'
'Gracious!' said Una. 'What an adventure!'
'Didn't anybody see you come in?' said Dan.
'There wasn't any one there. I'd made use of an orlop-deck port
- that's the next deck below the gun-deck, which by rights should
not have been open at all. The crew was standing by their guns up
above. I rolled on to a pile of dunnage in the dark and I went to
sleep. When I woke, men was talking all round me, telling each
other their names and sorrows just like Dad told me pressed men
used to talk in the last war. Pretty soon I made out they'd all been
hove aboard together by the press-gangs, and left to sort
'emselves. The ship she was the Embuscade, a thirty-six-gun
Republican frigate, Captain Jean Baptiste Bompard, two days out
of Le Havre, going to the United States with a Republican French
Ambassador of the name of Genet. They had been up all night
clearing for action on account of hearing guns in the fog. Uncle
Aurette and Captain Giddens must have been passing the time o'
day with each other off Newhaven, and the frigate had drifted
past 'em. She never knew she'd run down our smack. Seeing so
many aboard was total strangers to each other, I thought one
more mightn't be noticed; so I put Aunt Cecile's red cap on the
back of my head, and my hands in my pockets like the rest, and, as
we French say, I circulated till I found the galley.
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