There could be no retreat that day and no thought of it. Jundhra and Doonha were in ruins. The bridges were down behind them and Hanadra lay ahead. The British had to win their way into it or perish. Tired out, breakfastless, suffering from the baking heat, the long, thin British line had got—not to hold at bay but to smash and pierce—an over-whelming force of Hindus that was stiffened up and down its length by small detachments of native soldiers who had mutinied.
Numbers were against them, and even superiority of weapons was not so overwhelmingly in their favor, for those were the days of short-range rifle-fire and smoothbore artillery, and one gun was considerably like another. The mutinous sepoys had their rifles with them; there were guns from the ramparts of Hanadra that were capable of quite efficient service at close range; and practically every man in the dense-packed rebel line had a firearm of some kind. It was only in cavalry and discipline and pluck that the British force had the advantage, and the cavalry had already charged once and had been repulsed.
General Turner rode up and down the sweltering firing-line, encouraging the men when it seemed to him they needed it and giving directions to his officers. He was hidden from view oftener than not by the rolling clouds of smoke and he popped up here and there suddenly and unexpectedly. Wherever he appeared there was an immediate stiffening among the ranks, as though he carried a supply of spare enthusiasm with him and could hand it out.
Colonel Carter, commanding the right wing, turned his head for a second at the sound of a horse's feet and found the general beside him.
“Had I better have my wounded laid in a wagon, sir?” he suggested, “in case you find it necessary to fall back?”
“There will be no retreat!” said General Turner. “Leave your wounded where they are. I never saw a cannon bleed before. How's that?”
He spurred his horse over to where one of Bellairs' guns was being run forward into place again and Colonel Carter followed him. There was blood dripping from the muzzle of it.
“We're short of water, sir!” said Colonel Carter.
And as he spoke a gunner dipped his sponge into a pool of blood and rammed it home.
Bellairs was standing between his two guns, looking like the shadow of himself, worn out with lack of sleep, disheveled, wounded. There was blood dripping from his forehead and he wore his left arm in a sling made from his shirt.
“Fire!” he ordered, and the two guns barked in unison and jumped back two yards or more.
“If you'll look,” said General Turner, plucking at the colonel's sleeve, “you'll see a handful of native cavalry over yonder behind the enemy—rather to the enemy's left—there between those two clouds of smoke. D'you see them?”
“They look like Sikhs or Rajputs,” said the colonel.
“Yes. Don't they? I'd like you to keep an eye on them. They've come up from the rear. I caught sight of them quite a while ago and I can't quite make them out. It's strange, but I can't believe that they belong to the enemy. D'you see?—there—they've changed direction. They're riding as though they intended to come round the enemy's left flank!”
“By gad, they are! Look! The enemy are moving to cut them off!”
“I must get back to the other wing!” said General Turner. “But that looks like the making of an opportunity! Keep both eyes lifting, Carter, and advance the moment you see any confusion in the enemy's ranks.”
He rode off, and Colonel Carter stared long and steadily at the approaching horsemen. He saw a dense mass of the enemy, about a thousand strong, detach itself from the left wing and move to intercept them, and he noticed that the movement made a tremendous difference to the ranks opposed to him. He stepped up to young Bellairs and touched his sleeve. Bellairs started like a man roused from a dream.
“That's your wife over there!” said Colonel Carter. “There can't be any other white woman here-abouts riding with a Rajput escort!”
Bellairs gripped the colonel's outstretched arm.
“Where?” he almost screamed. “Where? I don't see her!”
“There, man! There, where that mass of men is moving! Look! By the Lord Harry! He's charging right through the mob! That's Mahommed Khan, I'll bet a fortune! Now's our chance Bugler!”
The bugler ran to him, and he began to puff into his instrument.
“Blow the 'attention' first!”
Out rang the clear, strident notes, and the non-commissioned officers and men took notice that a movement of some kind would shortly be required of them, but the din of firing never ceased for a single instant. Then, suddenly, an answering bugle sang out from the other flank.
“Advance in echelon!” commanded Colonel Carter, and the bugler did his best to split his cheeks in a battle-rending blast.
“You remain where you are, sir!” he ordered young Bellairs. “Keep your guns served to the utmost!”
