“They do not see. They do not hear,” he cried. “Ten thousand saints! They sleep, and I have won battles! Ha!”
He started forward to the gun, which, very naturally, was loaded, pulled the lanyard, and woke the dead night with the roar of the full charge behind a common shell. That shell mercifully just missed the stern of the “Guadala”, and burst on the bank. “Now you shall salute your Governor,” said he, as he heard feet running in all directions within the iron skin. “Why you demand so base a quarter? I am here with all my prisoners.”
In the hurly-burly and the general shriek for mercy his reassurances were not heard.
“Captain,” said a grave voice from the ship, “we have surrendered. Is it the custom of the English to fire on a helpless ship'?”
“Surrendered! Holy Virgin! I go to cut off all their heads. You shall be ate by wild ants--flogged and drowned. Throw me a balcony. It is I, the Governor! You shall never surrender. Judson of my soul, ascend her insides, and send me a bed, for I am sleepy; but, oh, I will multiple time kill that captain!”
“Oh!” said the voice in the darkness, “I begin to comprehend.” And a rope-ladder was thrown, up which the Governor scrambled, with Judson at his heels.
“Now we will enjoy executions,” said the Governor on the deck. “All these Republicans shall be shot. Little Judson, if I am not drunk, why are so sloping the boards which do not support?”
The deck, as I have said, was at a very stiff cant. His Excellency sat down, slid to leeward, and was asleep again.
The captain of the “Guadala” bit his moustache furiously, and muttered in his own tongue: “This land is the father of great villains and the stepfather of honest men. You see our material, Captain. It is so everywhere with us. You have killed some of the rats, I hope?”
“That is a pity. If they were dead, our country might send us men; but our country is dead too, and I am dishonoured on a mud-bank through your English treachery.”
“Well, it seems to me that firing on a little tub of our size without a word of warning, when you know that the countries were at peace, is treachery enough in a small way.”
“If one of my guns had touched you, you would have gone to the bottom, all of you. I would have taken the risk with my Government. By that time it would have been--”
