Cover art
[Frontispiece: "I HAULED IT UP HAND OVER HAND"
(missing from book)]
On Foreign Service
Or, The Santa Cruz Revolution
BY
STAFF SURGEON T. T. JEANS, R.N.
Author of "Mr. Midshipman Glover, R.N."
"Ford of H.M.S. Vigilant"
ILLUSTRATED BY WILLIAM RAINEY, R.I.
BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED
LONDON GLASGOW AND BOMBAY
1911
Preface
This story is based on experiences, of my own, in various parts of the world, and describes a Revolution in a South American Republic, and the part played by two armoured cruisers whilst protecting British interests.
It describes life aboard a modern man-of-war, and attempts to show how the command of the sea exercises a controlling influence on the issue of land operations.
As the proof sheets have been read by several officers of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines, and many suggestions and corrections made, the naval portion of the story may be taken to give an accurate description of the incidents narrated.
T. T. JEANS,
Staff Surgeon, Royal Navy.
ROYAL NAVAL HOSPITAL,
CHATHAM.
Contents
CHAP.
- [Ordered to Santa Cruz]
- [A Revolution imminent]
- [The Revolution breaks out]
- [The Rescue of the Sub]
- [Gerald Wilson Captures San Fernando]
- [The *Hector* goes to San Fernando]
- [General Zorilla falls back]
- [Zorilla loses his Guns]
- [Zorilla attacks]
- [The Fight round the Casino]
- [San Fernando attacked from the Sea]
- [How we fought the Four Point Sevens]
- [Bad News for Gerald Wilson]
- [*La Buena Presidente* Fights]
- [The Santa Cruz Fleet again]
- [The Attack on Santa Cruz]
- [The Ex-policeman]
- [The *Hector* goes Home]
Illustrations
["I hauled it up hand over hand"] . . . Frontispiece (missing from book)
["Is that Gerald Wilson aboard?"]
["I gave the first a blow on the point of his jaw"]
["I dodged to the rear of the first wagon"]
[Scrambling down the Mountain Side]
CHAPTER I
Ordered to Santa Cruz
Written by Sub-Lieutenant William Wilson, R.N.
Only eight months ago Ginger Hood and I had been midshipmen aboard the old Vengeance, and of course had spent most of our time, in her, trying to get to windward of her sub, pull his leg, and dodge any job of work which came along. Now the boot was on the other leg, for we were sub-lieutenants ourselves—he in the Hercules, I in the Hector, with gun-rooms of our own to boss, and as we'd only been at the job for a month, you can guess that we hadn't quite settled down yet, and felt jolly much like fish out of water.
The Hector and Hercules were two big armoured cruisers, as like as two peas, and they had come straight out from England to Gibraltar to work up for their first gunnery practices. For the last ten days they had been lying inside the New Mole waiting for a strong south-easter to blow itself out, and we had taken the opportunity of trying to make our two gun-rooms friendly; for, as a matter of fact, they hated each other like poison, his mids. taking every opportunity of being rude to mine, and mine to his. These rows were always reported to us, and if we hadn't been such chums, I do believe that we, too, should have fallen out. If a Hercules mid. came aboard the Hector on duty, my chaps would let him wear his legs out on the quarterdeck for hours sooner than ask him down below, and you can guess that they were just as kind aboard the Hercules if any of my mids. had to go aboard her. I had sixteen of the beauties in my gun-room to look after, and Ginger had fifteen; if his were more bother to him than mine were to me, I don't wonder he thought that his hair was turning grey. Never did they meet ashore without a free fight or some trouble or another cropping up. The row had started on board the Cornwall, where they had all been together as cadets, over some wretched boat-race. The winning crew had used racing oars, which the second boat's crew either hadn't had the savvy to get, or didn't find out till too late that they might have used. However it was, there had been a glorious row at the time, and as some of my mids. had pulled in the losing boat and some of Ginger's in the winning one, both gun-rooms still kept the feud going.
Ginger and I thought that the best way to patch up their quarrel was to make them play matches against each other, and this we had done—'soccer,' hockey, and cricket on the dockyard ground, and a 'rugger' game on the North Front.
There wasn't the slightest improvement. I had jawed my chaps till I was tired, and Ginger had jawed his, without the least effect; and now they'd just spoilt what might have been a grand game of hockey by squabbling all the time, claiming fouls, and 'sticks,' and nonsense like that, every other minute.
The game had been so unpleasant that Ginger and I were thankful when it was finished, slipped on our coats and watched our two teams quarrelling and taunting each other as they left the ground in two separate groups.
'Look at the young fools, Billums!' Ginger said angrily. 'Did you ever see anything so perfectly idiotic?'
'Come along up to the Club,' I said savagely. 'We'll have some tea. It makes one feel perfectly hopeless. I'd like to cane the whole crowd of them.'
Up we went together, and found the Captains and a number of the ward-room fellows from the two ships lying back in the wicker chairs on the verandah, basking in the sun and waiting for afternoon tea. As we came up the steps, they sang out to know which gun-room had won.
'Hercules won, sir,' I told our Skipper, Captain Grattan. 'Won by four to two.'
'Tut, tut, boy! What's that now? Still one game ahead, ain't you?'
'No, sir, we're all square.'
'Well, beat 'em next time, lad.'
A jolly chap our Skipper was—short and plump and untidy, with a merry twinkle spreading over his funny old face, all wrinkled up with the strain of keeping his eyeglass in place. Everybody knew him as 'Old Tin Eye,' and he was so jolly unaffected that nobody could help liking him.
As we leant our hockey sticks up against the railings and sat down in the corner, we could hear him chaffing Captain Roger Hill, the tall, thin, beautifully dressed Skipper of the Hercules, and could jolly well see by the way he fidgeted in his chair that he didn't like it a little bit. Old Tin Eye would call him 'Spats,' and he didn't like it in public, and squirmed lest we inferior mortals should hear of it. I don't suppose he knew that nobody ever did call him anything but 'Spats.' You see, he never went ashore without white canvas spats over his boots, and they were very conspicuous.
Our Fleet Surgeon, Watson—a morose kind of chap—and Molineux, the Fleet Surgeon of the Hercules, stopped talking 'shop' to ask Ginger how many goals he'd scored (Ginger was the terror of his team); and Montague, our Gunnery Lieutenant, and Barton, their gunnery-man, left off talking about the coming gun-layers' 'test' to ask us if the gun-rooms had made up their row.
'No such luck, sir,' we said. 'They're worse, if anything.'
Whilst we were having our tea, one of the Club 'boys' brought along the little Gib. paper, and of course our Skipper had first turn.
'Cheer up, Spats, old boy!' he sang out loudly enough for every one to hear—he loved tormenting Captain Roger Hill; 'there's trouble in Santa Cruz again. Old Canilla, the President, has collared half-a-dozen Englishmen belonging to the Yucan Rubber Company, and won't give 'em up. If you've got any shares in it you'd better sell them.'
'Hello,' I sang out to Ginger. 'I've got a brother out there. He's supposed to be rubber-planting, but I'll bet he spends most of his time teaching his natives to bowl leg breaks at him. Hope they haven't collared him—I'm sorry for them if they have.'
We saw the telegrams ourselves later on, but there wasn't any more information. Old Gerald, my brother, didn't belong to the Yucan Company, and we forgot all about it because there was a much more exciting telegram above this one. The United Services had beaten Blackheath by fifteen points to five—a jolly sight more exciting that was, especially as I had played for the U.S. this season before we left England, and knew all the chaps playing on our side.
Well, that night I had the middle watch, and whilst the Angel and Cousin Bob (you don't know who they are yet, but you precious soon will) were making my cocoa, the light at the Europa Signal Station began flashing our number. I telephoned to the fore-bridge to smarten up the signalman, and ask what the dickens he meant by being asleep; and then, just for practice, and for something to do, leant up against the quarterdeck rails and took in the signal. 'Admiral Superintendent to Captain Grattan. Coal lighters will come alongside at daybreak. (Full stop.) Both Hector and Hercules will fill up with coal and water as soon as possible, and will complete with ten days' fresh provisions. (Full stop.)'
A second or two later the signalman came running up with his signal-pad, and, not having the faintest idea what was in the wind, I took it down to the Skipper. I had to shake him before he would wake; and when he sat up in his bunk, found his eyeglass, tucked it into his eye, and read the signal, he chuckled, 'Tut, tut, boy; we're off somewhere—finish gunnery. Won't old Montague be sick of life? Show it to the Commander, and repeat it to old "Spats"—I mean Captain Roger Hill.'
As I was tapping at the Commander's door, Cousin Bob and the Angel came along, and I knew they were up to some dodge, for I could see them grinning in the light of the gangway lantern.
'Couldn't you let us off watch, as we've got to coal early to-morrow? Your cocoa's just inside the battery door,' they asked me as I went in.