Six-and-twenty horsemen, riding full-tilt at a thousand men, may look like a trifle, but they are disconcerting. What they hit, they kill; and if they succeed in striking home, they play old Harry with formations. And Risaldar Mahommed Khan did strike home. He changed direction suddenly and, instead of using up his horses' strength in outflanking the enemy, who had marched to intercept him, and making a running target of his small command, he did the unexpected—which is the one best thing to do in war. He led his six-and-twenty at a headlong gallop straight for the middle of the crowd—it could not be called by any military name. They fired one ragged volley at him and then had no time to load before he was in the middle of them, clashing right and left and pressing forward. They gave way, right and left, before him, and a good number of them ran. Half a hundred of them were cut down as they fled toward their firing-line. At that second, just as the Risaldar and his handful burst through the mob and the mob began rushing wildly out of his way, the British bugles blared out the command to advance in echelon.
The Indians were caught between a fire and a charge that they had good reason to fear in front of them, and a disturbance on their left flank that might mean anything. As one-half of them turned wildly to face what might be coming from this unexpected quarter, the British troops came on with a roar, and at the same moment Mahommed Khan reached the rear of their firing-line and crashed headlong into it.
In a second the whole Indian line was in confusion and in another minute it was in full retreat not knowing nor even guessing what had routed it. Retreat grew into panic and panic to stampede and, five minutes after the Risaldar's appearance on the scene, half of the Indian line was rushing wildly for Hanadra and the other half was retiring sullenly in comparatively dense and decent order.
Bellairs could not see all that happened. The smoke from his own guns obscured the view, and the necessity for giving orders to his men prevented him from watching as he would have wished. But he saw the Rajputs burst out through the Indian ranks and he saw his own charger—Shaitan the unmistakable—careering across the plain toward him riderless.
“For the love of God!” he groaned, raising both fists to heaven, “has she got this far, and then been killed! Oh, what in Hades did I entrust her to an Indian for? The pig-headed, brave old fool! Why couldn't he ride round them, instead of charging through?”
As he groaned aloud, too wretched even to think of what his duty was, a galloper rode up to him.
“Bring up your guns, sir, please!” he ordered. “You're asked to hurry! Take up position on that rising ground and warm up the enemy's retreat!”
“Limber up!” shouted Bellairs, coming to himself again. Fifteen seconds later his two guns were thundering up the rise.
As he brought them to “action front” and tried to collect his thoughts to figure out the range, a finger touched his shoulder and he turned to see another artillery officer standing by him.
“I've been lent from another section,” he explained: “You're wanted.”
“Where?”
“Over there, where you see Colonel Carter standing. It's your wife wants you, I think!”
Bellairs did not wait for explanations. He sent for his horse and mounted and rode across the intervening space at a breakneck gallop that he could barely stop in time to save himself from knocking the colonel over. A second later he was in Ruth's arms.
“I thought you were dead when I saw Shaitan!” he said. He was nearly sobbing.
“No, Mahommed Khan rode him,” she answered, and she made no pretense about not sobbing. She was crying like a child.
“Salaam, Bellairs sahib!” said a weak voice close to him. He noticed Colonel Carter bending over a prostrate figure, lifting the head up on his knee. There were three Rajputs standing between, though, and he could not see whose the figure was.
“Come over here!” said Colonel Carter, and young Bellairs obeyed him, leaving Ruth sitting on the ground where she was.
“Wouldn't you care to thank Mohammed Khan?” It was a little cruel of the colonel to put quite so much venom in his voice, for, when all is said and done: a man has almost a right to be forgetful when he has just had his young wife brought him out of the jaws of death. At least he has a good excuse for it. The sting of the reproof left him bereft of words and he stood looking down at the old Risaldar, saying nothing and feeling very much ashamed.
“Salaam, Bellairs sahib!” The voice was growing feebler. “I would have done more for thy father's son! Thou art welcome. Aie! But thy charger is a good one! Good-by! Time is short, and I would talk with the colonel sahib!”
He waved Bellairs away with a motion of his hand and the lieutenant went back to his wife again.
“He sent me away just like that, too!” she told him. “He said he had no time left to talk to women!”
Colonel Carter bent down again above the Risaldar, and listened to as much as he had time to tell of what had happened.
“But couldn't you have ridden round them, Risaldar?” he asked them.
“Nay, sahib! It was touch and go! I gave the touch! I saw as I rode how close the issue was and I saw my chance and took it! Had the memsahib been slain, she had at least died in full view of the English—and there was a battle to be won. What would you? I am a soldier—I.”
“Indeed you are!” swore Colonel Carter.
