by T. T. Jeans
*CHAPTER XVII*
*Goodbye to the Huan Min*
Out of Danger--Goodbye to Ching--Mr. Rashleigh's Report--at Hong-Kong
_Written by Commander Truscott_
I thank God that I am not lying under the muddy water rolling round theHector Group, with Withers and those other poor fellows of ours.
It was to Marshall and his marines that I owe my life, and I wish thatit was in my power to repay them. In attempting to rescue young Fordthat night he was captured, I had been shot clean through the body,below the left ribs, and two of the marines--I do not know which two,and they have never come forward to tell me--carried me back to thewalls of that battery, whilst Marshall kept the Chinese at bay. It wasBarclay who told them to carry me as gently and smoothly as possible, asthis was my only chance, and they carried me as if I had been a babyasleep, although the Chinese were closing all around them. They got medown the mud shore, and into the barge, only just in time, and it waswhilst I was being lifted in that Marshall received the blow on the headwhich knocked him over. There was a most desperate fight to save him,and then poor young Withers managed to drive them off with his gun.
When they got me aboard the _Vigilant_, Mayhew would not give me anyopinion as to what my chances were. "Look here, Mayhew!" I told him,"I'm not a baby; tell me;" but he only said, "Wait for three days, andeat nothing till then. I cannot tell you before."
I had to be content with that, and to lie in my bunk, with the picturesof my wife and my two boys smiling at me out of their frames, and watchthe hands of the little clock she had given me crawling round its face,and wondering, whenever I had a twinge of pain inside me, whether thetrouble which Mayhew feared had commenced, and whether the end was near.
Mayhew used to come to my cabin half a dozen times a day, feel my pulse,and take my temperature. "Hungry still, Commander?" he would say, andsmile and go away, and each time I would watch his face to see if thesmile was only there to cover his real feelings. No one who has notbeen through a time like this can imagine how awful is the suspense.
On the morning after the Skipper had come back with the landing parties,bringing Sally, her father, young Ford, and our missing men with him,Mayhew found my temperature and pulse normal. He gave a whoop. "You'lllive to enjoy your pension all right, Truscott," and told me that I waspractically out of danger. Barclay came in and confirmed his opinion.I lay back, too filled with emotion to speak. Those photographs seemedto smile even more at me--they represented all I had to live for--andlife seemed very good.
Neither of the doctors had had any sleep during the night, as they hadbeen busy with the wounded, and Barclay looked pretty ghastly. He hadhad a blow on the head during the fight in that square, but fortunatelythe sword edge had been turned by his cap.
The Captain came in almost immediately afterwards, growling veryfiercely to hide his feelings. "Umph! I've kept back the _Ringdove_till I heard about you from Mayhew this morning. Going to send her upto Shanghai at once. I'll be off and write a letter to your missus.Umph! You want shaving--badly;" and he gripped my hand and went outagain.
I finished my letter home--as you can imagine I finished it--the sentryoutside was waiting for it, I heard the boat shove off to take it to the_Ringdove_, and I thanked God once more and felt inexpressibly at peace.
At the same time that she heard the news of my wound, my wife would hearthat I was out of danger, and this, too, caused me to be very thankful.
Some little time afterwards the curtain was pushed aside, and youngFord's extremely disfigured face peeped through. I smiled at him, and hegave me a frightened cheerful smile and drew it back again.
Poor little chap! he'd been pretty badly knocked about. I ought never tohave let him go on that "fool" errand of his. But he was as happy as alord, because he had saved the Skipper's life.
In a week's time I was allowed to sit up for an hour or two a day, andin ten days' time to walk about a little.
Then the _Ringdove_ arrived with six weeks' mails, and orders from theAdmiral to proceed at once to Yokohama with the gunboats, to land allthe wounded still requiring hospital treatment, and to join the flagshipsomewhere off the coast of Corea. We were to proceed with "despatch",as political complications in Europe threatened war with a country whichmaintained a considerable fleet in Chinese waters.
The Captain of the _Huan Min_ had received orders by the _Ringdove_ aswell, and had to continue the search for the remainder of thepirates--those who had escaped in the junks.
Ching and his Captain dined with our Skipper that night, and, for him,"Old Lest" was extraordinarily gentle. He felt, I am sure, that he wasleaving them in the lurch, with all this work still in front of them,and thought it was hardly "playing the game", after the magnificent wayin which they had helped us.
I heard him tell Ching: "Umph! But for you, Ching, we should never havedone it, never have rescued the little lass" (I saw Ching wince), "andeveryone would have called 'Old Lest' a silly old fool. I only wishthat we could stay and help you; but we can't. There's trouble comin'along, and the Admiral wants every ship he can get hold of, so we've gotto be off." He grunted and growled a few times, and then burst outfiercely with, "'Old Lest' will never forget you."
He gave Ching a photograph of himself, and a silver cup he had won yearsago as a midshipman. It was the Admiral's cup for the Channel Fleet inthe old days, and he valued it more than anything else he had in hiscabin. I told Ching so afterwards, in order that he should appreciateit all the more.
He had written to the Foreign Office as well, about Ching, and we allhoped that eventually he would get his promotion.
To continue the search for the fugitive and scattered pirates was likehunting for the button in a Christmas pudding after the thimble andsixpence had been found--a good deal of trouble, and not worth thebother when you did find it.