The Commander was out of bed like a redshank, read the signal, and gave me his orders for the morning. 'Can I let Temple and Sparks turn in, sir, as we're coaling early?'
'Confound them! I suppose they'd better, the young rascals. Turn the light off as you go out, and for heaven's sake make that lumbering ox of a sentry outside my cabin take his boots off.'
I looked round to find the two mids., but they'd taken the leave for granted and gone below, so I drank my cocoa and finished my watch by myself.
I may as well tell you about the two young beauties. Bob Temple was, unfortunately for me, my cousin—a scraggy, freckled, untidy midshipman, who hadn't the brains to get into mischief, or to get out of it again, but for his pal the Angel. What had made them chum together I don't know, for the Angel (Tommy Sparks) was the exact opposite of Bob—as spruce and ladylike a chap as you ever saw, always beautifully neat and clean, with a face like a girl's, light hair, and blue eyes. He looked as though butter couldn't possibly melt in his mouth, and devoted every moment when he wasn't asleep or eating to getting himself and my dear young cousin into a scrape. It was one of his latest efforts which had cost them watch and watch for three days, and that was why they were keeping the 'middle' with me that night; so you can guess why they were so keen on the coaling signal, and had streaked down below. It didn't matter to me a tinker's curse how many watches the Angel kept, but with Cousin Bob it mattered a good deal. His people looked on me as his bear-leader, and every time he got into a row sooner or later I heard about it from them, or from his sister Daisy. I'm hanged if you are going to hear any more about her, except that she used to think me a brute whenever his leave was stopped, or he had 'watch and watch,' and put it all down to me. I hadn't had to cane him yet, but I knew that would have to happen sooner or later, and I guessed that when it did happen, she'd write me a pretty good 'snorter.'
Don't think that Bob would peach—not he, intentionally—but I knew exactly what he'd write home—something like this:
'The Angel sends his love—he and I cheeked the Padre at school yesterday—we had awful fun—old Billums (that was I) caned the two of us after evening quarters. This morning we both pretended we couldn't sit down, and groaned when we tried to, till the Padre went for old Billums for laying it on so hard. We've got our leave stopped for trying to catch rats on the booms with a new trap which the Angel has invented. The Commander caught his foot in it. You should have heard him curse.'
That was the kind of thing that used to go home, and his father and mother, and my mother too, to say nothing of Daisy, put it all down to me.
I had to turn the hands 'out' at seven bells, to rig coaling screens, the whips, and all the other gear for coaling, turned over my watch to the fat marine subaltern who relieved me, and got a couple of hours' sleep before the coal lighters bumped alongside.
It was a case of being as nippy as fleas after that, because we had to beat the Hercules. You should have seen the Angel and Cousin Bob in blue overalls, with white cap covers pulled down over their heads, digging out for daylight down in my coal lighter among the foretopmen, all of them as black as niggers, shovelling coal into baskets, passing them up the side, dodging the lumps of coal which fell out of them and the empty baskets thrown back from the ship. There wasn't much of the Angel left about either of them then.
At the end of the first hour we'd got in 215 tons, and as the little numeral pendants 2-0-7 ran up to the Hercules foreyard-arm to show how many tons she had taken in, our chaps cheered. We'd beaten her by eight tons.
'I bet she cheated even then,' I heard Bob tell his chum.
We were still a ton or two to the good after the second hour, and then the 'still' was sounded in both ships, and every one went to breakfast.
You should have been there to have seen us in our coaling rigs—simply a mass of coal dust and looking like a lot of Christy Minstrels—squatting on the deck outside the gun-room, and stuffing down sardines with our dirty hands, every one talking and shouting and as merry as pigs in a sty. Even young Marchant, the new clerk, had got into a coaling rig of sorts and worked like a horse—he was so keen to beat the hated Hercules.
I gave them all a quarter of an hour to stuff themselves, and then down we clambered into the lighters again and began filling baskets—nobody, not even the Angel, shirking a job like this, when there was the chance of getting even with the Hercules.
The men came struggling down after us, long before the breakfast half-hour was finished, and we could see the Hercules' people swarming down into her lighters as well.
In all the lighters we must have had sixty tons or more in baskets before the bugler sounded the commence, the ship's band upon the booms banged out 'I'm afraid to go home in the dark,' the drum doing most of it; the men began cheering and singing the chorus, and the baskets began streaming on board again.
By the end of the fourth hour we were as hard at it as ever, but then Commander Robinson—we didn't care for him much, as he was such a bully—began bellowing at us, because the Hercules was fifteen tons ahead. We could hear her chaps cheering. The band banged out again 'Yip-i-addy,' and the Skipper, with his eyeglass tucked in his eye and his long hair straggling over his neck, walked round the upper deck singing down to the lighters, 'Go it, lads, we must beat 'em.'
Down in my lighter the men were working like demons. They looked like demons too, got up in all sorts of queer rigs, and only stopping to take a drink from the mess tins of oatmeal water which the 'Scorp'[#] lighterman ladled out for them.
[#] Natives of Gibraltar are often called 'Scorps' (Rock Scorpions).
'Look out how you're trimming your lighter, Wilson,' the Commander had bellowed.
'Aye, aye, sir,' I shouted back, but never thought what he really meant—thought he meant we weren't working hard enough.
'We can't do no more 'ardly,' Pat O'Leary, the captain of the foretop, panted. 'The foretop men be pulling their pound—anyway, sir,' and he seized basket after basket and hove them on the platform rigged half-way up the ship's side, doing the work of three men.
'Keep it up, foretop,' I shouted, shovelling for all I was worth, Bob and the Angel keeping me busy with empty baskets. Then there was a warning shout from up above, a lot of chaps cried, 'Look out, sir!' and, before I knew what had happened, I was in the water, all my chaps were in the water, the lighter had turned turtle, and twenty or more tons of good coal was sinking to the bottom of the harbour.
The first thing I thought was, 'We can't beat them now,' knew it was my fault, and felt a fool. The Commander was bellowing for me to come aboard, and Bob and the Angel, with their faces rather cleaner and bursting with laughter, were bobbing alongside me. Then O'Leary spluttered out that the 'Scorp' lighterman was missing, and we both up with our feet and dived down to find him.
The water was so thick with coal dust that we couldn't see a foot away from us, but O'Leary touched him as he was coming up for breath and brought him to the surface, pretty well full of water and frightened out of his wits, though otherwise none the worse.
I did feel a fool if you like. What had happened was that we had dug away all the coal on one side, and I had never noticed—I was so excited—that the lighter was gradually heeling over, till over she went—upside down. The band had stopped, the whole of the coaling had stopped, the men looking over the side to see if any of us had been drowned, till the Commander, hoarse with shouting, shrieked for them to carry on again, whilst we clambered up the ship's side like drowned rats, O'Leary helping the lighterman. Well, there wasn't the faintest chance of our beating the Hercules now. Every one knew it, everyone slacked off, and there was no more cheering and shouting of choruses.
It was my stupidity that had spoilt everything.
The only thing that I could give as an excuse was that I'd never been in charge of a coal lighter before, but I jolly well knew that the Commander would say, 'And I'll take care you never have charge again,' so I kept quiet whilst he stormed at me, shouting that he'd make me pay for the twenty tons. When he was out of breath, he took me, dripping with coal water, to the Captain, who was very angry and very disappointed about the Hercules part of it, but he hated the Commander bellowing at people, so wasn't as severe as he might have been. He sent me away to right the lighter, and it took us—me and the foretop men—a couple of hours to do it, fixing ropes round her under water. We shouldn't have done it even then hadn't Stevens—one of the Engineer Lieutenants and a chum of mine—switched on the current to the electric fore capstan, and we hauled her round with this.
Another loaded lighter had been brought off from the shore to make up for the coal I'd tipped into the harbour, and then we were sent to empty her, whilst the rest of the ship's company sat with their feet dangling over the side, jeering at us.
By the time we had finished we were all in a pretty bad temper, all except O'Leary, who kept up his 'pecker' till the last basket had been filled and hauled up the side. 'I ought to have told you—anyway, sir; I've coaled from lighters time enough to have known better,' he said, trying to buck me up.
I reported myself to the Commander, had another burst of angry bellowing from him, and then every one had to clean ship.
Bob and the Angel were shivering close to me, so I sent them down below to get out of their wet things, but they were up again in a couple of seconds, and could hardly speak for excitement.
'We're off to Santa Cruz. They've collared a steamer as well as those Englishmen, and we're off to give 'em beans. Isn't that ripping?'