“Sahib! Call my sons!”
His sons were standing near him, but the colonel called up his grandsons, who had been told to stand at a little distance off. They clustered round the Risaldar in silence, and he looked them over and counted them.
“All here?” he asked.
“All here!”
“Whose sons and grandsons are ye?”
“Thine!” came the chorus.
“This sahib says that having done my bidding and delivered her ye rode to rescue, ye are no more bound to the Raj. Ye may return to your homes if ye wish.”
There was no answer.
“Ye may fight for the rebels, if ye wish! There will be a safe-permit written.”
Again there was no answer.
“For whom, then, fight ye?”
“For the Raj!” The deep-throated answer rang out promptly from every one of them, and they stood with their sword-hilts thrust out toward the colonel. He rose and touched each hilt in turn.
“They are now thy servants!” said the Risaldar, laying his head back. “It is good! I go now. Give my salaams to General Turner sahib!”
“Good-by, old war-dog!” growled the colonel, in an Anglo-Saxon effort to disguise emotion. He gripped at the right hand that was stretched out on the ground beside him, but it was lifeless.
Risaldar Mahommed Khan, two-medal man and pensionless gentleman-at-large, had gone to turn in his account of how he had remembered the salt which he had eaten.
Waist-held in the chains and soused in the fifty-foot-high spray, Joe Byng eyed his sounding lead that swung like a pendulum below him, and named it sacrilege.
“This 'ere navy ain't a navy no more,” he muttered. “This 'ere's a school-gal promenade, 'and-in-'and, an' mind not to get your little trotters wet, that's what this is, so 'elp me two able seamen an' a red marine!”
From the moment that the lookout, lashed to the windlass drum up forward, had spied the little craft away to leeward and had bellowed his report of it through hollowed hands between the thunder of the waves, Joe Byng had had premonitory symptoms of uneasiness. He had felt in his bones that the navy was about to be nose-led into shame.
At the wheel, both eyes on the compass, as the sea law bids, but both ears on the more-even-than-usual-alert, Curley Crothers felt the same sensations but expressed them otherwise.
“Admiral's orders!” he muttered. “Maybe the admiral was drunk?”
The brass gongs clanged down in the bowels of H.M.S. Puncher and she gradually lost what little weigh she had, rolling her bridge ends under in the heave and hollow of a beam-on monsoon sea.
“How much does he say he wants?” asked her commander.
Joe Byng in the chains and Curley Crothers at the wheel both recognized the quarter tone instantly, and diagnosed it with deadly accuracy; every vibration of his voice and every fiber of his being expressed exasperation, though a landsman might have noticed no more than contempt for what he had seen fit to log as “half a gale.”
“He says he'll take us in for fifty pounds, sir.”
“Oh! Tell him to make it shillings, or else to get out of my course!”
It is not much in the way of Persian Gulf Arabic that a man picks up from textbooks but at garnering the business end of beach-born dialects—the end that gets results at least expense of time or energy—the Navy goes even the Army half a dozen better. The sublieutenant's argument, bawled from the bridge rail to the reeling little boat below, was a marvel in its own sweet way; it combined abuse and scorn with a cataclysmic blast of threat in six explosive sentences.
“He says he'll take us in for ten pounds, sir,” he reported, without the vestige of a smile.
“Oh! Ask Mr. Hartley to step up on the bridge, will you?”
Two minutes later, during which the nasal howls from the boat were utterly ignored, the acting chief engineer hauled himself along the rail hand over hand to windward, ducking below the canvas guard as a more than usually big comber split against the Puncher's side and hove itself to heaven.
“It beats me how any man can keep a coat on him this weather,” he remarked, and the sublieutenant noticed that the streams that ran down both his temples were not sea water. “Send for me?”
His temper, judging by his voice, would seem to be a lot worse than could be due to the pitching of the ship.
“Yes. There's a pilot overside, and our orders are to take a pilot aboard when running in, if available. There are three men bailing that boat below there, and the sea's gaining on them. They'll need rescuing within two hours. Then we'd have a pilot aboard and would have saved the government ten pounds. Point is, can you manage in the engine-room for two or three hours longer? Three more waves like that last one and the man's ours anyway!”
“He might not wait two hours,” suggested Mr. Hartley. “He might get tired of looking at us, and beat back into port. Then where would be your strategy?”
“Then there wouldn't be a pilot available. I'd be justified in going in without one. Point is, can you hold out below?”
