Captain Jack Paul and his Grantully Castle see friendly years together. They go to India, to Spain, to the West Indies, to the Mediterranean, to Africa. While Captain Jack Paul is busy with the Grantully Castle, piling up pounds and shillings and pence for owners Donald, Currie & Beck, he is also deep with the books, hammering at French, Spanish and German. Ashore, he makes his way into what best society he can find, being as eager to refine his manners as refine his mind, holding the one as much an education as is the other. Finally he is known in every ocean for the profundity of his learning, the polish of his deportment, the power of his fists, and the powder-like explosiveness of his temper.
It is a cloudy October afternoon when Captain Jack Paul works the Grantully Castle out of Plymouth, shakes free his canvas, and fills away on the starboard tack for Tobago. The crew is an evil lot, and a spirit of mutiny stirs in the ship. Captain Jack Paul, who holds that a good sailor is ever a good grumbler, can overlook a deal in favor of this aphorism; and does. On the sixth day out, however, when his first officer, Mr. Sands, staggers below with a sheath-knife through his shoulder, it makes a case to which no commander can afford to seem blind.
“It was Mungo!” explains the wounded Mr. Sands.
Captain Jack Paul goes on deck, and takes his stand by the main mast.
“Pipe all hands aft, Mr. Cooper,” he says to the boatswain.
The crew straggle aft. They offer a circling score of brutal faces; in each the dominant expression is defiance.
“The man Mungo!” says Captain Jack Paul. “Where is he?”
At the word, a gigantic black slouches out from among his mates. Sloping shoulders, barrel body, long, swinging arms like a gorilla’s, bandy legs, huge hands and feet, head the size and shape of a cocoanut, small, black serpent eyes, no soul unless a fiend’s soul, Mungo is at once tyrant, pride and leader of the forecastle. Rumor declares that he has sailed pirate in his time, and should be sun-drying in chains on the gibbet at Corso Castle.
As he stands before Captain Jack Paul, Mungo’s features are in a black snarl of fury. It is in his heart to do murderously more for his captain than he did for first officer Sands. He waits only the occasion before making a spring. Captain Jack Paul looks him over with a grim stare as he slouches before him.
“Mr. Cooper,” says Captain Jack Paul after a moment, during which he reads the black Mungo like a page of print, “fetch the irons!”
The boatswain is back on deck with a pair of steel wristlets in briefest space. He passes them to Captain Jack Paul. At this, Mungo glowers, while the mutinous faces in the background put on a dull sullenness. There are a brace of pistols in the belt of Captain Jack Paul, of which the sullen dull ones do not like the look. Mungo, a black berserk, cares little for the pistols, seeing he is in a white-hot rage, the hotter for being held in present check. Captain Jack Paul, on his part, is in no wise asleep; he notes the rolling, roving, bloodshot eye, like the eye of a wild beast at bay, and is prepared.
“Hold out your hands!” comes the curt command.
Plainly it is the signal for which Mungo waited. With a growling roar, bear-like in its guttural ferocity, he rushes upon Captain Jack Paul. The roaring rush is of the suddenest, but the latter is on the alert. Quick as is Mungo, Captain Jack Paul is quicker. Seizing a belaying-pin, he brings it crashing down on the skull of the roaring, charging black. The heavy, clublike pin is splintered; Mungo drops to the deck, a shivering heap. The great hands close and open; the muscles clutch and knot under the black skin; there is a choking gurgle. Then the mighty limbs relax; the face tarns from black to a sickly tallow. Mouth agape, eyes wide and staring, Mungo lies still.
Captain Jack Paul surveys the prostrate black. Then he tosses the irons to Boatswain Cooper.
“They will not be needed, Mr. Bo’sen,” he says. “Pipe the crew for’ard!”
The keen whistle sings; the mutinous ones scuttle forward, like fowls that hear the high scream of some menacing hawk..
It is two bells in the evening; the port watch, in charge of the knife-wounded Mr. Sands, has the deck. The dead Mungo, tight-clouted in a hammock, lies stretched on a grating, ready for burial.
Captain Jack Paul comes up from his cabin. In his hand he carries a prayer-book. Also those two pistols are still in his belt.
“Turn out the watch below!” is the word.
