“Who is your biggest hero?” asked Mark as the captain paused.

The old man smiled humorously before he answered.

“Wal’, my biggest hero,” he said, “is the littlest hero on record as a sea-fighter, I guess.  Like Napoleon Bonaparte, his bigness was not in his body but in his mind.  And that’s Paul Jones of the Bonhomme Richard.”

As the captain pronounced the name of his hero, he struck his worn book a resounding slap, and his jaws clicked in emphasis of his statement.

“Can’t you tell us something about him?” asked Chester, fascinated by the old captain’s earnestness.

“That’s the ticket—–­I mean, please do,” endorsed Billy heartily.

“No, I can’t do that,” was the deliberate reply, as the captain rose to relieve Dave at the tiller, “but you can all borry the book and read the historian’s account of the battle between the Serapis and the Bonhomme Richard.  I git so excited when I read that, I hey ter go put my head in a pail o’ water to cool it off!  Fact!  You know that’s whar the cap’n of the Serapis calls out:  ’Hev ye struck?’ And John Paul Jones shouts back:  ’Struck!  I am just beginnin’ ter fight!’”

As Captain Vinton straightened his rounded shoulders and delivered this emphatic quotation, he shook his fist at an imaginary enemy and then brought it down hard on the railing.  Then he grinned sheepishly.

“You see how ’tis,” he said, laughing at himself as he moved away.  “Guess I’ll hev ter stop talkin’ or go fer that pail o’ water!”

The boys, left to themselves, discussed the theme that the captain’s words had suggested, and were rather ashamed to see how vague their knowledge of the famous battle was.  So, at Alec’s suggestion, Norton agreed to read the account of the fight as given in the captain’s book; and grouped about Hugh’s hammock, the boys listened eagerly.

“That makes our experiences on picket duty seem tame in comparison,” said Alec, commenting on the story when Norton had closed the book.

“We were not all on the firing line,” replied the young man, smiling.  “I’ll venture to say that Hugh did not find his share at all tame.”

Hugh smiled and nodded ruefully as his mind flew back to his dangerous situation as a captive of the desperate filibusters, and he felt that he could understand a little of what it meant to be in the thick of the fight.

“Me, too,” exclaimed Billy, shuddering at a sudden recollection.  “I haven’t told you fellows that I came near having my ear shot off, that time the other night when I was separated from the rest of you for a while.  Excuse me from anything nearer real battle fire than that!”

Just at that moment, a soft, regular thump-thump-thump from the deck behind Hugh’s hammock made all the boys turn quickly.

There stood Dave, skillfully flinging gayly colored hoops over a post at some distance from him.