“They are burning the ship!” shrilled a newcomer.
“Look,” shouted another; “there is only one man. Shall five hundred loyal subjects of the king be braved by one American cut-throat?”
Like a fury Ethan hacked and hewed at the hatches until he had them all cut away; he was delivering the finishing strokes when the press from the rear of the crowd became so great that those in front were hurled forward.
“Back!” cried the intrepid John Paul Jones, presenting his heavy pistols in their faces. “Keep back!”
This ready action and the coolness of the man filled the angry mob with fear. With cries of alarm they fled back to their former positions at the head of the pier. The brig was now wrapped in a solid sheet of flame; and as there was nothing that demanded the further detaining of the Ranger’s boats, the captain sprang into one of them, followed by Ethan, and they pushed off.
Immediately the crowd surged down the pier; some sprang to fight the flames; others stood at the harbor’s edge and shrieked their threats of vengeance; but the tars in the rapidly-receding boats only answered by a derisive laugh. Some one released the guard at the fort; the hastily-driven spikes were wrenched from one or two of the guns; and they were loaded and trained upon the boats.
But by the time their sullen reports broke upon the morning air the Americans were out of range; and in a very little while later the dashing sloop-of-war, under a press of white canvas, had disappeared beyond the vision of those upon the shore.
Expresses dashed about and signal fires burned along the coast from one end of England to the other. Fear fell upon the folk of every commercial port and fishing hamlet. Invasion had been the very last thing that the British had thought possible; no enemy had set his foot upon their soil before in the memory of living man; and now that the despised Americans had accomplished the feat, a wave of mingled fear and fury swept through the “tight little isle.”
The British had thought it very right and proper to burn and destroy along the American coast; they considered it a rather quick and effective method of suppressing the rebellious subjects of the king.
But when the youthful republic sent this daring sailor, Paul Jones, across the sea and through him applied the torch to British property and in a British harbor, the thing seemed vastly different. Pirate was the mildest term they could find for the chief of the Ranger; and indeed so they affect to regard him to this day.