The crew makes a silent half-circle about the dead Mungo. That mutinous sullenness, recently the defiant expression of their faces, is supplanted by a deprecatory look, composite of apology and fear. It is as though they would convince Captain Jack Paul of their tame and sheep-like frame of thought. The fate of Mungo has instructed them; for one and all they are of that criminal, coward brood, best convinced by a club and with whom death is the only conclusive argument. As they stand uncovered about the rigid one in the clouted hammock, they realize in full the villainy of mutiny, and abandon that ship-rebellion which has been forecastle talk and plan since ever the Plymouth lights went out astern.
Captain Jack Paul reads a prayer, and the dead Mungo is surrendered to the deep. As the body goes splashing into the sea, Captain Jack Paul turns on the subdued ones.
“Let me tell you this, my men!” says he. His tones have a cold, threatening ring, like the clink of iron on arctic ice. “The first of you who so much as lifts an eyebrow in refusal of an order shall go the same voyage as the black. And so I tell you!”
Captain Jack Paul brings the Grantully Castle into Tobago, crew as it might be a crew of lambs. Once his anchors are down, he signals for the port admiral. Within half an hour the gig of that dignitary is alongside.
The Honorable Simpson, Judge Surrogate of the Vice-Admiralty Court of Tobago, with the Honorable Young, Lieutenant-Governor of the colony, to give him countenance, opens court in the after cabins of the Grantully Castle. The crew are examined, man after man. They say little, lest they themselves be caught in some law net, and landed high and dry in the Tobago jail. First Officer Sands shows his wound and tells his story.
Throughout the inquiry Captain Jack Paul sits in silence, listening and looking on. He puts no questions to either mate or crew. When First Officer Sands is finished, the Honorable Simpson asks:
“Captain, in the killing of the black, Mungo, are you in conscience convinced that you used no more force than was necessary to preserve discipline in your ship?”
“May it please,” returns Captain Jack Paul, who has not been at his books these years for nothing, and is fit to cope with a king’s counsel —“may it please, I would say that it was necessary in the course of duty to strike the mutineer Mungo. This was on the high seas. Whenever it becomes necessary for a commanding officer to strike a seaman, it is necessary to strike with a weapon. Also, the necessity to strike carries with it the necessity to kill or disable the mutineer. I call your attention to the fact that I had loaded pistols in my belt, and could have shot the mutineer Mungo. I struck with a belaying-pin in preference, because I hoped that I might subdue him without killing him. The result proved otherwise. I trust your Honorable Court will take due account that, although armed with pistols throwing ounce balls, weapons surely fatal in my hands, I used a belaying-pin, which, though a dangerous, is not necessarily a fatal weapon.”
Upon this statement, the Honorable Simpson and the Honorable Young confer. As the upcome of their conference, the Honorable Simpson announces judgment, exonerating Captain Jack Paul.
“The sailor Mungo, being at the time on the high seas, was in a state of mutiny.” Thus runs the finding as set forth in the records of the Vice-Admiralty Court of Tobago. “The sailor Mungo was mutinous under circumstances which lodged plenary power in the hands of the master of the vessel. Therefore, the homicide was justifiable, because it had become the only means of maintaining the discipline required for the safety of the ship.”
The court rises, and Captain Jack Paul bows the Honorable Simpson and the Honorable Young over the side. When they are clear, First Officer Sands addresses Captain Jack Paul.
“Are the crew to be set ashore, sir?” he asks.
“What! Mr. Sands, would you discharge the best crew we’ve ever had?” He continues as though replying to his first officer’s look of astonishment. “I grant you they were a trifle uncurried at first. The error of their ways, however, broke upon them with all clearness in the going of Mungo. As matters now are, compared to the Grantully Castle, a dove-cote is a merest theatre of violence and murderous blood. No, Mr. Sands; we will keep our crew if you please. Should there be further mutiny, why then there shall be further belaying-pins, I promise you.”
The Grantully Castle goes finally back to England, the most peaceful creature of oak and cordage that ever breasted the Atlantic. Cargo discharged, the ship is sent into winter overhaul.
“As for you, sir,” remarks owner Donald, of Donald, Currie & Beck, shoving the wine across to Captain Jack Paul, “ye’re just a maister mariner of gold! Ye’ll no wait ashore for the Grantully Castle. We’ve been buildin’ ye a new ship at our Portsmouth yards. She’s off the ways a month, and s’uld be sparred and rigged and ready for the waves by now. We’ve called her The Two Friends.”
The wooded April banks of the Rappahannock are flourishing in the new green of an early Virginia spring. The bark Two Friends, Captain Jack Paul, out of Whitehaven by way of Lisbon, Madeira, and Kingston, comes picking her dull way up the river, and anchors midstream at the foot of the William Jones plantation. Almost coincident with the splash of the anchors, the Two Friends has her gig in the water, and the next moment Captain Jack Paul takes his place in the stern sheets.
