The fence was badly shattered and the ground ploughed up for several yards round the place where the guns formerly lay--formerly lay, for now they were scattered every which way. There was scarcely a gun that hadn't burst. Here was one ripped open from muzzle to breech, and there was another with its mouth blown into the shape of a trumpet. Three of the guns had disappeared bodily, but on looking over the edge of the wharf we saw them standing on end in the tide-mud. They had popped overboard in their excitement.
“I tell you what, fellows,” whispered Phil Adams, “it is lucky we didn't try to touch 'em off with punk. They'd have blown us all to flinders.”
The destruction of Bailey's Battery was not, unfortunately, the only catastrophe. A fragment of one of the cannon had earned away the chimney of Sailor Ben's cabin. He was very mad at first, but having prepared the fuse himself he didn't dare complain openly.
“I'd have taken a reef in the blessed stove-pipe,” said the Admiral, gazing ruefully at the smashed chimney, “if I had known as how the Flagship was agoin' to be under fire.”
The next day he rigged out an iron funnel, which, being in sections, could be detached and taken in at a moment's notice. On the whole, I think he was resigned to the demolition of his brick chimney. The stove-pipe was a great deal more shipshape.
The town was not so easily appeased. The selectmen determined to make an example of the guilty parties, and offered a reward for their arrest, holding out a promise of pardon to anyone of the offenders who would furnish information against the rest. But there were no faint hearts among the Centipedes. Suspicion rested for a while on several persons--on the soldiers at the fort; on a crazy fellow, known about town as “Bottle-Nose”; and at last on Sailor Ben.
“Shiver my timbers!” cries that deeply injured individual. “Do you suppose, sir, as I have lived to sixty year, an' ain't got no more sense than to go for to blaze away at my own upper riggin'? It doesn't stand to reason.”
It certainly did not seem probable that Mr. Watson would maliciously knock over his own chimney, and Lawyer Hackett, who had the case in hand, 'bowed himself out of the Admiral's cabin convinced that the right man had not been discovered.