two of the roughest and most villainous-looking of the crew, "down into the hold with you, and fetch me hither the prisoner and whoever it is who is with him. They will look well from yonder yard-arm." He followed the men down the gangway, and stood waiting between decks while they descended into Claude's prison.
In that supreme moment was written "The Star-Spangled Banner." The British ships slowly dropped down to North Point. Dr. Beanes went home to Upper Marlborough, very thankful as he saw the yard-arm of the Surprise melt out of sight, unburdened. Of all national airs, it breathes the purest patriotism.
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