“Let fall!” comes the sharp command, as he seizes the tiller-ropes.
The four sailors bend their strong backs, the four oars swing together like clockwork, and the gig heads for the plantation landing where a twenty-ton sloop, current-vexed, lies gnawing at her ropes.
At twenty-six, Captain Jack Paul is the very flower of a quarter-deck nobility. He has not the advantage of commanding height; but the lean, curved nose, clean jaw, firmly-lined month, steady stare of the brown eyes, coupled at the earliest smell of opposition with a frowning falcon trick of brow like a threat, are as a commission to him, signed and countersigned by nature, to be ever a leader of men. In figure he is five feet seven inches, and the scales telling his weight consent to one hundred and forty-five pounds. His hands and feet are as small as a woman’s. By way of offset to this, his shoulders, broad and heavy, and his deep chest arched like the deck of a whale-back, speak of anything save the effeminate. In his movements there is a feline graceful accuracy> with over all a resolute atmosphere of enterprise. To his men, he is more than a captain; he is a god. Prudent at once and daring, he shines a master of seamanship, and never the sailor serves with him who would not name him a mariner without a flaw. He is born to inspire faith in men. This is as it should be, by his own abstract picture of a captain, which he will later furnish Doctor Franklin:
“Your captain,” he will say, when thus informing that philosopher, “your captain, Doctor, should have the blind confidence of his sailors. It is his beginning, his foundation, wanting which he can be no true captain. To his men your captain must he prophet, priest and king. His authority when off-shore is necessarily absolute, and therefore the crew should be as one man impressed that the captain, like the sovereign, can do no wrong. If a captain fail in this, he cannot make up for it by severity, austerity or cruelty. Use force, apply restraint, punish as he may, he will always have a sullen crew and an unhappy ship.”
The nose of the gig grates on the river’s bank, and Captain Jack Paul leaps ashore. He is greeted by a tall, weather-beaten old man—grizzled and gray. The form of the latter is erect, with a kind of ramrod military stiffness. His dress is the rough garb of the Virginia overseer in all respects save headgear. Instead of the soft wool hat, common of his sort, the old man cocks over his watery left eye a Highland bonnet, and this, with its hawk’s feather, fastened by a silver clasp, gives to his costume a crag and heather aspect altogether Scotch.
The gray old man, with a grinning background of negro slaves, waits for the landing of Captain Jack Paul. As the latter springs ashore, the old man throws up his hand in a military salute.
“And how do we find Duncan Macbean!” cries Captain Jack Paul. “How also is my brother! I trust you have still a bale or two of winter-cured tobacco left that we may add to our cargo!”
“As for the tobacco, Captain Paul,” returns old Duncan Macbean, “ye’re a day or so behind the fair, since the maist of it sailed Englandward a month hack, in the brig Flora Belle. As for your brother William of whom ye ask, now I s’uld say ye were in gude time just to hear his dying words.”
“What’s that, Duncan Macbean!” exclaims Captain Jack Paul. “William dying!”
“Ay, dying! He lies nearer death than he’s been any time since he and I marched with General Braddock and Colonel Washington, against the red salvages of the Ohio. But you s’uld come and see him at once, you his born brother, and no stand talking here.”
“It’s lung fever, Jack,” whispers the sick man, as Captain Jack Paul draws a chair to the side of the bed. “It’s deadly, too; I can feel it. I’ll not get up again.”
“Come, come, brother,” retorts Captain Jack Paul cheerfully, “you’re no old man to talk of death—you, with your fewer than fifty years. I’ll see you up and on your pins again before I leave.”
“No, Jack, it’s death. And you’ve come in good time, too, since there’s much to talk between us. You know how our cousin left me his heir, if I would take his name of Jones?”
“Assuredly I know.”
“And so,” continues the dying man, “my name since his passing away has been William Paul Jones. Now when it is my turn to go, I must tell you that, by a clause of the old man’s will, he writes you in after me as legatee. I’m to die, Jack; and you’re to have the plantation. Only you must clap ‘Jones’ to your name, and be not John Paul, but John Paul Jones, as you take over the estate.”
“What’s this? I’m to heir the plantation after you?”
“So declares the will. On condition, however, that you also take the name of Jones. That should not be hard; ‘Jones’ is one of our family names, and he that leaves you the land was our kinsman.”
