Part 13

Directly the Skipper believed that the rascally Englishman and his pirate crews were at last cornered and unable to escape, he sent a letter ashore demanding the immediate release of Hobbs and his daughter, and the immediate surrender of the island. Whoever was in charge of the battery at the mouth of the creek respected the white flag, and the letter was jammed in one of a row of fishing stakes till some Chinese ventured out and took it ashore.

It was a mere matter of form. I do not suppose that anyone imagined that the man Evans would comply with either demand; and so it turned out, for he sent back—the morning after, when the same boat went in again—a most impudent letter, in which he stated that he was going to marry Miss Hobbs, and "hoping that it would not be necessary to hasten his marriage on account of any attempts being made to prevent it", a threat which infuriated the Skipper, and made us all feel extremely distressed.

The Skipper told me what his general plans were.

Two brigades were to be formed, one under his own command from the _Vigilant_, and the other under the command of Captain Parkinson of the _Omaha_ from the gunboats.

They were to disembark at the back of the island, behind the town, at places about two miles apart, and were to march inland as quickly as possible, get between the town and that walled house, and join hands there.

He had not yet decided whether he would land at night or during the day, but rather favoured daylight. "Like to see where I’m goin’, Truscott. ’Old Lest’ ain’t a badger."

This was the general idea, but to make certain that no chance should be left of Sally and her father being spirited away, the _Ringdove_ and _Omaha_ were ordered to destroy every junk and boat they could find in the three little creeks on their side of the island.

At the same time the _Sparrow_ and _Goldfinch_ were ordered to anchor as close in to the town as they could, to make escape impossible from there. They weighed anchor, and proceeded to take up their station inshore, directly after the receipt of the Englishman’s letter, but had not steamed within five thousand yards of the town, when the six-inch opened fire on them. We watched anxiously, and saw that the first shots were very wild. They steadily kept on their way, and, unfortunately, almost directly afterwards, the _Goldfinch_ was struck in the bows, and we could see was badly damaged. It was very awkward to know what to do, because the little hill, and the house in which Sally and Hobbs were imprisoned, were directly behind the six-inch gun, and might be damaged if they tried to return the fire. Their little four-inch guns were not of much use at that range, being very old and very inaccurate, and their erratic shells might have fallen anywhere.

The Skipper swore angrily, and ordered them to return, which they did, followed by six-inch projectiles, until they were well past us. It was a very anxious and exciting few minutes, because a single lucky shot would have sunk either of them, and many were falling extremely close.

We could see the hole in the _Goldfinch’s_ foc’s’tle as she steamed up, and she signalled for medical aid, and that she had two men killed and four wounded. The Skipper cursed roundly, and sent Mayhew and Barclay across to her.

"You’ll land and destroy that gun to-night, Truscott," he turned to me and growled out. "I daren’t fire at it for fear of hurting the little lass, and I’m not going to have it interfering with my plans. Take what men you like, and make what plans you like, and blow it up. Umph!" and he went across to see what damage had been done aboard the _Goldfinch_.

This rather staggered me—I’d not been expecting anything of the kind—but I had sense enough to stammer out, "Thank you very much, sir," before he went away, and went off to find Whitmore, and to get Hoffman to assist us as well.

Whitmore was wildly excited; but he is a good deal younger than I am, and hasn’t a wife to worry about, and I have, and a couple of youngsters too, which makes a good deal of difference.

Hoffman shook his head when he heard of the job, but gave us all the information he could. The six-inch gun, he told us, was mounted behind an open earthwork, on some rising ground, about five hundred yards from the little battery at the water’s edge, the one that had fired at our boats on the first night.

He drew the rough plan which I show you opposite, and which I have lettered, so that you can understand more easily where we had to go and what we had to do.

Our first idea was to land clear of the battery and advance straight towards the six-inch gun; but Hoffman said that there were many native fishermen’s huts all along the beach, and that we should wake their dogs before we’d gone five yards. Even if we did get past them, the ground between was a swamp, and after the continuous downpour of the last few days we should never get through it at night.

