ll, I've warned ye," says Uncle Aurette. "I'll be slipping off now
before your Revenue cutter comes. Give my love to sister and take care
o' the kegs. It's thicking to southward."

'I remember him waving to us and young Stephen L'Estrange blowing out
the lantern. By the time we'd fished up the kegs the fog came down so
thick Dad judged it risky for me to row 'em ashore, even though we could
hear the ponies stamping on the beach. So he and Uncle Lot took the
dinghy and left me in the smack playing on my fiddle to guide 'em back.

'Presently I heard guns. Two of 'em sounded mighty like Uncle Aurette's
three-pounders. He didn't go naked about the seas after dark. Then come
more, which I reckoned was Captain Giddens in the Revenue cutter. He was
open-handed with his compliments, but he _would_ lay his guns himself. I
stopped fiddling to listen, and I heard a whole skyful o' French up in
the fog--and a high bow come down on top o' the smack. I hadn't time to
call or think. I remember the smack heeling over, and me standing on the
gunwale pushing against the ship's side as if I hoped to bear her off.
Then the square of an open port, with a lantern in it, slid by in front
of my nose. I kicked back on our gunwale as it went under and slipped
through that port into the French ship--me and my fiddle.'

'Gracious!' said Una. 'What an adventure!'

'Didn't anybody see you come in?' said Dan.

'There wasn't any one there. I'd made use of an orlop-deck port--that's
the next deck below the gun-deck, which by rights should not have been
open at all. The crew was standing by their guns up above. I rolled on
to a pile of dunnage in the dark and I went to sleep. When I woke, men
was talking all round me, telling each other their names and sorrows
just like Dad told me pressed men used to talk in the last war. Pretty
soon I made out they'd all been hove aboard together by the press-gangs,
and left to sort 'emselves. The ship she was the _Embuscade_, a
thirty-six gun Republican frigate, Captain Jean Baptiste Bompard, two
days out of Le Havre, going to the United States with a Republican
French Ambassador of the name of Genet. They had been up all night
clearing for action on account of hearing guns in the fog. Uncle Aurette
and Captain Giddens must have been passing the time o' day with each
other off Newhaven, and the frigate had drifted past 'em. She never knew
she'd run down our smack. Seeing so many aboard was total strangers to
each