It jolly well was, but the youngsters had had just about enough of working in their wet clothes, and were shaking with cold, so I sent them down again and went on with my job—it didn't make any difference whether hoses were turned on me or not, I was so wet. Presently, old Bill Perkins, our First Lieutenant, came limping along, his jolly old red face beaming all over. 'Never mind, Wilson, we'll beat 'em another time; lucky none of you were hurt or drowned.' He saw that I too was about blue with cold, and took my job whilst I changed into dry things.
Old Ginger came over after dinner from the Hercules. 'They're having a sing-song in the gun-room, but I thought I'd give you a look up,' he told me—'awfully sorry about the lighter business.' Of course he'd come across to cheer me, and he did too, both of us talking twenty to the dozen about Santa Cruz and the chances of our having a 'scrap.'
My chaps presently started a bit of a jamberee, old Ginger singing a couple of songs and joining in the choruses. We were just beginning to forget all about the coaling, when a signalman came down and handed Barton, the senior mid., a signal. 'Senior Midshipman, Hercules, to Ditto, Hector.—Hope none of you are any the worse for your nice little swim.'
The mids. were too angry to speak for a minute, and then the storm burst, and they called the Hercules gun-room all the names they could lay hold of, old Ginger looking very uncomfortable, and very angry too.
'Never mind, Billums,' he said. 'We've done our best to make 'em friends, and they won't be,' and then sang out, 'Gentlemen, I apologise for that signal—don't answer it—its beastly rude, and I'll cane the senior midshipman to-morrow morning.'
There was no more sing-song after that, old Ginger went back to his ship as angry as we were, and I turned in, knowing jolly well that my chaps would hate Ginger's all the more, and that Ginger beating the senior mid. would only make things worse.
'Let's hope we get mixed up in a 'scrap' or two out in Santa Cruz,' Ginger had said as he went away, and I knew that that was about the only thing that would do the trick and make them friends.
That was a bad day's work for me. I'd shown myself a fool, the Commander wouldn't forget my carelessness for months, and the Skipper would feel he couldn't trust me. That made me want to kick myself.
CHAPTER II
A Revolution Imminent
Written by Sub-Lieutenant William Wilson, R.N.
Early next morning, just as the sun was lighting up the signal station at the top of the Rock, we and the Hercules slipped from our buoys and shoved off into the Atlantic, the Hercules two cables astern of us.
We rounded Tarifa Lighthouse; the jolly old Rock, sticking up like an old tooth, was hidden by the Spanish mountains; we saw the white walls of Tangier under the snow-capped Atlas mountains, on the African side, and then we began to tumble about merrily in the open Atlantic. The Hector wasn't still for a minute at a time, and my mids. had something else to think about than the latest Hercules gun-room insult. Most of them felt pretty 'chippy,' though of course it had nothing to do with us rolling and pitching. Rather not! None of them were seasick, perfectly absurd! They were only a little out of sorts; didn't want any breakfast, or got rid of what they did eat pretty rapidly; much preferred lying down in a corner inside the battery screen, out of the wind, and took a deal of 'rousting' out of it before they'd do their job. For all that, they'd have been awfully angry if any one had suggested that they were seasick. The gun-room messman had given us the strongest of kippers for breakfast that morning—this was his idea of a joke—and as we couldn't keep a single scuttle open, and there was practically no ventilation in the gun-room, you can imagine that you could almost cut the atmosphere with a knife.
The Hector and the Hercules
Pearson, the A.P., the engineer sub, Raynor, and I were alone in our glory when we began tackling the messman's kippers; but soon the mids. came along, and it was worth a fortune to watch them put their heads inside the gun-room, take a 'sniff,' and go away again. Presently Bob and the Angel came dashing down, and we three chuckled as they rushed in, got a breath of it, stopped dead in their tracks, pretended they didn't mind, and sat down as near the door as they could get. We watched them 'peck' a bit, Bob's freckles showed up more than ever, the Angel looked perfectly green, and they were both as silent as mummies.
The ship gave a big roll to starboard, a green sea slapped over the glass scuttles and darkened the whole gun-room; there was a crash of crockery smashing in the pantry; Bob and the Angel grabbed their plates, back the old Hector tumbled to port; Bob's coffee-cup slid gracefully into his lap—he could stick to it no longer—and rushed away.
The Angel lasted another lurch, but that finished him.
'Afraid I—caught—cold—in the water—yesterday—afraid Bob did too—I'm not—very hungry—I'll see what's the matter with Bob,' he gulped, swallowing every word; and, clapping his hand over his mouth, he disappeared after his chum.
More than half the mids. never ventured further than the gun-room flat, where they caught the first whiff of kipper, and those who did, didn't stay long.
'We'd get a fine mess surplus if they'd only keep like it,' the A.P. grinned; 'but, confound them, they won't.'
'They'd enjoy an hour down in the engine-room now. Wouldn't they?' Raynor chuckled.
Of course they were as right as a trivet in a couple of days, and you may bet that they made up for those lost meals.
Every one on board expected that there might be a bit of a scrap when we got across to Santa Cruz, and you can guess how we got hold of Brassey's Naval Annual and Jane's Fighting Ships to see if Santa Cruz had any ships good enough to give us a show.
They hadn't; that was the worst of it. Three or four miserable out-of-date cruisers, half-a-dozen gunboats, and a couple of torpedo boats built in the year one. There certainly was a cruiser building for them at Newcastle, a ship named La Buena Presidente, a big monster like our latest cruisers, and even bigger and more powerful than the Hector herself; but Raynor had seen her in the Tyne since she was launched, knew all about her, and was certain that she couldn't be ready inside six months.
'What a pity they didn't wait till they'd got her!' Bob said, with his mouth open. And that was about what we all thought.
Still, though there wasn't likely to be any sport with their wretched Navy, we might have to bombard a fort or two, which would be good enough business; and, more exciting even than that, we might have to send a landing-party ashore.
We didn't waste much time all these eight days we were at sea, the Commander, Bill Perkins, and Montague, the Gunnery Lieutenant, slapping round, from morning to night for all they were worth. The marines, three companies of seamen, two field-guns' and two maxim-guns' crews, and a stretcher party of stokers were told off to land. Their leather gear, haversacks, water-bottles, and rolled-up blankets were all got ready, hung over their rifles in the racks, and, morning and evening, we made an evolution of 'falling in' on the quarterdeck and fo'c'stle, and getting on our gear in double quick time.
Ten of my sixteen mids. were told off to land, and were as happy as fleas in a blanket, fitting their leather gear and sharpening their dirks all day long, and thinking about what they'd do when they got ashore half the night.
Marchant, the young clerk—he'd only just joined the Navy, and this was his first ship—was told off to land as 'Old Tin Eye's' secretary.
He was being pretty well bullied and knocked into shape by the mids., and made to feel what a hopeless worm he was; but now there were six of them who'd have given their heads to change places with him, and he absolutely swelled with pride and importance.
Three days after leaving Gib. the weather became gloriously warm, the sea simply like a sheet of glittering glass, the sun glaring on it all day long. It was grand to be alive, and we all—officers and men alike—went into training, and were doubled round and round, morning and evening, till the sweat rolled off us. Every evening, too, the parallel bars and the horizontal bar were rigged on the quarterdeck, and the ward-room fellows and we gun-room people did gymnastics for an hour or so, finishing up with a follow-my-leader round the battery till we nearly dropped. On board the Hercules they were doing gymnastics and the new Swedish drill, on the fo'c'stle, the whole day long. But the sight of all was the fat blue marine subaltern—the Forlorn Hope, we called him—doubling up and down the quarterdeck, on his own, to work off his fat, so that he could march properly when he landed—his cheeks flopping from side to side, and running with perspiration. I'm sure you would have died of laughing, especially when his opposite number—the Shadow—the awfully thin red marine subaltern, doubled round after him, trying to work up an appetite, and put on more weight. It was the terribly earnest faces they shipped that made one laugh. When you come to think of it, the whole thing was really jolly odd. Here were these two great grey ships, with their long grim 9.2's and 7.5's, and their twelve hundred odd men, pounding steadily along for eight days and nights, to a country hardly any one of us had heard of before, and every one on board both of them was digging out to make himself and them as fit as 'paint,' in case there was a job for us when we did get there.
The Commander even stopped bellowing at people, and brimmed over with good temper.
We had two great heroes on board—at any rate the mids. thought they were—one of the lieutenants—Bigge—who had been with Sir Edward Seymour in the Relief of Pekin force, and Mr. Bostock, the Gunner, who had been through the siege of Ladysmith during the Boer War.
Some one told the story how five Chinamen had attacked Bigge whilst he was trying to blow in a gate or something like that, and how he settled the whole lot of them with his revolver. Whether it was true or not—and I believe it was—the mids. simply hung round him now, and tried to get him to tell them some of his experiences. They looked at the little bit of yellow and red ribbon on his monkey-jacket, and simply longed for a chance to earn something like it, and have a bit of ribbon to stick on their chests. Although they never could get him to talk about his show, Mr. Bostock would talk about the siege of Ladysmith, and how the naval brigade helped the sappers, that awful morning on the crest of Wagon Hill—would talk as long as they'd like to listen.