He sent for his Chinamen to help him, and apparently they were of the same opinion.

"How about landing on the other side of the island and approaching it from the rear?" I asked. He shook his head. "There are huts all over the island, and where there are huts there are dogs, and you’d wake every dog for miles. There’s not the faintest chance of your rushing it and surprising the people there."

I scratched my head. I didn’t like the job a little bit; but the Skipper had said it was to be done, so that was the end of it—it had to be done.

Whitmore suggested landing abreast the battery and rushing that.

Hoffman thought that could be done easily enough, though it was hardly worth it, in his opinion, as the guns were useless old smooth-bores. He was evidently afraid of irritating the people.

"If once they get out of hand," he said earnestly, with a haggard expression on his thin face, "they’ll rush that house and murder Hobbs and little Sally."

Whitmore hadn’t intended merely rushing the battery, but had thought out an entire scheme. One party was to rush the farther end of it—the right-hand end of it—the one opposite the fishing stakes, and they were not to try to do it silently, but to draw any fellows there towards them, whilst another party slipped round the left end and made their way up to the six-inch gun with a gun-cotton charge.

"The ground is all right if you could find your way in the dark," Hoffman told us.

"Why not send one of your fellows?" we suggested; but he said he couldn’t trust them, couldn’t be sure what they would do under fire, and besides, they were not natives of the place, and wouldn’t know the way.

There are any number of small huts and fences and pitfalls there, and you could never get past them in the dark.

I had enough experience of Chinese villages to recognize that it would be a jolly ticklish job.

We left him then—he looked too ill to be worried any more—and went back to my cabin, taking his rough drawing with us.

The landing seemed easy enough—it was the getting back again which worried me. The party who held the right end of that battery would have to hold it for at least forty or fifty minutes; the destruction party couldn’t possibly find their way up to the gun, disable it, and return in less time than that.

"It has to be done," I said finally, "and your way seems the best. We’ll do it."

I don’t mind confessing that I had never run a "real" show previously. Plenty of times I had worked out schemes, and carried them through successfully, at manoeuvres and things like that; but it was very different now, and I devoutly wished that the Captain hadn’t put all the responsibility on my shoulders, and, without really meaning to do so, I more or less shifted it on to Whitmore’s.

Whitmore wanted to land at nine o’clock, an hour before high water, so that we should have firmer ground under us, be able to get closer in to the battery, and have less trouble with the boats. I, however, thought the early morning the best time, somewhere about three o’clock, for my experience in manoeuvres and sham attacks had taught me that the attacked side was generally at its worst, and that men, all the world over, were more likely to be surprised and "shaken", at that hour. It had the disadvantage of being at low water, but we should have those fishing stakes to guide us. Hoffman had told us the mud was fairly firm there, and, perhaps what appealed to me most, daylight would not be far off.

Whitmore eventually gave way, and we decided that we would leave the ship at about 1.30 a.m., be towed as far as possible, and pull in with muffled oars.

Then it was a question of what men I should take, and I decided to take Marshall[#] and his forty marines. Speaking generally, they were an older lot of men than a seaman company, and the older the men were, the less liable they would be to lose their heads.

[#] Captain S. A. Marshall, R.M.L.I., was in command of the detachment of Royal Marines.

It was decided that I should rush the battery, and that Whitmore should take twenty picked men and three torpedo hands with the gun-cotton charges and try and make for the gun.

"How about midshipmen?" he asked.

I personally didn’t want to take any; the job was too risky a one. However, we finally decided to take one each, and thought we had better choose Rawlings and Ford, as they had had some experience lately.

"Heads, Ford; tails, Rawlings," Whitmore said, tossing a dollar; and Ford fell to me. There was nothing to choose between the two boys.

