All hands who could be spared from the guns, and I among the rest, flew to their stations to trim sails; the yards were braced sharp up, and with her head to the south-west, the _Foam_ stood away on a bowline from her powerful antagonist. We were not to escape, however, with impunity; for as soon as the brig's crew had somewhat recovered from the confusion into which the damage done by our shot had thrown them, such guns as could be brought to bear were fired at us with no bad aim. One struck our taffrail, and another killed a man on the forecastle; but our rigging escaped. Twice the brig missed stays in attempting to come about, from so much of her head-sail having been cut away; and this, as she all the time was sailing one way and we the other, contributed much to increase our distance. The breeze also favoured us further by freshening, making it more difficult to the enemy to repair damages, while, as we were unhurt, it sent us along all the more rapidly. The Americans are not the people to take the treatment we had given them with calmness, especially as we were so much the smaller, and had less force. At last, at a third trial, the brig came about, while she continued without cessation firing at us. Not much damage was done, though our sails had daylight made through them several times by her shot, and another man was killed; but this casualty the pirates seemed to make light of--it was the fortune of war, and might happen every instant to any of us. The bodies, with scant examination, except to discover whether there was money in their pockets, or rings in their ears or on their fingers, were thrown overboard without a prayer or a sigh. As the shot came whistling over us, they laughed when they saw me bobbing down my head in the hope of avoiding them. I had no fancy, I own, to be shot by people with whom I had not the slightest enmity, nor whom I in any way wished to injure. We soon found that the brig-of-war, instead of being a slow sailer, was remarkably fast, and that, while we were in chase of her, she must, by towing a sail overboard, or by some other manoeuvre, have deadened her way, on purpose to allow us to come up with her. We had now, therefore, to put the schooner's best leg foremost to get away from her, even before she had got all her gear aloft again. To try and do her further damage, a gun was got over the taffrail, and a constant fire was kept up from it as fast as it could be loaded. I was standing in the waist with the black, Mark Anthony, near me. "Well, Massa Peter, if de brig catch we, we all be hung; how you like dat?" he asked, with a broad grin, which made him look far from pleasing. "I should be sorry to see any of those who have treated me with kindness hung, or otherwise injured," I replied. "See! Ha, ha! but how you like feel being hung, Massa Peter?" he said, again grinning more horribly than before.