He'd sit smoking ship's tobacco in his cabin—it hadn't any scuttle or ventilation whatever of any account, so you can have an idea what the smell was like—and the mids. would crowd in, those who couldn't do so squeezing into the doorway, and listen by the hour. Nothing else but war was talked about from morning to night.
Well, on the ninth day out from Gibraltar, we sighted Prince Rupert's Island, ran in through the northern channel, and anchored two miles off Princes Town in a great wide bay, with the dark mountains of Santa Cruz just showing up on the horizon away to the west. Somewhere up among them old Gerald was teaching his natives to play cricket.
The Skipper went ashore immediately in the picketboat, to call on the Governor and get news and fresh orders; so you can guess how excited we all were when she was seen coming tearing off again, and the Skipper ran up the accommodation ladder. I believe every officer in the ship was up on the quarterdeck to hear the news, and you can just imagine what we felt like when we saw that the Skipper had shipped a long face, and when he shook his head at us and went down below.
In three minutes we knew the worst—it was all over the ship. The Englishmen and the English steamer had been released; old Canilla, the President, had apologised handsomely, and all was peace. Wasn't it sickening?
'Ain't it a bally shame,' Montague, the Gunnery Lieutenant, said, 'stoppin' our gun-layers' test at Gib., just as we were in the thick of it; bringin' us lolloppin' along here, and nothin' for us to do when we get here—no landin' party, no nothin'.' And he sent word down to Mr. Bostock to re-stow and pack up all the leather gear and water-bottles.
'It do take the 'eart out of one,' Mr. Bostock told the sympathising mids., 'not a blooming chawnce to let off so much as a single ball cartridge,' and he went below to see that none of his landing party gear was missing.
The Governor himself came off to return the Skipper's call, and brought off some of the shore chaps with a challenge to play us at football, hockey, tennis, cricket, polo, or anything and everything we jolly well liked.
That bucked us all up a bit, and Clegg, our Surgeon—a great, tall chap and a grand cricketer—who ran the sports on board, sent for me to fix up things. Between us we fixed enough matches to last the first ten days.
'Can't play you at polo,' we told them, 'we've only got one chap who's ever played in his life.'
'Well, I'll tell you what we'll do,' one of them said, 'we'll lend you ponies to practise for the match, and if you'll lend us one of your boats, we'll practise in her, and pull a race against you in ten days' time. What d'you say to that? That'll even up matters a bit.'
'Let's get this little lot finished first,' we said, laughing.
They were a sporting crowd. This was a Tuesday. On Wednesday we were to play Princes' Town at rugby—it made me sweat only to think of it, although this was what they called their winter—whilst the Hercules was to play the Country Club. On Thursday we were to change rounds, and on Friday the two ships were to play the whole of Prince Rupert's Island.
On Saturday they thought we might have a cricket match—if it wasn't too cold! 'Right you are,' we said, 'if there's anything left of us—though we shall probably be melted by that time.'
There were dances every night, and picnics and tennis parties for those who weren't playing anything else.
'We're going to have a fizzing time, Wilson, after all,' Dr. Clegg said, as we watched them go ashore, after having had no end of a job to get their boat alongside, because there was such a crowd of native boats swarming round the foot of the ladder, loaded down to the gunwales with bananas, oranges, melons, and things like that, the buck niggers on board them quarrelling, and squealing, and laughing, dodging the lumps of coal the side boys threw to make them keep their boats away from the gangway.
Most of the boats had their stern-sheets weighted down with black ladies, dressed in white calico skirts and coloured blouses, trying to look dignified and squealing all the time, holding up bits of paper whenever they caught sight of an officer, and singing out, 'Mister Officah, I vash your clo's—I hab de letter from naval officah—I good vasher-lady, you tell quatamasta, let me aboard—all de rest only black trash.'
They were allowed on board presently, and down into the gun-room flat they swarmed—old ones, young ones, fat ones, and thin ones, all trying to get our washing to take ashore. 'Me Betsy Jones, me vash for Prince George, sah! I know Prince George when he so high, sah! Betsy good vasher-lady, you give me your vashing.' They were all round the 'Angel.' 'Ah! bless your pretty heart, my deah, you give your vashing to Matilda Ann; I vash for Prince George and for Admiral Keppel—verrah nice man Admiral Keppel.' He was pulled from one to the other, and when he escaped into the gun-room they followed him. He was jolly glad to hear the picketboat called away and escape.
It was all very well to arrange matches; but a wretched collier came creeping into the bay that very afternoon with three thousand tons of Welsh coal for the Hercules and ourselves, and, instead of playing football, we jolly well had to empty her between us. There was no going ashore for any one except the paymasters, and for two whole days we were busy. The heat of it and the dirt of it were positively beastly. It took us twenty-two solid hours to get in 1400 tons, because the men couldn't work well in that heat. It was bad enough on deck, but down in the collier and down below in our own bunkers the heat was simply terrific.
We felt like bits of chewed string when we did go ashore on the third day to play the combined match, and chewed string wasn't in it after we'd been playing ten minutes. I don't think that we could have possibly held our own, but that game never ended. We were waiting for the 'Angel' to get back his breath after being 'winded,' and were wiping the sweat out of our eyes, when a marine orderly came running on to the ground with orders from the Skipper for us to return on board at once.
We stuck the 'Angel' on his feet, told the other chaps what had happened, bolted for our coats, and were off through the town to the Governor's steps as fast as we could go, the marine orderly puffing behind us and the nigger boys, thinking we were running away from the Prince Rupert's team, shouting rude things after us.
Boats were waiting there, the ward-room and gun-room messmen came along, followed by strings of niggers carrying fruit and live fowls and turkeys—everything was bundled down into the stern-sheets—there was no time for ceremony—and we were only waiting for Perkins, the First Lieutenant, who was lame and couldn't run. He'd being doing touch judge.
Cousin Bob was the midshipman of the boat—the second barge. 'What's up?' I asked him. 'Somebody's died—over in Santa Cruz—and we're ordered off to Los Angelos at once. We're to attend the funeral or something like that.'
'Funeral!' we groaned; 'fancy spoiling a football match for a funeral,' and the 'Angel,' who'd recovered by now, squeaked out that he'd already engaged most of his partners for the dances—'ripping fine girls, too, you chaps.'
Perkins came hobbling along, his red face redder than ever, hustled his way through the laughing, jostling crowd of niggers at the top of the steps, and jumped down among us, mopping his face. 'All in the day's work, lads; shove off, I'm in the boat.'
'Hi, Bill!' some of the ward-room people sang out, 'some one wants you,' and they pointed to where an enormously stout black lady was elbowing her way to the front.
'Hi, Massa Perkins! Hi, Massa Perkins! How d'ye do, Massa Perkins—me Arabella de Montmorency—you sabby Arabella—Arabella see your deah red face—vash for you in de flagship—de Cleopatra—you owe Arabella three shillin' and tuppence—you pay Arabella—vat for you no pay Arabella—Arabella vash for you when you midshipman in de Cleopatra.'
'All right, old girl,' Perkins sang out, waving his stick cheerily at her, 'I sabby you, you come aboard, by an' by, when we come back—give you some ship's baccy—come aboard the Hector.'
'Shove off,' he told Bob, and off we pulled, the crew grinning from ear to ear, and the niggers all cackling with laughter, dancing about and singing out, 'Three cheers for the red, white, and blue,' 'Old England for ebber,' and Mrs. Arabella's voice following us, 'I mak' de prayer to de good Lo'd for Massa Perkins—Him keepa Massa Perkins from harm—Arabella want de three shillin' and tuppence.'
'You've got some nice friends, Bill,' the ward-room officers chaffed him.
The cable was already clanking in through the hawse-pipe as we got aboard, and in half an hour the Hercules was following us out through the eastern passage, and we headed across for the mainland and Santa Cruz.
It was my morning watch next morning (from four to eight), and it was a grand sight to see the sun rise behind us, flooding the calm sea with red and orange colours, whilst the little wisps of clouds which hung about the sides of the fierce-looking mountains of Santa Cruz, in front of us, kept on changing from gold to pink and from pink to orange.
O'Leary was the quarter-master of the watch, and I saw the old chap looking at them. He shook his head at me, 'Better than an "oleo"—that—sir. That's God's own picture.'
Even the stokers who'd just come off watch and were cooling themselves, down on the fo'c'stle below us, stood watching the grand sight, and then, down at the foot of the mountains, a long white line showed up.
'That's the breakwater at Los Angelos,' fat little Carlton, our navigator, told me.