I am not going to weary you with all the details which had to be thought out and prepared, but I will just say this. There is no possible similarity between preparing for a landing party or a sham fight during manoeuvres and preparing for the real thing. When you are getting ready for the first, someone comes along: "The Gunnery Lieutenant’s compliments, sir, and he doesn’t want the small-arm magazines opened this morning". "All right; very well," you say; so no ammunition is passed round, you take it for granted that water-bottles are filled, and a hundred-and-one other things which are essential in active warfare. Besides—and this is more serious than everything else put together—for one you prepare as for a football match, for the other you cannot help realizing that the lives of the men actually standing there in front of you, cheerfully getting ready, are to be dependent upon your judgment. If other people who have the same responsibility are as keenly conscious of their own lack of skill and experience as I was that day, I am very sorry for them.

By six o’clock in the evening everything that Whitmore and I could think of had been prepared. The men had all seen Hoffman’s rough sketch, and all thoroughly understood what was to be done. They were thoroughly happy too, and the Skipper sending up to tell me that he wanted to say a few words to them, I fell them "in" on the quarterdeck. There was very little light, though enough to see his great wrinkled red face.

"Landing party present, sir," I reported, calling them to attention.

"Umph!" he said, speaking in his gruffest tones. "You went in last night, most of you, and blew a hole as big as a house in that tramp. You know why you did that, and got wet skins doing it—to stop ’em taking away the little lass, now I’ve cornered ’em. To-night the Commander is going to take you in to blow up that gun which had the confounded cheek to fire on the _Vigilant_ the other day, and killed two men aboard the _Goldfinch_ this forenoon.

"Umph!" he growled. "Last time the Royal Marine detachment went ashore there was a good deal of leave breakin’. I hope you’ll all come back this time." (The men guffawed and chuckled.)

"Captain Marshall," he roared, and pointed to one of the front-rank men, "have that man’s hair cut before he leaves the ship. He’s a disgrace to the detachment;" and he went round and inspected them all.

"Well! Umph! Good luck to you!" and he looked them up and down again, growled, and went below, the marines all grinning with amusement.

I dismissed them.

"What a grand chap the old man is!" Marshall said. "No wonder the men would do anything for him. Hasn’t he a grand ’few words’?"

The rain had ceased, and the night showed signs of being clear though cold, and the breeze was not strong enough to make boat work difficult.

I tried to make Ford and Rawlings turn in directly after dinner, but they—like the two young fools they were—were much too excited to do any such thing. I turned in myself, but that drawing which Hoffman had made seemed to haunt me. Directly I turned my light out and shut my eyes, I saw it, and even now, when I am much worried, it comes before me as clearly as it did that night.

I couldn’t sleep a blessed wink, and at one o’clock my servant called me, bringing some cocoa and biscuits.

I had no appetite for anything, and it was so cold that I shivered as I dressed.

*CHAPTER XI*

*The Landing Party*

Left Behind—"You’ll Do—Some Day"—"Dicky"—Preparation to Land—"Good Luck, Men!"—In the Boats—Scrambling Ashore—Rushing the Battery—Setting Fire to the Huts—A Hot Corner

_Written by Midshipman Ford_

I have so very much to tell you, that I hardly know where to start; but I think that I had better begin where we met the old _Vigilant_ steaming away from Tinghai. It was simply grand to take Mr. Travers back to her, and to go alongside her in the dark with everybody looking over the side and cheering. There was a very nasty sea running, and they were a long time getting the wounded across; but no one was hurt, and it was splendid to know that Dicky would now be a jolly lot more comfortable than he could be in the _Ringdove_.

They gave Jim and me a splendid "blow out" in the gunroom, and we simply had a grand time. There was only one thing which made us miserable—the Captain didn’t seem at all pleased. I had been so longing for him to be pleased—everything I had done I had done for him—and had been looking forward to what he would say when I saw him, and when he knew that I had rescued Mr. Travers.

It wasn’t till after Mr. Rashleigh had gone away that he spotted me. I had been hanging about and getting in his way on purpose, and when he growled out in a surly manner, "Umph! Lost my junk, have you, and four good men—Umph!—and haven’t got anything to show for ’em either?" and turned away, I almost felt inclined to blub, and Jim was just as miserable.