“Man,” said Mr. Hartley, “you're a genius.” He peered through the spray down to leeward, where the pilot's boat danced a death dance alongside, heel and toe to the Puncher's statelier swing. “Yes; there are three men bailing, and you're a genius. But no! The answer's no! The engines'll keep on turning, maybe and perhaps, until we make the shelter o' yon reef. There's no knowing what a cherry-red bearing will do. I can give ye maybe fifteen knots; maybe a leetle more for just five minutes, for steerage way and luck, and after that—”
Even crouched as he was against the canvas guard he contrived to shrug his shoulders.
“But if we go in there are you sure you can contrive to patch her up? It looks like a rotten passage, and not much of a berth beyond it.”
“I could cool her down.”
“Oh, if that's all you want, I can anchor outside in thirty fathoms.”
Curley Crothers heard that and his whole frame stiffened; there seemed a chance yet that the Navy might not be disgraced. But it faded on the instant.
“Man, we've got to go inside and we've got to hurry! Better in there than at the bottom of the Gulf! Put her where she'll hold still for a day, or maybe two days—”
“Say a month!” suggested the commander caustically.
“Say three days for the sake of argument. Then I can put her to rights. I daren't take down a thing while she's rolling twenty-five and more, and I've got to take things down! Why, man, the engine-room is all pollution from gratings to bilge; if I loosened one more bolt than is loose a'ready her whole insides 'ud take charge and dance quadrilles until we drowned!”
“You won't try to make Bombay?”
“I'll try to give ye steam as far as the far side o' yon reef. After that I wash my hands of a' responsibility!”
“Oh, very well. Mr. White!”
The sublieutenant hauled himself in turn to windward. Curley Crothers gave the wheel a half-spoke and looked as if he had no interest in anything. Joe Byng in the chains bowed his head and groaned inwardly; his sticky, spray-washed lead seemed all-absorbing.
“Tell that black robber to hurry aboard, unless he wants me to come in without him.”
The little boat had drifted fast before the wind, and the sublieutenant had to bellow through a megaphone to where the three men bailed and the ragged oarsmen swung their weight against the storm. The man of ebony, who would be pilot and disgrace the Navy, balanced on a thwart with wide-spread naked toes and yelled an ululating answer. With his rags out-blown in the monsoon he looked like a sea wraith come to life. The big gongs clanged again, and the Puncher drifted rather than drove down on the smaller craft. A hand line caught the pilot precisely in the face. He grabbed it frantically, fell headlong in the sea, and was hauled aboard.
“He says he wants a tow for that boat of his,” reported the sublieutenant. “Said it in English, too—seems he knows more than he pretends.”
“Missed it, by gad, by just about five minutes!” said the commander aloud but to himself. “Well—the bargain's made, so it can't be helped. That boat's sinking! Throw 'em a line, quick!”
The pilot's crew displayed no overdone affection for their craft, and there was no struggle to the last to leave it. One by one—whichever could grab the line first was the first to come—they were hauled through the thundering waves and their boat was left to sink. Then, before they could adjust their unaccustomed feet to the different balance of the Puncher's heaving deck, the gongs clanged and the destroyer leaped ahead like a dripping sea-soused water beetle, into her utmost speed that instant.
All conscious of his new-won dignity, and utterly regardless of his boat, the pilot had found the bridge at once. He clung to the rail there and braced one naked foot against a stanchion. To him the ship's speed seemed the all-absorbing thing, for either Mr. Hartley had forgotten just how many revolutions would make fifteen knots or else he had underestimated his engine-room's capacity. The Puncher split the waves and spewed them twenty feet above her, racing head-on for the reef, and Curley Crothers was too busy at his wheel to pass the pilot the surreptitious insult he intended.
The gongs clanged presently, and the Puncher swallowed half her speed at once, giving the pilot courage.
“This exceedingly damn dangerous place, sah!” he remarked.
“No bottom at eight!” sang Joe Byng in the chains.
Three words passed between the commander and Crothers, and the Puncher hove a weed-draped underside high over the crest of a beam-on roller as she veered a dozen points, ducked her starboard rail into the trough of it, and sliced her long thin nose, sizzling and swirling, into the welter ahead. It was growing weedier and dirtier each minute.
“No bottom at eight!” chanted Joe Byng.
And at the sound of his voice the pilot hauled himself up by his leverage on the rail and found his voice again.
