University of Virginia Library

VI

THE Chicken was doing her best. Pent's posture at the wheel seemed to indicate that her best was about thirty-four knots. In his eagerness he was braced as if he alone was taking in a 10,000-ton battleship through Hellgate.

But the Chicken was not too far in the rear, and Pent could see clearly that he was to have no minor part to play. Some of the antique shells had struck the Holy Moses, and he could see the escaped steam shooting up from her. She lay close inshore, and was lashing out with four 6-pounders as if this was the last opportunity she would have to fire them. She had made the Spanish gunboats very sick. A solitary gun on the one moored to the wharf was from time to time firing wildly, otherwise the gunboats were silent. But the beach in front of the town was a line of fire. The Chicken headed for the Holy Moses, and, as soon as possible, the 6-pounder in her bow began to crack at the gunboat moored to the wharf.

In the meantime the Chancellorville prowled off the bar, listening to the firing, anxious, acutely anxious, and feeling her impotency in every inch of her smart, steel frame. And in the meantime the Adolphus squatted on the waves and brazenly waited for news. One could thoughtfully count the seconds, and reckon that in this second and that second a man had died—if one chose. But no one did it.

Undoubtedly the spirit was that the flag should come away with honor, honor complete, perfect leaving no loose unfinished end over which the Spaniards could erect a monument of satisfaction, glorification. The distant guns boomed to the ears of the silent blue-jackets at their stations on the cruiser.

The Chicken steamed up to the Holy Moses and took into her nostrils the odor of steam, gunpowder and burned things. Rifle-bullets simply streamed over them both. In the merest flash of time, Pent took into his remembrance the body of a dead quartermaster on the bridge of his consort. The two megaphones lifted together, but Pent's eager voice cried out first: "Are you injured, sir?"

"No, not completely. My engines can get me out after—after we have sunk those gunboats." The voice had been utterly conventional, but it changed to sharpness: "Go in and sink that gunboat at anchor."

As the Chicken rounded the Holy Moses and started inshore, a man called to him from the depths of finished disgust: "They're takin' to their boats, sir." Pent looked and saw the men of the anchored gunboat lower their boats and pull like mad for shore.

The Chicken, assisted by the Holy Moses, began a methodical killing of the anchored gunboat. The Spanish infantry on shore fired frenziedly at the Chicken. Pent, giving the wheel to a waiting sailor, stepped out to a point where he could see the men at the guns. One bullet spanged past him and into the pilot-house. He ducked his head into the window. "That hit you, Murry?" he inquired with interest.

"No, sir," cheerfully responded the man at the wheel.

Pent became very busy superintending the fire of his absurd battery. The anchored gun-boat simply would not sink. It evinced that unnatural stubbornness which is sometimes displayed by inanimate objects. The gunboat at the wharf had sunk as if she had been scuttled, but this riddled thing at anchor would not even take fire. Pent began to grow flurried—privately. He could not stay there forever. Why didn't the pig-headed gunboat admit its destruction? Why—

He was at the forward gun when one of his engineers came to him, and after saluting, said serenely: "The men at the after-gun are all down, sir."

It was one of those curious lifts which an enlisted man, without in any way knowing it, can give his officer. The impudent tranquillity of the man at once set Pent to rights, and the engineer departed admiring the extraordinary coolness of his captain.

The next few moments contained little but heat, an odor, applied mechanics, and an expectation of death. Pent developed a fervid and amazed appreciation of the men, his men: men he knew very well, but strange men. What explained them? He was doing his best because he was captain of the Chicken, and he lived or died by the Chicken. But what could move these men to watch his eye in bright anticipation of his orders, and then obey them with enthusiastic rapidity? What caused them to speak of the action as some kind of joke—particularly when they knew he could overhear them? What manner of men? And he anointed them secretly with his fullest affection.

Perhaps Pent did not think all this during the battle. Perhaps he thought it so soon after the battle that his full mind became confused as to the time. At any rate, it stands as an expression of his feeling.

The enemy had gotten a field-gun down to the shore, and with it, they began to throw 3-inch shells at the Chicken. In this war it was usual that the down-trodden Spaniards, in their ignorance, should use smokeless powder, while the Americans, by the power of the consistent, everlasting, three-ply, wire-woven, double-back-action imbecility of a hayseed government, used powder which on sea and on land cried their position to heaven; and accordingly, good men got killed without reason. At first, Pent could not locate the field-gun at all; but as soon as he found it, he ran aft with one man and brought the after 6-pounder again into action. He paid little heed to the old gun-crew. One was lying on his face apparently dead; another was prone, with a wound in the chest; while the third sat with his back to the deck-house holding a smitten arm. This last one called out huskily, "Give 'em hell, sir."

The minutes of the battle were either days, years, or they were flashes of a second. Once Pent, looking up, was astonished to see three shell holes in the Chicken's funnel—made surreptitiously, so to speak. "If we don't silence that field-gun she'll sink us, boys." The eyes of the man sitting with his back against the deck-house were looking from out his ghastly face at the new gun-crew. He spoke with the supreme laziness of a wounded man: "Give 'em hell." Pent felt a sudden twist of his shoulder. He was wounded—slightly. The anchored gunboat was in flames.