Mr. Trevelyan had been snubbed nearly as much, and he was furious, and said, "That fat little beast Rashleigh has been spinning yarns, that’s what it is." The Captain was certainly rather nicer when he came down into the gunroom after dinner and made a speech; but no one ever says nasty things in a speech at that time of night, so it didn’t nearly "make up".

Still, everything else was so jolly, and it was so glorious to know that Mr. Hoffman had escaped from the fire after all, and that we had found out where Sally and her father were, and that we were actually on our way to rescue them, that we couldn’t feel miserable for long.

Next morning Mr. Trevelyan sent for Jim and myself in his cabin.

"I told you what it was," he burst out, red with rage. "It was that overfed, bloated hog! Look at his report! The Commander has just given it to me to read. I’m going off to tell him our side of the show," and he rushed off, but came back again redder than ever. "I’m to wait till I’m cooler, as if I wasn’t as cool as a cucumber in an ice chest;" and he stamped about his cabin.

Later on, however, we were all sent for, one after the other, and told the Commander our own accounts of what happened, and some time afterwards were ordered to send in our own reports in writing.

Neither Jim nor I went ashore with the Captain that first night when he blew a hole in the tramp steamer, and we knew that it was because he was still angry with us. We would have given our skins to go; but we both pretended that we didn’t mind, and that as the night was so cold and awfully wet, it was jolly lucky that we hadn’t gone. We determined to have a jolly good feed, and then turn in early and get a jolly good night’s rest, and we yarned with Dicky and tried to pretend that we were having a good time. It wasn’t much of a success, however, and we soon found ourselves on the fore bridge in the rain, looking at the flashes and then waiting for the "booms" from the guns with a beastly feeling inside, because we weren’t there ourselves. We got just as wet and cold as they did, almost.

I was more lucky than Jim, because I did have something to do, and went with Mr. Trevelyan very early in the morning to bring off Mr. Hoffman’s Chinaman. We had to hang about near a big rock at the back of the island, and directly it was light "stand by" for a piece of red bunting to be waved from shore. We must have been there for more than an hour, and thought that he had either gone back to Mr. Whitmore in the steam cutter, or perhaps been collared by the pirates. When we did see it wave, we fetched him off pretty quickly, and shoved along back to the _Vig_ just as hard as we could go. You see, we were certain that he had good news, because Mr. Trevelyan drew pictures of a thin little man and a girl and showed them to him, and he seemed to understand, and nodded his head and pointed to the island. He kept on saying "Vely good" all the way off to the ship. I don’t think he knew any more English words.

On our way back we watched the six-inch gun firing, and dropping her shells or shot all over the place. Some of them fell very close to the _Vigilant_, and we wondered why Captain Lester didn’t reply.

"How would you like to be there?" Mr. Trevelyan asked.

"Ra—ther!" I told him, and he smiled. "It’s all right if you’re doing something yourself, but it’s a jolly different thing when you’re simply waiting for them," and that made me think of my horrible funk when those two shore guns had fired point blank at the _Sally_, and I was rather sorry I had spoken.

Mr. Trevelyan laughed when he saw them all falling in for "Divisions" on board the _Vig_. "That’s ’Old Lest’ all over," he said. "I bet he’s in a towering passion."

Jim told me afterwards that he didn’t like the shooting a little bit, and if they all hadn’t been so afraid of the Captain, they would have hated it all the more. That was the day we wrote our reports—the _Ringdove_ coming made the Commander remember about them—and I put it all down very clearly, how I had done my best to escape from the four junks, and why I had been obliged to run down through the middle of them. I told exactly how I and all those who were left of the _Sally’s_ crew had brought Mr. Travers off in the _Ringdove’s_ cutter, and put in a lot about Scroggs and Sharpe and all of them. You see, I wanted Captain Lester to get Scroggs’s wife as big a pension as possible, because of all the children.

I didn’t want to say much about Dicky, because—well, you know what I mean—I was only a very few places senior to him, although he was only a cadet, and it seemed so cocky.