“This most exceedingly damn dangerous place, sah!”
But the commander was too busy acting all three L's—Log, Lead and Lookout—his shrouded figure swaying to the heave and fall and his eyes fixed straight ahead of him on the double line of boiling foam. He had conned his course and had it charted in his head. There was no time to argue with a pilot.
“Port you-ah hel-um, sah! Port you-ah hel-um!”
“By the mark—seven!” sang Joe Byng from the chains.
“Port you-ah hel-um, sah!” yelled the pilot in an ecstasy of fright.
“Starboard a little,” came the quiet command.
Curley Crothers moved his wheel and the Puncher's bow yawed twenty feet, as if Providence had pushed her.
“Gawd A'mighty!” murmured Joe Byng, gazing open-mouthed at fifty feet of jagged rock that grinned up suddenly three waves away.
The pilot braced both feet against a stanchion and tried to take the weigh off her by pulling.
“Half speed, sah! Go slow, sah! Go dead slow, sah! You'll pile up you-ah damn ship, sah! Ah tell you, sah, you'll pile her up as suah as hell, sah! 'Bout a million sharks round he-ah, sah! For the love o' God, sah—Captain, sah—”
“Oh, muzzle him, some one!” ordered the commander, and the jiggling, complaining engines danced ahead, the horrid gray beneath the pilot's ebony notwithstanding.
“By the deep—four!” warned Joe Byng in a level sing-song. The two gongs clanged like an echo to him, and the Puncher's speed was reduced at once to her point, of minimum stability. She rolled and quivered like a living thing in fear, falling on and off, nosing out a passage on her own account apparently, and seeming to be gathering all her strength for one tremendous effort.
“That's bettah, sah! That's bettah, Captain, sah! Go astern! This he-ah's the bar, sah—damn bad place, the bar, sah! Go astern, sah. Captain, sah, d'you he-ah me—go astern! Try again, 'nother place further up, sah. Captain, sah! Over that way; that way thar—that way, sah!”
He pointed through the sky-flung spray with a trembling finger and his voice was rich with doleful emphasis, but the commander held his course and carried on. There seemed neither sympathy nor understanding on that unsteadiest of ships. Curley Crothers, solemn-faced as Nemesis and looking half as compassionate, moved his wheel a trifle. Joe Byng in the chains kept up his even sing-song, expressionless, as if he were an automatic clock that did not care, but must record the truth each time his dripping pendulum touched bottom.
“And a half—three!”
White foam was boiling in among the dirty welter, and the Puncher's bow pitched suddenly as the first big bar wave lifted her; a second later her propellers chug-chug-chugged in surface spume as she kicked upward like a porpoise diving.
“Oh, lordy, lordy, lordy!” groaned the pilot. “This he-ah watah's full of sharks, an' that's the bar! You're on the bar now, Captain, sah!”
“By the mark—three!” Byng chanted steadily.
“Starboard a little more,” said the commander leaning forward and shoving the pilot away to leeward at the same time. Then he shouted to the fo'castle head, where a bosun's mate and his crew had climbed and were awaiting orders in evident and most unreasonable unconcern.
“Get both anchors ready!”
“Aye, aye, sir!” came the answer, and efficiency controlled by experts proceeded at kaleidoscopic angles to defy the elements. The big steel hooks were ready in an instant.
“Stop her!” ordered the commander.
The gongs clanged out an alarm and the throbbing ceased.
“Hard astern, both engines!”
Again there was a clangor under hatches, and the suffering bearings shrieked. The Puncher dropped her stern two feet or so, and the foam boiled brown round her propellers. The shock of the reversal pitched the pilot up against the forward rail, where he clung like a drowning man.
“For the love o' God, sah! Captain; sah, we've struck! Ah told you so; Ah said—”
“And a half-three!” chanted Joe Byng.
“Stop her! Starboard engine ahead! Port engine ahead! Ease your helm! Meet her! Half speed ahead!”
The Puncher pitched and rolled, kicking at the following monsoon that thundered at her counter and tossing up the foam that seethed about her bow. She trembled from end to end, as if the pounding of the water hurt her.
“Helm amidships!” ordered the commander suddenly.
“'Midships, sir!”
“Full speed ahead, both engines!”