Little Sally was the thimble, and the yacht and the tramp steamer thesixpence, and we all knew well enough that Ching wanted the thimble, anddidn't care in the least for anything else.
He had told me that he was hoping to be sent back to Shanghai, and Iknow that he wanted another chance of seeing Sally, and that theprospect of cruising alone among those bleak, fog-bound islands, nowthat she had been rescued and had gone out of his life, was very drearyto him.
Before he went back to his antiquated old tub, he was taken into theward room, where they gave him a great "send-off". Everyone knew thatbut for him Sally would not have been rescued, everyone on board admiredhis pluck and gallantry, and everyone was extremely sorry to part withhim.
At daybreak next morning the _Huan Min_ got up her clumsy anchor andsteamed away, and we all manned ships and cheered her as she passed us,and waited on deck till she had disappeared round the island, out ofsight, and nothing of her remained but a dense cloud of oily blacksmoke.
"Umph! There goes a confounded fine chap", the Skipper growled, as hewent below. We ourselves, with our gunboats, left shortly afterwardsfor Yokohama, and Parkinson in the _Omaha_ came along too. There aresmall English and United States naval hospitals still kept up in thisJapanese town, and all the bad cases were sent ashore to them.
Parkinson, after having landed his, left for Chemulpo in Corea, and wegave him and his officers a great farewell dinner to commemorate thetermination of the expedition.
I did not take part in this, however, because Mayhew forced me to go tohospital with Whitmore, Ford, and seven others of our men.
I was very loath to go, because I felt as fit as a fiddle, and wartroubles were brewing, and my place ought to be on board. However muchI dreaded a big naval war, there was always the chance of somepromotion, and I hated to be left behind.
However, Mayhew wouldn't hear of my coming, and we had to watch the old_Vigilant_ steam away past the breakwater without us.
I rather fancy that the doctors were a little too careful about me, for,as a matter of fact, I never felt better
in my life.
Before the _Vigilant_ sailed, the Skipper brought "Blucher" up to thehospital to say goodbye to us, and told me many things. One was that hehad allowed the old Scotch engineer, whom we had brought with us fromthe island, to go ashore and disappear.
"Umph!" the Skipper growled. "Had enough evidence to hang him a dozentimes; but he helped our people in that house, and Ford and those twofellows would have been scuppered but for him, so I sent him ashore atnight, gave him a ten-pound note, and told him to clear."
The ten-pound note was out of his own pocket, I knew well enough.
He was asking my opinion as to whom he should mention by name in hisdespatches, and, just as he was going, said, "Umph! Truscott, I sentthat Report of Proceedings back to Rashleigh with a copy of Trevelyan'sand young Ford's. Told him to rewrite his. Told him that I wouldn'tforward it to the Admiral till I was satisfied with it, and he's writtenquite a different yarn. Umph! I told him what I thought of him--prettyplainly."
Young Ford had been bothering me, time after time, to do something aboutthat Chinese gun which Whitmore, Travers, and Marshall had captured, andwhich Rashleigh had claimed and kept. From all that I had gathered,especially from Whitmore, there was no doubt that Rashleigh had noearthly right to it. I took this opportunity of mentioning the subject.
"Umph! I know the fat little beggar's got no right to it. Thought hehad when he asked me for it, so gave it him, and let him take it away;but when 'Old Lest's' given anything away--umph!--he don't go back onhis word. It belongs to me, I suppose, and I can do what I like withit, eh?"
After he had gone I let Ford know what he had said about that Report,and he was extremely delighted; but the possession of that gun stillrankled very deeply, and I felt sure that he would not be content whilstit remained aboard the _Ringdove_.
From a few things Ford said, more or less under his breath, I had a dimsuspicion that if it wasn't handed over to the _Vigilant_, the gunroommeant to do something or other.
"What's the game?" I asked him; but he wasn't going to give away anysecrets.
For four weeks we were left to ourselves, and young Ford and myself wereable to have many pleasant little excursions up country, and each day'sexcitement was the arrival of Reuter's telegram at the English Club onthe Bund, with news of the gathering war clouds.
As war seemed to be becoming imminent, both of us felt our position verykeenly. Poor Whitmore with his smashed thigh was, of course, totallyhelpless, but, as I said before, I was as strong as a horse again, andFord's arm did not entirely incapacitate him.
Just, however, as we thought that war was only a question of hours, thewar clouds disappeared, to our intense relief, and presently the_Vigilant_ came back to pick us all up again, the Skipper having ordersto proceed to Singapore, and to act as Senior Officer there till it wastime for us to go home and pay off.
I was fit for duty now, even Mayhew couldn't deny that, and right glad Iwas to get back to my work and to my own bunk.
We called in at Nagasaki for coal, took in four hundred tons, and thenleft for Hong-Kong, where we arrived in the middle of June, just beforethe hot weather had commenced, and made fast to one of the buoys offMurray Pier.
It was very pleasant being back there, and we were obliged to remain fora whole week, whilst the dockyard made a few slight repairs.
The only other man-of-war in the harbour besides the _Tamar_ and the old_Wyvern_, moored off Kowloon, was the _Ringdove_, secured to anotherbuoy farther inshore.
Young Ford can tell you better what happened there during that week thanI can.
As a matter of fact, I am not supposed to know anything about it, anddon't _officially_.
The 'Huan Min' steaming eight knots]