As we forged along through the oily, glistening sea, and got closer, we could see the masts and funnels and fighting-tops of the little Navy of Santa Cruz sheltering behind it, all tinged with the sunrise; and the hundreds of windows in the lighthouse and the houses clustered at the foot of the mountains were all glowing as if they were on fire. If old Gerald had heard we were coming, it was quite likely that he'd come down from the estate and might be snoring on his back behind one of them, snoring like a good 'un and dreaming about the last football match he'd played in.
Then high up the side of the dark mountains a ball of white smoke shot out, hung there in the still air for a second or two, and melted away, changing colour as it disappeared.
'That's the sunrise gun, sir, from one of their forts, sir. Them Dagos be half an hour adrift, I'm blowed if they ain't,' O'Leary said.
The bridge was crowding up now, for the Skipper and the Commander and a host of mids. had come along to bring the ships to anchor.
'Pretty sight that,' the Skipper grunted, squinting through his eyeglass.
'Like pink icing on a wedding cake, sir,' the Commander added, thinking he'd said something funny.
'Yes, sir; beautiful, sir,' chipped in the navigator, really wondering what the Skipper was referring to, but very eager to agree with him—he would have licked his boots if he thought the Skipper would like it.
'Bring ship to an anchor,' snapped out the Skipper, and the boat's'n's mates piped, 'Watch, bring ship to an anchor—duty-men to their stations—away second barges.'
The anchoring pendants were run up to our masthead—the answering pendant on board the Hercules got to her masthead almost as soon—and we moved slower and slower in towards the breakwater.
The navigator reported, 'On our bearings, sir;' the Skipper nodded to the Commander, who bellowed down to the fo'c'stle, 'Let go;' the signalman hauled down the pendants; the starboard anchor splashed into the sea, and the cable began rattling out through the hawse-pipes.
Down went the pendant aboard the Hercules, and her anchor splashed behind us.
'Full speed astern both,' snapped the Skipper to the man at the engine-room telegraph and the water churned up under our stern.
'Going astern, sir,' sang out the leadsman, with an eye on the water.
'Stop engines,' the Skipper snapped again, and the old Hector was once more at anchor.
At eight o'clock we saluted the Santa Cruz flag; the fort, up in the clouds, which had fired the sunrise gun, returned it after a while, and the swarthy little port doctor came out from behind the breakwater, in a fussy little steam-launch, to see if we had any infectious diseases on board, and as we hadn't, to give us 'pratigue'—take us out of quarantine.
After a lot of silly rot, he bowed and scraped himself on board, said 'bueno, bueno,' about a hundred times, bowed and scraped himself down the ladder into his boat, and went fussing back behind the breakwater again.
He'd brought some letters from our Minister at Santa Cruz, and it turned out that it was the President's wife who had died. She was to be buried next day, so we were a trifle early.
'We might have finished that "footer" match after all,' I heard the Angel grumble to Cousin Bob.
I rather hoped that Gerald would have written, but he hadn't—he was a terrible hand at writing letters.
The Skipper—Old Tin Eye—went ashore to call on the Military Governor, who returned his call almost before he could get back.
He was a long, lean, hollow-cheeked Spanish kind of a chap, in a white uniform and marvellous hat with green and yellow plumes, his chest covered with medals and orders—a grand-looking old fighting-cock. He brought with him his two A.D.C.'s—one of them as black as your hat, and the other fat and short, with an enormous curved sabre ten sizes too big for him and gilt spurs so long that he could hardly get down the ladders, even by walking sideways. He looked just like a pantomime soldier.
He brought his black pal down to the gun-room to leave the Governor's cards, and, as he could speak a little English, we got on all right.
I noticed him looking at me rather curiously, and at last he said, 'You know Señor Geraldio Wilson?'
'Old Gerald! he's my brother. Why?' I asked.
'You have the same,' and he pointed to his face and hair. Old Gerald has the same yellowish hair and grey eyes that I have.
Funny that he'd spotted me, wasn't it, for we never thought each other much alike?
'You know Gerald?' I asked him.
'All peoples know Señor Geraldio,' he replied, very courteously, but with an expression on his face as if he wasn't going to say any more.
We took them on deck, and whilst their boat was being brought alongside, and they were waiting for the Governor to come up from the Captain's cabin, they were awfully keen on the after 9.2 gun.
'Make shoot many kilometres?' the fat chap asked.
'About thirty,' I told him, doing a rough calculation in my head, and he told his black pal, and they jerked their thumbs towards the mountains. It didn't take much brains to guess that they were wondering whether we could shell the city of Santa Cruz itself. They looked at that gun jolly respectfully after that.
Later on that day, we learnt a lot about local politics from two English merchants, who came off to call and feel English 'ground'—as they expressed it—under their feet again. They looked jolly cool in their white clothes and pith sun-helmets.
'It's a mighty change from a week ago,' they said. 'All the Europeans and Americans here at Los Angelos and up in Santa Cruz were practically prisoners, some had actually been thrown into San Sebastian—the old fort of Santa Cruz—and we were all expecting notice to quit the country, when they heard that you were coming along, apologised to the chaps in San Sebastian, and let the rest of us along. We're glad to see you, you bet we are, for there's trouble coming.'
'What? Where?' we asked, frightfully keen to know, all the mids. crowding round and keeping as silent as mice.
'Revolution! that's what's coming. It's as certain as we're sitting here. Old Canilla, the President, is hated everywhere, except in his own province of Santa Cruz and the city itself. The country will revolt directly the Vice-President—de Costa—gives the word. It's been coming for years, but Mrs. President, the old lady who's to be buried to-morrow, was the Vice-President's sister, and, though they hate each other like poison, she kept the peace between her husband and her brother. 'Every one called her La Buena Presidente, and now she's gone'—they shrugged their shoulders—'we don't know what will happen. The very day La Buena Presidente, poor old lady, died, General Angostina was shot in the back—he was the most popular general in the country and backed the de Costas—and no attempt has been made to arrest his assassins, who boast about it at the Military Club. In fact, the paper this morning says that one has been promoted for "services to his country."'
'La Buena Presidente?' the A.P. sang out; 'that's the name of the new cruiser building for them at Newcastle.'
'Named after her,' one of them said. 'She's big enough to sink the whole of the rest of their fleet, and that's where the trouble comes in. The fleet is loyal to the President just now, but he's in a terrible funk lest the crew he is sending to England to bring her here alter their minds. If they do, they can make cat's-meat of the rest, and then old Canilla's up a tree, for he can't scotch a revolution in the provinces to north and south of him, unless he holds command of the sea and prevents them joining forces.
'When's this revolution to start?' we asked rather chaffingly.
'To-morrow at 1.25 sharp. That's the official time for the funeral service to end, and till then Canilla and de Costa will be friends. To-morrow night there won't be a single friend of the Vice-President in Santa Cruz, unless he's shot or in San Sebastian. De Costa himself won't be in Santa Cruz either, unless he's shot or arrested as he leaves the cathedral. He'll be off to his own province of Leon. Now you can guess why we're glad to see you.'
'I'm jolly glad we didn't stay to finish that footer match,' the Angel sang out, as they took their leave. 'We're going to have some jolly fun, ain't we, Bob?'
'D'you know a chap called Gerald Wilson, a brother of mine?' I asked one of them, a very fat chap, whose name was Macdonald. 'A chap with yellow hair something like mine and a jaw like an ox.'
'Know him!' he answered quickly; ''pon my word, I've been looking at you and wondering whom you were like. Why, you're as like as two peas, though he's a bit broader and taller.'
'Do we know Gerald Wilson? Don Geraldio? Why, my dear chap, every one knows your brother,' the other Englishman joined in. 'He's the maddest chap in the country, and if our Minister doesn't get him out of it pretty quickly, he'll get his throat cut.'
'Or be a general in the revolutionary army,' Macdonald added. 'He's right "in" with the de Costas.'
Well, that was exciting if you like—to me, but the mater would be awfully upset if she knew—poor old mater.
'Where's he now?' I asked excitedly. 'I've not seen him for five years.'
'Up in Santa Cruz, he lives at the European Club,' Macdonald answered. Then an idea struck him, and he continued, 'Some of your people are going up to the funeral. If you like to go, I'll take you; get ashore to-morrow morning by 6.30. I'm driving up. The funeral will be worth seeing, even if you hadn't your brother up there. I'll find him for you.'
'Thank you very much, I'll try and get leave,' I told him, as he went down into his boat.
'You can bring a couple of your midshipmen if you like,' he shouted up.
I was so excited I hardly knew what to think or do, it was so worrying about Gerald, from the mater's point of view, and so splendid from mine.
To-morrow was my day 'off,' the Commander gave me leave, the two mids. were, of course, the Angel and Cousin Bob, and they were too excited to do anything else but walk up and down the quarterdeck with their eyes glued on the mountains, where Santa Cruz lay, in the clouds, five thousand feet above them.