The Puncher leaped, as all destroyers do the second day they are loosed. She sliced through the storm straight for the coral beach beyond the bar, shaking her graceful shoulders free of the sticky spray—reeling, rolling, thugging, kicking, bucking through the welter to where quiet water waited and the ever-lasting, utterly unrighteous stink of sun-baked Arab beaches. As each tremendous breaker thundered on her stern each time she lifted to the underswell, the pilot vowed that she had struck, rolling his eyes and calling two different deities to witness that none of it was any fault of his.
“Thar's no water, sah—no water, Captain, sah—not one drop! You've piled up you-ah ship! Ah told you so; Ah said—”
“By the deep—four!”
“And a half-four!”
“By the mark—five!”
The Puncher was across the bar, gliding through muddy water on an even keel and giving the lie direct to him whose fee was ten pounds English. The pilot drew a talisman of some kind from underneath the least torn portion of his shirt, and to the commander's amazement kissed it. It is not often that a woolly headed, or any other, native of the East kisses either folk or things. But the commander was too busy at the moment to ask questions.
“Have your starboard anchor ready!” he commanded, making mental notes.
“Ready, sir!”
The glittering, wet, wind-blown beach and the little estuary slid by like a painted panorama smelling of all the evil in the world as the Puncher eased her helm a time or two seeking a comfortable berth with Joe Byng's chanted aid.
“Let go twenty fathoms!”
The pilot sighed relief as the starboard anchor splashed into the water and the cable roared after it through the hawse pipe.
“What nationality are you?” asked the commander, watching the Puncher swing and gaging distances, but sparing one eye now for his unwelcome but official guest.
“Me, sah?”
“Yes, you.”
The pilot looked anywhere but at his questioner, and a picture passed before the commander's eyes—a memory, perhaps, of something he had read about at school—of Christians in Nero's day being asked what their religion was.
“Are you afraid to tell me?” he asked, softening his voice to a kinder tone as he remembered that God did not make all men Englishmen, and turning just in time to cause Crothers to withdraw his right leg.
The pilot's toes were, after all, not destined to be trodden on just then.
“No, sah, Ah'm not afraid.”
“What are you, then?”
“Ah'm—”
“Well? What?”
“Ah'm English!”
“What?”
“Captain, sah, Ah'm English!”
“Oh! Are you? Um-m-m! Mr. White, give this man his ten pounds, will you? And get his receipt for it.”
That appeared to end matters, so far as the commander was concerned; official dignity forbade any further interest. But it was not so very long since Mr. White was senior midshipman, and it takes a man until he is admiral of the fleet to unlearn all he knew then and forget the curiosity of those days.
“Now, I should have thought you were a Scotchman,” he suggested without smiling, studying the salt-encrusted wrinkles on the ebony face. “You like whisky?”
“Yes, sah—positively, sah! Yes, Captain, sah—Ah do!”
Mr. White sent for whisky and poured out a stiff four fingers, to the awful disgust of Curley Crothers, who saw the whole transaction. The pilot consumed it so instantly that there seemed never to have been any in the glass.
“I suppose your name's Macnab—or Macphairson—which? Sign here, please.”
The pilot took the proffered pen in unaccustomed fingers and made a crisscross scrawl, adorned with thirteen blots. The pen nib broke under the strain, and he handed it back with an air of confidential remonstrance.
“That thing's no mo-ah good,” he volunteered.
“So I see. Now tell me your name in full, so that I can write it next to the mark. It's a wonder of a mark! Mac—what's the rest of it?”
“Hassan Ah.”
“Machassan?”
“No, sah. Hassan Ah.”
“And you're English?”
“Yes, sah.”
“With that name?”
“Mah name makes no diffunts, sah. Ah'm English.”
“Well—here's your money. Cutter away, there! Put the pilot and his crew ashore! Sorry about your boat, pilot, but it couldn't be helped.”
“Makes me believe that I'm a nigger!” muttered Curley Crothers, not yet released from duty on the bridge.
“First time I ever wished I was a Dutchman!” swore Joe Byng, coiling up his sounding line.
Ten minutes later the cutter's captain swung the boat's stern in shore when he judged that he was reasonably near enough and too far in for sharks. He had his orders to put the pilot and his crew ashore, but the means had not been too exactly specified.
“Get out and swim for it, you bally Englishman!” he ordered, using a boat-hook on the nearest one to make his meaning clear.
One by one they jumped for it, the pilot going last. He plainly did not understand the point of view.
“Ah'm English!” he expostulated. “Lissen he-ah, Ah'm English! Damwell English!”