“Why, then,” cries Captain Jack Paul, “I wasn’t hesitating for that. Paul is a good name, but so also is Jones. Only, I tell you, brother, I hate to make my fortune by your death.”
“That’s no common-sense, Jack. I die the easier knowing my going makes way for your good luck. And the plantation’s a gem, Jack; never a cold or sour acre in the whole three thousand, but all of it warm, sweet land. There’re two thousand acres of woods; and I’d leave that stand.” The dying man, being Scotch, would give advice on his deathbed. “The thousand acres now under plow are enough.” Then, after a pause: “Ye’ll be content ashore? You’re young yet; you’re not so wedded to the sea, I think, but you’ll turn planter with good grace?”
“No fear, William. I’ve had good fortune by the sea; but then I’ve met ill fortune also. By and large, I shall be very well content to turn planter.”
“It’s gainful, Jack, being a planter is. Only keep Duncan Macbean by you to manage, and he’ll turn you in one thousand golden guineas profit every Christmas day, and you never to lift hand or give thought to the winning of them.”
“Is the plantation as gainful as that? Now I have but three thousand guineas to call mine, after sailing these years.”
“Ay! it’s gainful, Jack. If you will work, too, there’s that to keep you busy. There’s the grist mill, the thirty slaves, the forty horses, besides the cows and swine and sheep to look after; as well as the negro quarters, the tobacco houses, the stables, and the great mansion itself to keep up. They’ll all serve to fill in the time busily, if you should like it that way. Only Jack, with the last of it, always leave everything to Duncan Macbean. A rare and wary man is old Duncan, and saving of money down to farthings.”
“Whose sloop is that at the landing!” asks Captain Jack Paul, willing to shift the subject.
“Oh, yon sloop! She goes with the plantation; she’ll be yours anon, brother. And there you are: When the sea calls to you, Jack, as she will call, you take the sloop. Cato and Scipio are good sailors, well trained to the coast clear away to Charleston.”
And so William Paul Jones dies, and John Paul takes his place on the plantation. His name is no longer John Paul, but John Paul Jones; and, as his dying brother counselled, he keeps old Duncan Macbean to be the manager.
When his brother is dead, Captain Jack Paul joins his mate, Laurence Edgar, on the deck of the Two Friends, swinging tide and tide on her anchors.
“Mate Edgar,” says Captain Jack Paul, “it is the last time I shall plank this quarterdeck as captain. I’m to stay; and you’re to take the ship home to Whitehaven. And now, since you’re the captain, and I’m no more than a guest, suppose you order your cabin boy to get us a bottle of the right Madeira, and we’ll drink fortune to the bark and her new master.”
It is a soundless, soft December evening. The quietly falling flakes are cloaking in thin white the streets and roofs of Norfolk. Off shore, a cable’s length, an English sloop of war, eighteen guns, lies tugging at her anchors. In shore from the sloop of war rides the peaceful twenty-ton sloop of Planter Paul Jones. The sailor-planter, loitering homeward from a cruise to Charleston and the coast towns of the Carolinas, is calling on friends in Norfolk. Both the war sloop and the peace sloop seem almost deserted in the falling snow. Aside from the harbor light burning high in the rigging, and an anchor watch of two sailors muffled to the ears, the decks of neither craft show signs of life.
Norfolk’s public hall is candle-lighted to a pitch of unusual brilliancy; the waxed floors are thronged with the beauty and gentility of the Old Dominion, as the same find Norfolk expression. It is indeed a mighty social occasion; for the local élite have seized upon the officers of the sloop of war, and are giving a ball in their honor. The honored ones attend to a man—which accounts for the deserted look of their sloop—and their gold lace blazes bravely by the light of the candles, and with tremendous gala effect.
Planter Paul Jones is also among the guests. Since he is in town, his coming to the ball becomes the thing most natural. Already he is regarded as the Admirable Crichton, of tide-water Virginia, and the function wanting his presence would go down to history as incomplete.
Paul Jones, planter for two years, has made himself a foremost figure in Virginia. Twenty-eight, cultured, travelled, gallant, brilliant, and a bachelor, he is welcome in every drawing-room. Besides, is there not the Jones plantation, with its mile of river front, its noble mansion house, its tobacco teeming acres, its well-trained slaves, and all turning in those yearly one thousand yellow guineas under the heedful managing thumb of canny Duncan Macbean? Planter Paul Jones is a prince for hospitality, too; and the high colonial dames, taking pity on his wifeless state, preside at his table, or chaperone the water parties which he gives on his great sloop. Also—still considering his wifelessness—they seek to marry him to one of their colonial daughters.
