It would be mightily entertaining, no doubt, to know what the feelings of the Scotch skipper were as he found himself thus on another man’s quarter-deck, in another man’s cabin, going through another man’s shipping papers and deeply mystified as to how he was going to explain the extraordinary situation to another man’s owners. We wonder, too, what the French owners said when their ship finally reported in the person of a master with an outlandish tongue and a truly incredible yarn. The Scot bobbed away to the horizon, cogitating his own particular problems, when another ship--but of the wrong sort--came smoothly down upon the _Revenge_. A French warrior! Gow took her in with a long, slow glass. “Thirty-two guns,” he growled to his boatswain, “and by the looks of her decks the whole French navy’s aboard!” Down fluttered the black flag; a young panic brewed in those honest hearts, while in the prisoners’ quarters the Frenchmen could scarcely breathe for hope and fear. Gow knocked his pipe pensively out on the capstan. His was the right of decision to stay and fight or flee to fight another day. He ordered flight. “You white-livered coward!” bellowed Williams, rather grogged up, “Run away from a frog-eater!” [Illustration: “You white-livered coward!” bellowed Williams, “Run away from a frog-eater!”] That meant only one thing--who would fire first? Out of his belt Williams whipped his pistol and snapped it squarely at his captain. The thing flared and fizzed and flashed feebly in the pan. Guns were tragically unreliable in those days. Ere he could recover for another shot, he went down with two balls piercing his body,--and one of them was from the weapon of old Paterson. Gow simply commanded with a slight, contemptuous inclination of the head; old Paterson and another grabbed the lieutenant for rough and ready interment in the convenient deep, but when they had pantingly hoisted the body to the height of the bulwark, it came back to vigorous life, hit about with startling force and then bolted, pistol drawn and still loaded, to the powder magazine, shouting that all hands should go down--or rather up--together. Within but a second of the most dreadful destruction, a couple of stalwarts fell heavily on the desperate wretch and lugged him away to be chained in irons and cast among the prisoners, there to be nursed, lovingly and tenderly, by those who, like all previous captives, had endured his vile whims; nursed, that is, by being used as a bench for tired Frenchmen to sit upon, and as a football for those whose cramped limbs made wholesome exercise imperative.