“All right; let's see you swim, English!” jeered the cutter's captain, and the pilot took the water with a splash.
“Ah su-ah am English!” he vowed, as he swam for the shore, and he stood by the sea's edge repeating his assertion with a leathery pair of lungs until the cutter had rowed out of ear-shot.
“English, is he?” said Joe Byng to Curley Crothers in the fo'castle, not twenty minutes later. “I'd show him, if I had him in here for twenty minutes!”
“That fellow's interested me,” said Crothers. “He's got me thinking. I vote we investigate him.”
“How?”
“Ashore, fathead.”
“There'll be no shore leave.”
“No? You left off being wet nurse to the dawg?” “I brush him, mornin's; if that's what you mean.”
“Is he fit?”
“Fit to fight a bumboat full o' pilots!”
“Could he be sick for an hour?”
“Might be did.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Morning?”
“At about two bells?”
“It could be done.”
“Then do it!”
“Why?”
“Because, Joe Byng my boy, you and I want shore leave; and the pup—and he's a decent pup—must suffer for to make a 'tween-deck holiday. Get my meaning? I've a propagandrum that'll work this tide. You go and set the fuse in the pup's inside; and mind you, time it right, my son—for two bells when the old man's in the chair!”
So Joe Byng, who was something of an expert in the way and ways of dogs, departed in search of an oiler with whom he was on terms of condescension; and he returned to the fo'castle a little later with the nastiest, most awful-smelling mess that ever emanated even from the engine-room of a destroyer in the Persian Gulf (where grease and things run rancid.)
Lying lazily at anchor off the reeking beach of Adra Bight, the Puncher looked peaceful and complacent—which is altogether opposite to what she and her commander were, or had been, for a month. The ship hummed her shut-in discontent, as a hive does when the bees propose to swarm, and her commander—who never, be it noted, went to windward of the one word “damn”—used that one word very frequently.
He sat “abaft the mainmast” at a table that was splotched already with abundant perspiration, and the acting engineer who stood in front of him shifted from foot to foot in attitudes expressive of increasing agony of mind. It grew obvious at last that there was a limit to Mr. Hartley's store of courteous deference.
There had been news, red hot but wrong, of dhows loaded to the water-line with guns and ammunition somewhere up the Gulf. India, ever fretful for her tribes beyond the border, had borrowed Applewaite and his destroyer by instant cablegram, and jealously held records had been broken while the Puncher quartered those indecent seas and heated up her bearings. It was almost too much to have to come back empty-handed. It was quite too much to have to run for shelter under the lee of Adra's uninviting coral reef. And to be told by an acting engineer that he would have to stay a week was utterly beyond the scope of polite conversation.
“Why a week?” asked Commander Applewaite, with eyebrows raised to the nth power of incredulity.
“Why a week?” asked Mr. Hartley, breaking down the barrier of self-restraint at last. “I'll tell you why. Because, although the guts of her are so much scrap-iron, you've a crew of engineers who could build machinery of hell-slag—build it, mind—and could get steam out o' the Sahara, where there isn't any water at all.
“Because—conditional upon the act o' God and your permission—I'm willing to perform a miracle. Because the whole engine-room complement is dancing mad for shore leave, and there'll be none this side o' Bombay; and because, in consequence o' that, creation would be a mild name for what's about to happen under gratings until the shafts revolve again. Man, I wish ye'd take one peep at her bearings, though ye wouldn't understand.
“Because you're lucky; any other engineer in all the navies o' the world would take a month to tinker with her, even if he didn't have to send to Bombay for a tow. Because—”
“That'll do!” said Applewaite, his mind wandering already in search of suitable employment for the crew. “Get the repairs done as soon as possible; we stay here until you have finished what is necessary.”
It looked like an evil moment for asking favors, but it was the time laid down in Regulations when such things as favors may be had; and it was the moment Curley Crothers had picked out for asking for shore leave.
“Come 'ere, Scamp. Come along, Scamp. Come along 'ere—good boy!” he coaxed, dragging by a short chain in his wake the sorriest-looking bull terrier that ever acted mascot in the British or any other navy. Courteous and huge and cap in hand, his weather-beaten face smiling respectfully above a snow-white uniform, he took his stand before the little table. His outward bearing was one of certainty, but his shrewd, slightly puckered eyes alternately conned the expression of his commander's face and watched the dog.