CHAPTER III
The Revolution breaks out
Written by Sub-Lieutenant William Wilson, R.N.
A whole crowd of us from the Hector and the Hercules, all bound for Santa Cruz, went ashore at six o'clock next morning. On our way inshore, after we'd pulled round the head of the breakwater, we had a good view of the Santa Cruz ships. Rotters they all looked, slovenly kept, nothing seamanlike or shipshape about them, with their 'wash clothes' hung about the rigging and even over the quarterdeck railings—anyhow.
And a funny-looking crowd of soldiers they had too, falling in on the wharf where we landed, ready to receive the two Skippers when they came ashore—in uniform—to attend the funeral on duty. They were all South American natives or full-blooded niggers, half of them bare-footed, none of them dressed alike. Some had hats like the French army kepi, others, broad-brimmed felt or straw hats; their shirts were of every colour under the sun, and a pair of loose dirty cotton trousers seemed to be about the only uniform they had. They all had rifles—of sorts—a bayonet, and a leathern belt hanging loose over their hips to support a cartridge pouch, but many had lost their bayonet frogs and scabbards, and simply stuck the naked bayonet inside the belt.
My chum with the gilt spurs and enormous sabre seemed to be bossing the show, and was too busy trying to get the men into something like order to notice me.
We all pushed our way along through a not at all friendly mob of people, Bob and the Angel sticking to me like leeches. Then we lost the rest of our people, and felt pretty lost ourselves till a grinning native caught hold of my sleeve.
'Buenos! Señor! You Señor Wilson? Señor Macdonald send me. I his boy.'
We were jolly glad to find any one who would take us to him.
'How did you find me in the crowd?' I asked him.
'Señor Macdonald say you like Señor Geraldio. All peoples know Señor Geraldio.'
'Blowed for a yarn,' I thought. 'Old Gerald wouldn't be very flattered.'
We stepped out briskly enough then, and you ought to have seen the Angel strutting along in the middle of the road, in a blue suit and straw hat, the trousers beautifully creased, the latest thing in ties round his neck, the most startling thing in socks showing under his turned-up trousers, looking as if he was off to a tea-party in Southsea. Even the niggers smiled at him and got out of his way. We came upon Macdonald in a minute or two, waiting for us at a corner, with a carriage and six grand-looking mules—the carriage was like a big two-wheeled governess cart with an awning over it, and he was so enormous that he almost filled it.
In we jumped, the two mids. managed to squeeze themselves alongside the native driver, our guide kicked the mules in the stomach, one after the other, just to wake them up; the driver cracked his whip, and away we went bump-terappity along the bumpy road, the bells on the harness jingling like fun.
We clattered along past rows and rows of red mud cottages, dogs flying out at us from every door, and giving the two mids. a grand time with the whip, pack mules tied up to the door-posts frisking about and kicking up their heels as we went past, and long-legged fowls scattering like smoke in front of us.
'You're extraordinarily like your brother, now you're in plain clothes,' Mr. Macdonald muttered, with his mouth full—for he'd started on the hampers already.
'Jolly proud of it,' I answered, but he only made a face and shrugged his shoulders.
We started climbing soon after, and the mules had a pretty hard time of it for the next three hours, zigzagging up the most appalling road, panting and grunting. The mids. and I walked the steepest parts, but neither the driver nor Mr. Macdonald budged from their seats. The higher we got the more cheerful we were. It was grand looking down at Puerta and the sea, with the Hector and Hercules like toy ships lying inside the breakwater, but Mr. Macdonald did not let us stop anywhere for more than a minute at a time, because there was a whole line of jangling mule carriages coming up after us, and he didn't want to be overtaken. The mids. didn't either, for there were four Hercules mids. in the one next behind us, and they were not going to be beaten by them if they could help it.
Every now and again, at the corners where the road zig-zagged, we came across thirty or forty native soldiers, evidently guarding the way.
'That looks as if they were expecting trouble,' Mr. Macdonald told me. 'It's most unusual. D'you see the colours they have in their hats?'
Nearly all of them had a patch of yellow and green stripes sewn on.
'I've never seen the regular troops wearing them,' he said. 'Did you notice that the stripes were vertical! That means that they are President's men. The de Costa's colours are black and green, but the stripes are worn horizontally, and of course they aren't allowed to wear them.'
He shook his head very ominously.
'Things are going to hum to-day. You'd have been wiser to stay on board. You're too like your brother.'
You can guess that this only made it more jolly exciting.
Every now and then we met long trains of mules or donkeys, with huge bundles on their backs, pacing wearily down the road.
'They're carrying rubber or cocoa down to Los Angelos,' Mr. Macdonald said. 'The President makes them bring all their rubber through Los Angelos; that's one of the grievances they have against him.'
Jolly interesting everything was, and once the men with one long mule train took off their big hats, bowing and saying, 'buenos.'
'They're doing it to you, not to me,' Mr. Macdonald said. 'They're from Paquintos, close to your brother's estate, and think you are he.'
It was a jolly funny feeling to land at this out-of-the-way spot and find so many people appear to know me; don't you think it was?
By this time we had left the shade of the tropical trees below us, and the road and the side of the mountain were simply bare rock—the heat terrific. At half-past ten we were at the top, and got our first glimpse of Santa Cruz spread out in a hollow beneath us, with mountain ridges all round it. Our mules roused themselves into a trot, and we slung along at a good rate, kicking up a cloud of dust. The Hercules mids. had been gradually drawing closer, and now they came along at a gallop, and would have passed us, singing out rude remarks, but the Angel seized the whip and beat our poor brutes into a gallop too, and the teams simply tore along, side by side, the drivers having all they could do to keep on the road. The two carriages bounced along close together, I thought the wheels would lock every other second, and the mids. were hitting at each other with their sticks and shouting.
Luckily we didn't meet anything, but I saw that, just ahead, the road narrowed, and that we couldn't possibly get through there side by side.
'Let them go ahead,' I shouted, and leant over to help the driver pull in the team, but then one of the Hercules mids. sang out, 'Who upset the coal lighter?' the others shouted, 'The rotten Hectors!'—and that made me as mad as a hatter. I didn't care whether we all went to glory or not so long as we beat them—after that.
'Pull up, you fools!' Mr. Macdonald shouted, but the mules were quite out of hand.
We came to the narrow part, the leading mules bumped into each other, then the others, till the wheelers were touching; our axles bumped once or twice, there was a lurch and a crash, the other carriage toppled over on to the bank, the wheeler mules were on their backs, and the mids. shot out head over heels as we flew past, the Angel and Bob cheering wildly.
Before we were out of sight we saw the four mids. and the driver on their feet again, trying to right the carriage, so I knew they weren't hurt.
Mr. Macdonald simply wagged his head from side to side. 'It was my weight brought us through—you'd have upset but for me.'
I do actually believe he enjoyed it.
We were in the city itself by now, and the mules had steadied down on the rough stone streets crowded with people on foot or riding horses or mules. There were soldiers at every corner—quite smart chaps these—and they all had the vertical green and yellow stripes in their helmets or hats. The same colours, hoisted with the stripes vertical, hung at half-mast from nearly every house, and the few women, we saw, had the same colours too.
'There are some of de Costa's people,' Mr. Macdonald sung out, as we passed a group of sunburnt men outside a café. I looked, and saw that they had patches of green and black stripes worn horizontally.
'They call the two parties the Verticals and Horizontals,' Mr. Macdonald told me. 'Those are countrymen; you can see that by their rig.'
'Hi!' he sung out; 'look up there, up to the left, that's San Sebastian, where our chaps were put in "chokey" a fortnight ago.'
It was a crumbling old fort perched on a rocky hill just above the big building, and we three looked at it jolly keenly.
Then we got into the better part of the town, dazzling big white houses with gratings in front of every window, and women peering out from behind the curtains in most of them. Everywhere were soldiers, and the yellow and green flags drooping at half-mast.
Next we drove through a great open place, white with dust and dazzling in the sun, with a grand old weather-beaten cathedral on one side, and on the other some public garden with palms and huge tropical ferns. We had to draw up to let a regiment march into the square, and then we wedged our way out of it, into a side street, turned a corner, and stopped in front of a big door with strong iron gates, sentries with fixed bayonets on each side of it, and a whole jumble of French, English, German, American, and Dutch ensigns hanging down from a flagstaff above it. There was a wizened little black chap leaning up against the wall; he started when he saw me, and let his cigarette drop out of his mouth. He was an ugly-looking little beast.
'The European Club,' Mr. Macdonald said. 'Out you jump. I bet your brother's in here.'
