To check the ambitious Pearson in his efforts to luff across his forefoot, Commodore Paul Jones pays off the _Richard_‘s head a point. The check is not alone successful, but under the influence of that master hand, the _Richard_ all but gets the _Serapis_’ head into chancery. Being defeated in his luff, Captain Pearson next discovers that his brisk antagonist has put him in a dilemma. If he holds on, the _Richard_ will run him down; he can already see the great, black cutwater rearing itself on high, as though to crush him and cut him in two. If he pays off the head of the _Serapis_, and avoids being run down, the _Richard_ will still foul and grapple with him. Lieutenant Mayrant’s bandaged head shows above the _Richard_‘s hammock nettings, as, with grappling irons ready for throwing, he musters a party of boarders--cutlass and pistol and pike--to have them in hand the moment the ships crash together. That title of Knight Commander of the Bath, and the star and garter that go with it, do not look so near at hand. Also, the _Serapis_, at this closer range, begins to feel the musket-fire from the _Richard_‘s tops. One after another, three seamen are shot down at the wheel of the _Serapis_. In this desperate emergency, Captain Pearson, good sailorman that he is, neither holds on nor pays off, but with everything thrown aback attempts to box-haul his ship. It may take the sticks out by the roots, but he must risk it. The chance is preferable to being either run down or boarded. The _Serapis_ is a new ship, fresh from the yards, and her spars and cordage stand the strain. Captain Pearson backs himself slowly out of the trap. He grazes fate so closely that the _Richard_, answering some sudden occult movement of the helm, runs its bowsprit over the larboard quarter of the _Serapis_, into its mizzen rigging. “Stand by with those grappling irons!” shouts Commodore Paul Jones. Lieutenant Mayrant throws the grapples with a seaman’s accuracy; they catch, as he means they shall, in the mizzen backstays of the Englishman. But the ships have too much way on. The _Richard_ forges ahead; the _Serapis_, every sail flattened, backs free; the lines part. Before Lieutenant Mayrant can take his jolly boarders over the _Richard_‘s bows, the ships have swung apart, and fifty feet of open water yawn between them. The _Serapis_ falls to leeward; at the end of the next five minutes both ships are back in their old positions, with their broadside guns--or what are left of them--at that furious work of hammer and tongs.