This summons and response were whirled on eddies of smoke and flame.  Both vessels were now on fire.  The men of either knew hardly which to do; strive to destroy the enemy, or save themselves.  In the midst of this, one hundred human beings, hitherto invisible strangers, were suddenly added to the rest.  Five score English prisoners, till now confined in the Richard’s hold, liberated in his consternation by the master at arms, burst up the hatchways.  One of them, the captain of a letter of marque, captured by Paul, off the Scottish coast, crawled through a port, as a burglar through a window, from the one ship to the other, and reported affairs to the English captain.

While Paul and his lieutenants were confronting these prisoners, the gunner, running up from below, and not perceiving his official superiors, and deeming them dead, believing himself now left sole surviving officer, ran to the tower of Pisa to haul down the colors.  But they were already shot down and trailing in the water astern, like a sailor’s towing shirt.  Seeing the gunner there, groping about in the smoke, Israel asked what he wanted.

At this moment the gunner, rushing to the rail, shouted “Quarter! quarter!” to the Serapis.

“I’ll quarter ye,” yelled Israel, smiting the gunner with the flat of his cutlass.

“Do you strike?” now came from the Serapis.

“Aye, aye, aye!” involuntarily cried Israel, fetching the gunner a shower of blows.

“Do you strike?” again was repeated from the Serapis; whose captain, judging from the augmented confusion on board the Richard, owing to the escape of the prisoners, and also influenced by the report made to him by his late guest of the port-hole, doubted not that the enemy must needs be about surrendering.

“Do you strike?”

“Aye!—­I strike back” roared Paul, for the first time now hearing the summons.

But judging this frantic response to come, like the others, from some unauthorized source, the English captain directed his boarders to be called, some of whom presently leaped on the Richard’s rail, but, throwing out his tattooed arm at them, with a sabre at the end of it, Paul showed them how boarders repelled boarders.  The English retreated, but not before they had been thinned out again, like spring radishes, by the unfaltering fire from the Richard’s tops.

An officer of the Richard, seeing the mass of prisoners delirious with sudden liberty and fright, pricked them with his sword to the pumps, thus keeping the ship afloat by the very blunder which had promised to have been fatal.  The vessels now blazed so in the rigging that both parties desisted from hostilities to subdue the common foe.