The lee, scuppers were the goal of the dog's immediate ambition, for he was a well-brought-up dog and such of the decencies as were not his by instinct he had learned by painful and repeated acquisition. But at the moment Curley Crothers showed a wondrous disregard for etiquette.
“He's very sick, sir,” he asserted, tugging a little at the chain in the hope of producing instant proof of his contention. But the dog was gamiest of the game, and swallowed hurriedly.
“Well? I'm not a vet. What about it?”
“The whole ship's crew 'ud be sorry, sir, if 'e was to lose 'is number. He's the best mascot this ship ever had, by all accounts.”
“He hasn't brought us much luck this run!” smiled Applewaite, remembering a long list of “previous convictions” and wondering what Crothers might be up to next.
“No, sir? We're still a-top o' the water, sir.”
“Oh! He gets the credit for that, eh? But for him, I suppose we'd have piled up on the reef yesterday?”
“Saving your presence, sir.”
Curley Crothers made a gesture expressive of a world of compliment and praise, but he kept one eye steadily on the dog; he seemed to imply that but for the presence of the dog on board the commander might have forgotten his seamanship.
“Well? What do you suggest?”
“Seeing the poor dog's sick, sir, and you and all of us so fond of him, and all he needs is exercise, I thought perhaps as 'ow you'd order me an' Byng, sir, to take 'im for a run ashore. There'd be jackals and pi-dogs for 'im to chase. A bit o' sport 'ud set 'im up in a jiffy. He's languishing—that's what's the matter with him.”
There were almost tears in his voice as he tugged at the chain surreptitiously, in a vain effort to produce the cataclysm that was overdue. But for all his efforts to appear affected, his eyes were smiling. So were his commander's.
“Why Byng?” he asked.
“Byng cleans him, sir. He knows Byng.”
“Then, why you?”
“Why; he knows me too, sir, and between the two of us, we'd manage him proper. S'posin' he was to get huntin' on his own and one of us was tired out chasin' him, t'other could run and catch him. If there was only one of us, he couldn't.”
“I see. Well? One of the other men might take him on the chain. A good-conduct man, for instance.”
Crothers tugged at the chain, and the unhappy dog drew away toward the scuppers with all his remaining strength.
“He's cussed about the chain, sir—apt to drag on it and try to chaw it through. Besides, sir, when a dawg's sick, he's like a man—same as me an' you; he likes to 'ave 'is partic'lar pals with 'im. Now, that dawg's fond o' me an' Byng.'
“I see. But supposing exercise isn't what he wants after all? Suppose he needs a long rest and lots of sleep? How about that?”
The argument had reached a crisis, and Curley realized it. Joking or not, when the commander of a ship takes too long in reaching a decision he generally does not reach a favorable one. The leash was tugged again, this time with some severity. The martyred Scamp was drawn on his protesting haunches close to the official table, that the commander might have a better view of his distress. And then the expected happened—voluminously.
Curley stood with an expression of wooden-headed, abject innocence on his big, broad face, and looked straight in front of him.
“He certainly is sick, sir,” he remarked.
“Sick. Good heavens! The dog's turning himself inside out! That's the last time a thing like this happens; he's the last dog I ever take on a cruise. Take him away at once! Bosun—call some one to wipe up that disgusting mess!”
“Take him ashore, did you say, sir?”
“Take him out of this! Take him anywhere you like! Yes, take him ashore and lose him—feed him to the sharks—give him to the Arabs—take him away, that's all!”
“Me and Byng, sir?”
“Yes, you and Byng! Did you hear me tell you to take him away?”
“Very good, sir; thank you!”
Curley Crothers saluted without the vestige of a smile, and hurried off before the dog could show too early signs of recovering health and strength or the commander could change his mind.
“Come on, Scamp,” he whispered. “That was nothing but a temporary disaccommodation to your tummy, doglums; we'll soon have you to rights again.”
He dived into the fo'castle with the dog behind him, and there were those who noticed that the terrier's whip-like tail no longer hugged his stomach, but was waving to the world at large.
And thirty minutes later, as the Puncher's launch put off with Curley and Joe Byng comfortably seated in the stern, it was obvious to any one who cared to look that Scamp was the happiest and healthiest terrier in Asia.
“Now, I wonder what they did to him,” mused the Puncher's commander, watching from beneath his awning. “Those two men live up to the name they brought aboard! I believe they'd find means and a good excuse for walking to windward of a First Sea Lord!”