In this latter dulcet intrigue, the high colonial dames fail wholly. The young planter-sailor is not a marrying man. There is in truth a blushing story which lasts throughout a fortnight in which he is quoted as about to yield. Rumor gives it confidently forth that the Jones mansion will have a mistress, and its master carry altar-ward Betty Parke, the pretty niece of Madam Martha Washington. But pretty Betty Parke, in the very face of this roseate rumor, becomes Mrs. Tyler, and it will be one of her descendants who, seventy-five years later, is chosen President—a poor President, but still a President. Planter Paul Jones rides to the wedding of pretty Betty Parke, and gives it his serene and satisfied countenance. From which sign it is supposed that Dame Rumor mounts by the wrong stirrup when she goes linking the name of pretty Betty Parke with that of Planter Paul Jones; and no love-letter scrap, nor private journal note, will ever rise from the grave to disparage the assumption.
That Planter Paul Jones has thus lived for two years, and moved and had his social being among the most beautiful of women, and escaped hand free and heart free to tell the tale, is strange to the brink of marvellous. It is the more strange since no one could be more than he the knight of dames. And he can charm, too—as witness a letter which two years farther on the unimpressionable Doctor Franklin will write to Madam d’Haudetot:
“No matter, my dear madam,” the cool philosopher will say, “what the faults of Paul Jones may be, I must warn your ladyship that when face to face with him neither man nor, so far as I learn, woman, can for a moment resist the strange magnetism of his presence, the indescribable charm of his manner; a commingling of the most compliant deference with the most perfect self-esteem that I have ever seen in a man; and above all the sweetness of his voice and the purity of his language.”
Paul Jones is not alone the darling of colonial drawing-rooms, he is also the admiration of the men. This is his description as given by one who knew him afloat and ashore:
“Though of slender build, his neck, arms and shoulders were those of a heavy, powerful man. The strength of his arms and shoulders could hardly be believed. And he had equal use of both hands, even to writing with the left as well as with the right. He was a past master of the art of boxing. To this he added a quickness of motion that cannot be described. When roused he could strike more blows and cause more havoc in a second than any other could strike or cause in a minute. Even when calm and unruffled his gait and all his bodily motions were those of the panther—noiseless, sleek, the perfection of grace.”
The above, by way of portrait: When one adds to it that Planter Paul Jones rides like a Prince Rupert, fences like a Crillon, gives blows with his fist that would stagger Jack Slack, and is death itself with either gun or pistol, it will be seen how he owns every quality that should pedestal him as a paragon in the best circles of his day.
It is towards the hour of midnight when Planter Paul Jones, attired like a Brummel, stands in quiet converse with his friend Mr. Hurst. Their talk runs on the state of sentiment in the colonies, and the chance of trouble with the motherland.
“Hostilities are certain, my dear Hurst,” says Planter Paul Jones. “I hear it from Colonel Washington, Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Henry. They make no secret of it in Williamsburg about the House of Burgesses.”
“But the other colonies’?”
“Mr. Morris of Philadelphia, as well as Mr. Pynckney of Charleston, agrees with the gentlemen I’ve quoted. They say, sir, there will soon be an outbreak in Boston.”
“In Boston!” repeats Mr. Hurst doubtfully.
“Have the Massachusetts men the courage, think you?”
“Courage, ay! and the strength, my friend! Both Colonel Washington and Mr. Jefferson assured me that, although slow to anger, they are true sons of Cromwell’s Ironsides.
“And what shall be our attitude?”
“We must sustain them at all hazards, sir—sustain them to the death!”
It is now that a knot of English officers drift up—a little flushed of wine, are these guests of honor. They, too, have been talking, albeit thickly, of a possible future full of trouble for the colonies.
“I was observing,” says Lieutenant Parker, addressing Planter Paul Jones and Mr. Hurst, “that the insolence of the Americans, which is more or less in exhibition all the way from Boston to Savannah, will never get beyond words. There will be no blows struck.”
“And why are you so confident?” asks Planter Paul Jones, eye agate, voice purringly soft. “Now I should say that, given provocation, the colonies would strike a blow, and a heavy one.”
“When do you sail?” interrupts Mr. Hurst, speaking to Lieutenant Parker. Mr. Hurst would shift conversation to less perilous ground. As a mover of the ball, he is in sort host to the officers, as well as to Planter Paul Jones, and for the white credit of the town desires a peaceful evening. “I hear,” he concludes, “that your sloop is for a cruise off the French coast.”