We followed him into a cool courtyard with a splashing fountain in the middle of it, and through the open French windows I heard the click of billiard balls—a jolly homely sound—and, looking in, there was Gerald, with his coat off, watching the other chap making his stroke, his jolly old lion head with the long yellow hair brushed back and his grand square jaw—not a bit like me.
He didn't see me as I went in and touched him on the back. 'Hello, Gerald!'
'Hello, Billums! What the dickens are you doing here? How's the mater? Well played, Arnstein (this to his opponent). Wait till I've "knocked" him. Won't be a second.'
He won quite easily, and then he stood us all lunch at the Club. I did my best to pump him about the revolution, but he kicked me hard under the table, so I didn't say any more about it. The mids. had a grand time, hardly uttered a word, but simply ate steadily through course after course, not even the excitement of hearing regiments of infantry tramping past every now and again, with their bands playing, putting them off their feed.
'Come along,' Gerald said presently, 'I've got a window from which we can see everything; there'll be room for all of you.'
But Mr. Macdonald wasn't coming, so we left him.
'Be here by three o'clock,' he said, 'not a minute later, and I'll drive you back.'
As we left the gate I noticed that the sentries looked rather puzzled at Gerald and myself.
'I couldn't say anything in there,' Gerald began, when we'd got out into the crowded street; 'you never know who may be listening. We're going to have a revolution, and I'm rather mixed up in it. You saw that little plain-clothes chap at the gate, he's one of the President's secret police, and has been shadowing me for the last four days.'
I had seen him, the one who'd been so startled when I went in.
'Don't you carry a revolver or anything?' I asked nervously.
'My dear old Billums, I've never thought of it.'
I bothered him to get one in case anything happened.
'All right, old chap, I'll think about it.'
There was too great a crush in the narrow streets to do much talking, and we had a lot of trouble to push our way along. There were quite a lot of people wearing the horizontal black and green stripes in these streets, and you could tell they were strangers by their weird-looking clothes and by the way they flocked along with their eyes and mouths open.
We presently passed a lot of officers standing outside a doorway.
'That's the Officers' Club,' Gerald told me, as he took his hat off, and they all clicked their heels and saluted, looking from Gerald to myself with that same puzzled look—they seemed very unfriendly. We waited a minute or two to let a battery of field artillery rumble past—the guns were 'horsed' with mules—turned down another side street, and entered a cool courtyard with more fountains splashing. There were any number of people in it; they nearly all had black and green rosettes with horizontal stripes, and all bowed very cordially to Gerald. He spoke to several, looked as if he had heard bad news, and took us into the back of the Hotel de L'Europe, up some narrow wooden stairs, opened a door on a narrow landing, and there we were in a corner room with a large French window opening on to an iron balcony and overlooking the great square. The cathedral tower, with its arched entrance and broad steps, wasn't fifty yards away.
'You'll get a grand view here—it's cool too—you'd get sunstroke outside—stay where you are—I'll be back presently—I've just had some important news,' Gerald jerked out, and left us to watch the people and the soldiers pouring into the square—'Plaza' every one called it. These soldiers were jolly smart-looking chaps, well dressed and well set up, very different to those we had seen at Los Angelos. They all had the vertical green and yellow stripes in their white helmets, and even we could see that they were pretty rough in dealing with the people. We saw several of the ward-room fellows hunting about for a good place to see the procession, and the two Skippers drove up to the cathedral, in uniform, the soldiers making a way for their carriage, and driving the people back by prodding them in the stomach with the butt-ends of their rifles.
Gerald came in again looking worried.
'Everything all right?' I asked.
He nodded, and sat down in a corner.
'The soldiers don't treat the people very gently,' I said, and he told me that they were all Presidential troops in the city that day, and that there was no love lost between them and the country people, who had poured into the city to pay respect to the President's wife. 'If you look closely, you'll see that a great many of these are wearing the badge of the de Costas—the horizontal green and black stripes.'
'I heard to-day,' he went on, 'that the President's wife, just before she died, made her brother, de Costa, and her husband, José Canilla, shake hands and promise to keep the peace after she was gone.'
'Will they?' Bob asked, with his mouth open.
He only smiled and shrugged his shoulders—quite like a Spaniard. 'They called her La Buena Presidente, and she was a good old lady and kept the peace, but she's kept back progress and reform for years. There's no such thing as freedom in the country. There will soon be a change now.'
'They named that ship which Armstrong's building after her, I suppose?' I asked him, and he nodded.
I tried to pump him about her, but he'd tell me nothing, except that she would be ready very soon, and was strong enough to blow the rest of the Santa Cruz Navy out of the water. I knew that well enough.
I wanted to ask him if there was any chance of her new crew favouring the Vice-President's party—as Mr. Macdonald had suggested—and a whole lot of other things, but a frightful din started in the 'Plaza.'
Bob, pointing down below, yelled for us to look, and we saw a drunken-looking countryman waving his broad-brimmed felt hat, with an enormous black and green rosette fastened to it, in the face of one of the officers with the troops. He tried to take no notice of it, but in a second or two lost his temper, seized the rosette, tore it off, threw it on the ground, and stamped it into the white dust with his patent-leather boots.
There was a roar of anger at this, booing and hissing from people crowding in the windows of a house close by, and the mob beneath us began pushing and shouting; knives were drawn, the few women there began screaming, and the soldiers, standing in line, turned round to drive the people back. Some cavalry came galloping up, and began hitting at the people with the flat of their swords. One of them was pulled off his horse and disappeared in the struggle, people were pressing in from all sides of the Plaza, and things began to look jolly ugly, when we heard a pistol fired, and a very smart-looking young cavalry officer, who was trying to get his men together, reeled in his saddle and fell on the ground, his fiery little horse plunging away down the swaying lines of soldiers.
Women screamed, every one stopped struggling and drew back, leaving him lying there, by himself, all doubled up in a heap, in the dust, blood trickling from his mouth. Almost before we'd realised what had happened, a young priest, in black cassock, dashed across from the cathedral steps, knelt down, and lifted the officer's head on his knee. We saw him press a little black crucifix to his lips, but it was too late, the poor chap was as dead as a door-nail.
Then there was another wild burst of shouting and hooting from the mob and from the people at the windows.
'They've got the man who fired the shot,' Bob squeaked—he was so excited—and we could see a lot of soldiers struggling with a very tall man. He wrested himself free, knocked down one or two, burst through the line of troops, and went running away from the cathedral, the crowd trying to prevent the soldiers following. I'd never seen anything so exciting. He dodged, and doubled, and got clear again for a second, running towards one corner, but there were soldiers everywhere, one of them tripped him with the butt-end of his rifle, and he fell sprawling on the pavement right under our window. Before you could say a word, a couple of soldiers had driven their bayonets through him—we could actually hear the points knocking against the pavement. In a moment the mob were on them, and a fierce fight commenced. What would have happened I don't know, but then the loud crashing music of the Dead March in 'Saul' sounded from the opposite side of the square.
'Thank God,' I heard Gerald mutter, 'here comes the procession.'
Officers dashed up again, shouting and cursing, the soldiers fell back into line, the mob hid their knives and took up their places, the space in front of the cathedral was cleared in a twinkling-, Bob, leaning out of the window, told us that they'd brought the body of the officer into the hotel, and that the other body had disappeared, the purple velvet hangings which hid the cathedral entrance from us were drawn apart, and, right in the middle, on the top step, a tall old priest, gorgeously dressed, was standing with his arms lifted up. He must have been a bishop at the very least, because directly the people saw him, they fell on their knees in the dust, leaving only the soldiers standing erect.
This really was a most extraordinary effect after the noise, and yelling, and struggling of a few moments before. Now nothing could be heard, except, some way off, the funeral march, the clatter of cavalry horses, and the grating of the wheels of the funeral car, a dark mass we could see just entering the square.
Behind the cavalry marched a couple of companies of sailors from the ships at Los Angelos, their white uniforms stained with sweat; then came eight horses, with velvet cloths flowing almost to the ground, dragging the great state funeral car covered with more purple velvet, the troops reversing arms and the kneeling people crossing themselves as it passed in front of them.
Walking two or three yards behind the car were two men, and then a gap in the procession.
'There they are,' Gerald said excitedly. 'The little wizened chap in uniform, with the grey moustaches, is the President, and the fat man in plain clothes the Vice-President.'
The two walked slowly past under our window, and we got a jolly good view of them. The little chap was covered with orders and medals, and looked a grand little soldier and jolly fierce, whilst the big chap, clumsily built, slouched along, one step behind the President, and didn't seem at all at ease. He was perspiring very much too—his collar was all limp—and he kept on looking from side to side as if he didn't much care for his job.
'You wouldn't if you were he,' Gerald half shouted. He had to shout, because the massed bands were now passing beneath us kicking up the most appalling din.
