h captain.

While Paul and his lieutenants were confronting these prisoners, the
gunner, running up from below, and not perceiving his official
superiors, and deeming them dead, believing himself now left sole
surviving officer, ran to the tower of Pisa to haul down the colors. But
they were already shot down and trailing in the water astern, like a
sailor's towing shirt. Seeing the gunner there, groping about in the
smoke, Israel asked what he wanted.

At this moment the gunner, rushing to the rail, shouted "Quarter!
quarter!" to the Serapis.

"I'll quarter ye," yelled Israel, smiting the gunner with the flat of
his cutlass.

"Do you strike?" now came from the Serapis.

"Aye, aye, aye!" involuntarily cried Israel, fetching the gunner a
shower of blows.

"Do you strike?" again was repeated from the Serapis; whose captain,
judging from the augmented confusion on board the Richard, owing to the
escape of the prisoners, and also influenced by the report made to him
by his late guest of the port-hole, doubted not that the enemy must
needs be about surrendering.

"Do you strike?"

"Aye!--I strike _back_" roared Paul, for the first time now hearing the
summons.

But judging this frantic response to come, like the others, from some
unauthorized source, the English captain directed his boarders to be
called, some of whom presently leaped on the Richard's rail, but,
throwing out his tattooed arm at them, with a sabre at the end of it,
Paul showed them how boarders repelled boarders. The English retreated,
but not before they had been thinned out again, like spring radishes, by
the unfaltering fire from the Richard's tops.

An officer of the Richard, seeing the mass of prisoners delirious with
sudden liberty and fright, pricked them with his sword to the pumps,
thus keeping the ship afloat by the very blunder which had promised to
have been fatal. The vessels now blazed so in the rigging that both
parties desisted from hostilities to subdue the common foe.

When some faint order was again restored upon the Richard her chances of
victory increased, while those of the English, driven under cover,
proportionably waned. Early in the contest, Paul, with his own hand, had
brought one of his largest guns to bear against the enemy's mainmast.
That shot had hit. The mast now plainly tottered. Nevertheless, it
seemed as if, in this fight, neither party could be victor. Mutual
obliteration from the face of the waters seemed t