“She and the fleet she belongs to,” responds Lieutenant Parker, utterance somewhat blurred, “will remain on this station while a word of rebel talk continues.”
“Now, instead of keeping you here,” breaks in Planter Paul Jones, vivaciously, “to hector peaceful colonies, if I were your king I should send you to wrest Cape Good Hope from the Dutch.”
“Cape Good Hope from the Dutch?”
“Or the Isles of France and Bourbon from the French—lying, as they do, like lions in the pathway to our Indian possessions. If I were your king, I say, those would be the tasks I’d set you.”
“And why do you say ‘your king?’ Is he not also your king?”
“Why, sir, I might be pleasantly willing,” observes Planter Paul Jones airily, “to give you my share in King George. In any event, I do not propose that you shall examine into my allegiance. And I say again that, if I were your king, sir, I’d find you better English work to do than an irritating and foolish patrol of these coasts.”
“You spoke of the Americans striking a blow,” says Lieutenant Parker, who is gifted of that pertinacity of memory common to half-drunken men; “you spoke but a moment back of the Americans striking a blow, and a heavy one.”
“Ay, sir! a blow—given provocation.”
Lieutenant Parker wags his head with an air of sagacity both bibulous and supercilious. He smiles victoriously, as a fortunate comparison bobs up to his mind.
“A blow!” he murmurs. Then, fixing Planter Paul Jones with an eye of bleary scorn: “The Americans would be quickly lashed into their kennels again. The more easily, if the courage of the American men, as I think’s the case, is no more firmly founded than the chastity of the American women.”
Planter Paul Jones deals Lieutenant Parker a blow with his clenched fist, the like of which was never before seen even in the violent port of Norfolk. Lieutenant Parker’s nose is crushed flat with his face; he falls like some pole-axed ox. His fellow-officers lift him to his feet, bleeding, stunned beyond words.
“You shall hear from us!” is the fierce cry from his comrades, as they hurry the stricken Parker from the ballroom.
“I shall be pleased to hear from any or all of you,” replies Planter Paul Jones; “or from what other dogs in king’s coats shall question the honor of American women.” Then, turning to Mr. Hurst: “You, sir, shall act for me! Accept every challenge they send! Make it pistols, ten paces, with Craney Island for the place; and fix the time to suit their English convenience.”
Norfolk is never more at peace than on the day succeeding the ball. There is no challenge, no duel. Planter Paul Jones waits to hear from Lieutenant Parker; at first hopefully; in the end, when nothing comes, with doubtful brow of grief. Is it that Lieutenant Parker will not fight? Planter Paul Jones hears the suggestion from his friend Mr. Hurst with polite scorn. Such heresy is beyond reach.
“He must fight,” urges Planter Paul Jones, desperately keeping alive the fires of his hope. “He will fight, if for no other reason, then because it is his trade. Lieutenant Parker is pugnacious by profession; that of itself will make him toe the peg.”
Planter Paul Jones is wrong. Lieutenant Parker never shows his beaten face on American soil again. Nor does any bellicose gentleman appear for Lieutenant Parker, or propose to take his place.
This last omission gives Planter Paul Jones as sharp a pang as though he has been slighted by some dearest friend. Having on his own part a native lust for battle, it bewilders him when so excellent a foundation for a duel falls into neglect, and no architect of combat steps forward to build thereon.
“It is not to be understood!” observes Planter Paul Jones dejectedly, after the sloop of war, with Lieutenant Parker and those others of that gold-lace coterie, has sailed away, “it’s not to be understood! Surely, there must have been one gentleman among them who, free to do so, would have called me to account.” Then, with solemn sadness: “I am convinced that their admiral interfered.”
Who shall say? The admiral is the paternal uncle of Lieutenant Parker of the crushed and broken nose.
The story will go later to England to the explanatory effect that no fellow-officer would act for Lieutenant Parker. However, in doubt of this, that last named imprudent person—wearing the marks of Planter Paul Jones’ rebuke for many a day—is not dismissed the king’s service. He will be in the fight off Fort Moultrie, where—unlike Sergeant Jasper of the Americans—he in no wise is to distinguish himself.