But Mr. Trevelyan made me do it, and I explained it all to Dicky. Afterwards Mr. Trevelyan wrote some pretty hot stuff too. This was part of it: "With regard to the alleged disobedience of the orders of Lieutenant and Commander Rashleigh to proceed to the given rendezvous, I considered that the information obtained from Midshipman Ford of the _Sally_ made it imperative that further and more definite information should be obtained. Your" (that was Captain Lester’s) "original orders to me were to obtain such information at all costs, and I considered this the opportunity to act upon them. As a direct result, I discovered the whereabouts of one of the headquarters of the pirates, and indirectly was the means of the rescue of Mr. Travers."

We took them to the Commander, who made us rewrite them and "tone down" many things; but they were pretty good "snorters" for Mr. Rashleigh, even after that.

The Captain must have thought that he had been a little unjust, because later on in the day he saw me on the quarterdeck and stopped me. He glared at me for a moment, and with his legs wide apart, growled out: "Seem to have shown more sense than I thought. Umph! You’ll do—some day," and left me feeling jolly happy.

Of course when the _Goldfinch_ and _Sparrow_ arrived, Mr. Langham and Mr. Forbes and the midshipmen of the other junks came back to the _Vigilant_. They hadn’t any experience worth telling, compared to ours, except Webster, who had managed to run his junk ashore, and the _Goldfinch_ had spent all her time getting her off again.

Jim and I nudged each other; we didn’t like Webster.

Dicky didn’t come off badly either. You know that we all called him "Dear Little Dicky", all except Jim, who flatly refused to obey the Sub’s order, and had been caned twice by him for not doing so. He was let alone afterwards.

Dicky hated it; it had made his life absolutely miserable; and now Mr. Langham, as soon as he got back, held a Court of Enquiry down in the gunroom about our losing the junks. I didn’t care a snap what he thought or said about it, nor did Jim. The whole thing was only got up for his amusement—his and Hamilton’s (the big Engineer Sub) and Webster’s; but one of their "findings" was this. I copied the "rot" off the notice board in the gunroom:

COURT OF ENQUIRY, Held in the Gunroom, H.M.S. _Vigilant_, At Sea, _April_ 7th.

As a result of the Court of Enquiry held last night to enquire into the loss of H.M.S. _Sally_ and H.M.S. _Ferret_, Mr. Ford commanding the one and Mr. Rawlings the second in command of the other, these officers have been adjudged to have borne themselves with credit to the gunroom, but are cautioned not to do so again. It has also been decided, affirmed, and we do hereby solemnly declare, that Mr. Morton, hitherto known as Mr. Dear Little Dicky, worked a Maxim gun so accurately, and polished off so many niggers before he was knocked over, stunned, incapacitated, and otherwise by flow of his blood rendered _hors de combat_, that he is entitled to some signal reward.

We do therefore proclaim, announce, and order that from henceforth, evermore, and hereafter he shall be known as "Dicky".

For "Dear Little Dicky" in future read "Dicky". (This was in big print.)

Given under our hand and seal,

BENJAMIN LANGHAM, Sub-lieutenant. A. E. HAMILTON, Engineer Sub-lieut. HARRY G. WEBSTER, Senior Midshipman.

Of course it was silly rot. Still, so much silly rot goes on in a gunroom, and a lot of it makes a difference—actually, and nothing they could have done would have made Dicky more pleased. He still spent most of the day in his hammock, but was allowed "up" for two hours every afternoon in the gunroom.

He told Jim, on the quiet, that he quite liked going there now. He had hated doing so before, and used to sit for hours on his chest outside, or wander about on deck, because he so dreaded having his leg pulled, and hearing himself called "Dear Little Dicky".

He could remember very little about the fight with the junks, and nothing at all after seeing all those Chinamen struggling in the water when that first junk sank. He didn’t even remember Sharpe and me giving him that hot milk during the night, and nothing till he was carried up the side of the _Ringdove_.

You may bet that Jim and I had plenty to tell him; and we brought Sharpe along to back us up, because I couldn’t get him to believe, by myself, that it was his Maxim gun which had done the trick when the first of the four junks came along.