Planter Paul Jones, when every final chance of the trouble for which he longs has departed with the departure of the war sloop, sorrowfully steers the peace sloop back to his plantation by the Rappahannock; and thereafter he does his best to forget an incident that—because of the mysterious tameness of the English, under conditions which should have brought them ferociously to the field—gives him an aching sense of pain. He says to Mr. Hurst, when about to spread his small canvas and sail away for home, “It is one of those experiences, sir, that shake a man’s faith in his kind.”
The colonial dames get hold of the tale, and
Planter Paul Jones becomes all the more the petted darling of the drawing-rooms. This of itself is a destiny most friendly to his taste; for our Virginia Bayard lives not without his tender vanities. Bright eyes are more beautiful than stars; and he can sigh, or whisper a sonnet, or softly press a little hand. Also, having in his composition an ardent dash of the peacock, he is capable, with fair ladies looking on, of a decorous, albeit a resplendent strut.
Four months, dating from the disaster to Lieutenant Parker’s nose, have squeezed through the gates of a narrow present, and merged with those other countless months which together make the past. It is a muggy April morning, and New York City, panting with its metropolitan population of forty thousand, is soaked to the bone. Little squalls of rain follow each other in gusty procession. Between the squalls the sun shines forth, and sets the world a-steam. After each of these intermittent bursts of glory, the sun is again blotted ont by a black flurry of clouds, and another shower sets in.
It is in William Street that the reader comes across the lithe figure of Planter Paul Jones. That restless tobacco grower, with his two aquatic slaves, Scipio and Cato, in the little sloop, has been knocking about the eastern shore for ducks. A sudden change of plan now brings him to New York, with a final purpose of extending his voyage as far as Boston. Planter Paul Jones is in a mood to know the Yankees better, and come by some guess of his own as to how soon our Puritan bulldogs may be expected to fly at the English throat.
As he goes briskly northward along William Street, even through his landsman’s garb there shows much that is marine. Also, he evinces a sailor’s contempt for the dripping weather, plowing ahead through shine and through shower as though in the catalogue of the disagreeable there is no such word as a wetting.
At the corner of John Street, Planter Paul Jones comes upon a lean, prim personage. By his severe air the latter gentleman is evidently an individual of consequence. The severe gentleman, with a prudent care for his coat in direct contrast to the weather-carelessness of the other, has taken refuge in the safe harborage of a doorway. From the dry vantage thereof he cranes his neck in a tentative way, the better to survey the heavens. Plainly he desires a guarantee, in favor of some partial space of sunshine, before he again ventures abroad.
As Planter Paul Jones comes up, both he and the severe gentleman gaze at each other for one moment. Then their hands are caught in a warm exchange of greetings:
“Mr. Livingston, by my word!” cries Planter Paul Jones, shaking the severe gentleman’s hand.
“Paul Jones!” exclaims the severe gentleman, returning the handshake, but with due regard to the pompous.
“Now this is what I term fortunate!” says Planter Paul Jones, releasing the other’s fingers. “I was on my way to your house to ask for letters of introduction to Mr. Hancock and others in Boston.”
“Boston! Surely you have heard the news?”
“News? I’ve heard nothing. For six weeks I’ve been anywhere between Barnegat and the inner Chesapeake in my sloop. I tied up at the foot of Whitehall Street within the hour, and you’re the first I’ve spoken with since I stepped ashore. What is this news that makes you stare at the name of Boston?”
“And you’ve not heard!” repeats Mr. Livingston. Then, with a look at once somber and solemn: “Black news! Black news, indeed! I’m on my way to Hanover Square to have it set in types, and scattered up and down the town. Come; you shall go with me. I’ll talk as we walk along.”
Mr. Livingston takes Planter Paul Jones by the arm.
“Black news!” he resumes. “The Massachusetts men have attacked the British at Lexington and Concord; my despatches, while necessarily meager, declare that the British were disgracefully beaten, and lost, killed and wounded, several hundred soldiers.”
“And you call that black news?” interjects Planter Paul Jones, his eye finely aflame. “To my mind now it is as good news as ever I hope to hear.”
“How can you say so! It fills me with measureless gloom. I cannot but look ahead and wonder where it will end. And yet we should hope for the best.” The speaker heaves a weary sigh. “Possibly the mother country may learn from this experience how bitterly in earnest Americans are, and be thereby led to mitigate the harshness of her attitude toward us.”
Planter Paul Jones looks his emphatic disbelief.
“There will be no softening of England’s attitude. Believe me, sir, I’m not so long out of London, but what I’m clear as to the plans and purposes of King George and his ministers. The Tories have deliberately forced the present situation.”
“Forced the situation! You amaze me!”
“Sir, my name is not Paul Jones, if it be not the deliberate design of King George and his advisers to bring about a clash between England and these colonies.”
“And to what end, pray?”
“To give them an excuse for imposing martial law upon us. They will pour a cataract of redcoats upon our shores. Musket in fist, cannon to back them, they will disperse our legislatures, take away our charters of self-government. That blood at Concord and Lexington gives them the pretext for which they schemed. They can now call us ‘rebels;’ and, calling us ‘rebels,’ they will try to reduce us—for all our white skins and freeborn blood—to the slavish status of Hindostan.”
Mr. Livingston stares, while this long speech is reeled off.
“Do you mean to say,” he asks at last, “that we are the victims of a Tory plot? Am I to understand that Concord and Lexington were aimed at by the king?”
“Precisely so; and for one I’m glad the issue’s made. We have now but the one alternative. We may choose between abject slavery and war to the hilts.”
Mr. Livingston’s severely pompons face, as the iron truth begins to overcome him, assumes an expression at once noble and high.
“Why, then!” says he, “if such be the Tory design, war we shall have.” Then, following a pause: “And what is to be your course in case of war?”
“I shall take my part in it, never fear! This very day I shall write to friends who will have seats in the Congress that meets next month in Philadelphia, and ask them to wear my name in their minds. I am theirs so soon as ever they have a plank afloat to put me on.”
The pair, earnestly talking, reach Hanover Square, and pause in front of “The Bible and Crown.”
“Here we are,” says Mr. Livingston. “Now if you’ll but wait until I give orders to Master Rivington, as to how he shall print and circulate my despatches, I’ll have you up to the house, where we can further consider this business over a bottle of wine.”
“I beg that you will excuse me,” returns Planter Paul Jones. He has been making plans of his own while they talked. “I trust you will pardon me; but I shall have no more than time to write and post my letters, and get away on the ebb tide. Three days from now I must be at my plantation by the Rappahannock, putting all in order for the storm.”
“Remember!” cries Mr. Livingston, as he and Planter Paul Jones shake bands at parting, “my brother Philip will be in the coming Congress. You have but to go to him, he is as much your friend as is either Mr. Washington or Mr. Jefferson. I shall speak to Philip of you before the day is out.”
“Say to your brother,” returns Planter Paul Jones, “that I shall come to him among the first.”
The winds generously flatter the little sloop on her return voyage. She came north slowly, reluctantly; now, with the wind aft and all but blowing a gale, she flies southward like a bird. As Planter Paul Jones boasted, within the three days after seeing the last of Sandy Hook, he steps ashore on his own domain by the Rappahannock.
Cato and Scipio grin in exultation. In a pardonable anxiety to open the eyes of plodding fellow-slaves of the tobacco fields, they mendaciously shorten the sailing time out of New York by forty-eight hours, and declare that Planter Paul Jones brought the sloop home in a single day.
“Potch um home, Marse Paul does, faster than a wil’ duck could trabble!” is their story. Thereupon, the innocent tobacco blacks marvel, openmouthed, at the far-travelled Cato, and Scipio of the many experiences.
Planter Paul Jones, on whom a war-fever is growing, plunges into immediate conference with Duncan Macbean.
“How much free money can we make?” he asks.
The old Highlander scratches his grizzled locks.
Then he thoughtfully considers the inside of his Glengarry bonnet, which he takes from his head for that purpose. One would think, from his long study of it, that he keeps his accounts in its linings. The inspection being over, he puts it back on his head.
“Now there s’uld be the matter of three thousand guineas in gold in Williamsburg,” returns old Duncan Macbean; “besides a hunner or so siller in the house. I can gi’ ye three thousand guineas, and never miss the feel o’ them, gin that’ll be enou’.”
“Three thousand guineas! What time I shall be in Philadelphia it should keep a king! Have it set to my credit, Duncan, in Mr. Ross’ bank in Chestnut Street in that town. I shall go there as soon as Congress convenes.”
“And will ye no be back home agen?” asks Duncan, his bronzed cheek a trifle white.
“If there’s war—and, take it from me, there will be—I shall not return. I hope to sail in the first warship that flies the colors of the Colonies.”
Then, grasping old Duncan’s hand in a grip of steel: “You stay here and run the plantation, old friend! Wherever I am, I shall know that all is right ashore while you are here. For I can trust you.”
“Ay! ye can trust me; no fear o’ that!” and the water stands in the old eyes.