After the bands had gone by, long rows of people, some in uniform, others in plain clothes—notable people of sorts, I suppose—went shuffling past, looking hot and uncomfortable.
We saw the cavalry and seamen halt, forming a guard on each side of the cathedral steps, and then, as the big hearse drew up at the foot of them, a great discordant bell clanged out from the tower above, and a second later there was the loud boom of a gun.
'That's the first minute-gun from San Sebastian,' Gerald said.
The bands suddenly ceased, from the open cathedral doors we heard the grand rolling sound of an organ, and, as the coffin was borne up the steps, choristers broke out into a shrill anthem—an awfully melancholy sound, which made me catch my breath for a second.
The little President and the lumbering great Vice-President, mopping his forehead, walked after the coffin side by side, and disappeared into the gloom of the cathedral, followed by all the untidy string of notables, who scrambled in after them in a very undignified manner, as though they wanted to get out of the heat.
As the last one crowded in, the velvet curtains were drawn across the door again and shut out the noise of the singing.
'That's the last time any one will see those two together again in peace,' Gerald muttered, and turning round I saw that he was looking fearfully worried and anxious.
'What's the matter?' I asked.
'There's hardly a Vice-President's man among that lot,' he whispered.
'What's that mean?'
'They've cleared out, Billums—fled to the country—it's the beginning. Something's gone wrong. It's beginning too soon.' He was very excited, and could hardly sit still. In a minute or two he jumped up, sang out that he must find out how the land 'lay,' and told us to stay where we were.
'If there's any shooting, lie down on the floor—there may be some.'
'Let me come with you?' I asked, awfully keen to go, but he shook his head, and went out.
I wished he'd have let me go with him.
The mids. hadn't noticed him go, for they were tremendously excited again. Some more cavalry were clattering along between the lines of soldiers, and in front of them, his black horse flecked with white foam, they had recognised the Governor of Los Angelos and his two A.D.C.'s, the fat little chap looking a jolly sight smarter on a horse than he did climbing down ladders on board the Hector. They stopped opposite the cathedral, dismounted, the Governor strode up the steps, the black A.D.C. handed him a big blue paper, and he stood there looking nervously first at the velvet curtains drawn across the entrance, and then at the troops and the kneeling masses of people behind them. A battery of field artillery began unlimbering on each side of the steps, the guns pointing straight across the Plaza, more infantry marched up and formed a semicircle, four deep, round the base of the steps, and the line of soldiers, turning round, forced the people to rise from their knees, and pressed them back away from the cathedral. There wasn't the least doubt that something was going to happen, and I remembered that Mr. Macdonald had told us that the Vice-President might be arrested or shot directly after the service—perhaps that blue paper the Governor of Los Angelos had in his hand was the warrant.
All this time the huge bell in the cathedral tower above us clanged and jarred, and the minute-guns from San Sebastian shook the air, and made it feel even hotter than it was. We were so excited that, for a moment, I forgot about Gerald.
Suddenly we heard the organ inside the cathedral throbbing, the velvet curtains were drawn aside, the Governor of Los Angelos, unfolding his blue paper, sprang forward, and the little white figure of the President appeared. The massed bands blared out some weird tune—probably the Santa Cruz National Anthem—the troops presented arms, the Governor saluted, and then seemed uncertain what to do. He was looking for some one—the Vice-President, I felt certain—but his clumsy figure didn't appear, only the long string of notables. I saw the Governor shake his head and disappear into the cathedral, one of his A.D.C.'s dashed down the steps, and the President, without looking back or moving a muscle of his face, mounted a white horse, which was waiting for him, and cantered away at the head of a cavalry escort, all the troops presenting arms and shouting, 'Viva el Presidente.'
Once or twice since we'd been in that window, hawkers had tried to make us buy things by shoving up little baskets, of sweets and fruit, fastened to long poles. They went from window to window and did a roaring trade. Now as we watched the President cantering away, another basket was thrust up. I pushed it away, but it came again. I shook my head at the man down below who had done it, and saw something strange in his expression. He nodded, and motioned with his free hand as if he wanted me to pick something out, shoving the basket right under my nose.
I looked in, and there, under some small oranges, was a piece of folded paper. I seized it, the basket was drawn down again, and I unfolded it. Hurriedly scrawled there was, 'Can't come back. Get back to the Club quickly, and stay there.—Gerald.'
'Phew!' I went cold all over with excitement. I didn't know what to think.
I looked at my watch, it was 1.30, and remembered that Mr. Macdonald had told us chaffingly that the revolution would begin at 1.25 sharp. I wasn't going to move yet, especially if there was going to be any fighting; we hadn't to meet Mr. Macdonald till three o'clock, and we might as well see all the fun there was going on.
The soldiers began clearing the square now, crowds of people passing along under our windows, Bob and his chum spotted some of our mids., and yelled to them and to the four Hercules mids. who came by too, but the noise was so great, and they were so busy shoving and pushing in the hot crowd, that they didn't hear them.
Presently Captain Grattan—Old Tin Eye—squinting through his eyeglass and smiling at the crowd, Captain Roger Hill, sitting bolt upright and looking bored, Perkins, and the Fleet Surgeon drove past in a carriage. They were all in uniform, and the soldiers made a way for them through the people.
'There's not going to be any firing after all,' the Angel said sadly. 'Look how peaceably all the people are clearing out.'
'Well, come along,' I sang out, 'we'll go along to the Club,' so we picked up our hats and sticks, opened the door, and ran 'slick' into the arms of that ugly little chap I'd seen outside the Club—the one Gerald said had been shadowing him.
He had half-a-dozen sturdy nigger soldiers behind him, and he held up a blue paper in front of me, grinning cunningly—hateful little beast.
I couldn't read the lingo, but there was Señor Gerald Wilson written among the print, and a scrawling 'José Canilla' at the bottom, so I guessed at once that this was a warrant for Gerald's arrest, and that he must have given the little beast the slip. The nigger chaps began closing round me, and had the cheek to try and seize hold of my wrists.
Well, I'm pretty strong, and I'm pretty bad-tempered too, and this was too much for me. I'd torn the warrant to bits, punched Gerald's friend good and hard in the face, and laid out the first two chaps who'd touched me—banged their heads against the woodwork of the narrow passage, before I'd thought of it—but then the others drew their revolvers, and that wasn't playing the game. I yelled to the mids., shoved them back into the room, banged the door, and slipped two bolts in as the chaps charged it.
'Lean out and try to get some of our fellows to help us,' I sang out; 'I'll hang on to the door.' It was the first idea that came, but then it flashed through my head that the longer I kept them fooling round after me, the more chance Gerald would have of escaping—I knew now that that was what he must be doing.
'Slide down into the street—over the balcony—get to the Club—and tell the Skipper I've been arrested,' I yelled out.
'Ain't going to leave you,' the Angel and Bob cried, and came in again and got their shoulders against the door. 'There's not a single one of our chaps about,' they panted, pushing against the creaking door.
My Christopher! it was a shoving match. Luckily the passage outside was so narrow that only two people abreast could shove properly, but the screws in the clasps of the bolts at the top of the door began to 'draw,' and I knew we couldn't hold them for long. Then they fired a pistol through the door—high up—the bullet smashing against the opposite wall.
I knew it was no use staying any longer, I didn't want a bullet in me. 'Clear out, and I'll come too,' I sang out, and we bolted to the window, climbed over the balcony, and shinned down the iron uprights. As my feet touched the pavement, a dozen soldiers threw themselves on top of me; I hadn't a chance to strike out, my head was covered with a cloak, and the next I knew I was inside the hotel bar, being trussed like a turkey.
As soon as he could do it safely, the little brute who'd had the warrant came and kicked me in the stomach and spat at me—I must have had my pipe in my hand when I hit him, for he had a gash across his forehead—and the two whose heads I'd banged came along and kicked me too.
Thank goodness, Bob and his chum weren't there—I guessed that they'd been cute enough to cut away to the Club.
Even then I rather enjoyed it (not the kicking part—I'd be even with those swine some day), thinking how disappointed they would all be when they found that I wasn't Gerald.
Some more soldiers poured into the room, the little brute pulled a dirty greasy cloth off a table, I was covered with it, carried outside like a sack of potatoes, and dumped into a cart. Something else soft was dumped in beside me, half-a-dozen chaps sat on me to keep me quiet, and off we drove. I could hear horses' hoofs on either side of the cart and the clatter of scabbards and jingle of accoutrements, so knew I had a cavalry escort, and felt jolly proud that Gerald was such a big 'pot' in the revolution business as to require one.
We went slowly after a little while—going uphill. I wondered whether they were taking me to San Sebastian, but didn't wonder long, because a minute-gun was fired—about the last of them—and it sounded quite close.
In a minute or two we bumped and rattled across a wooden bridge, and then stopped.
As I was hauled out, they pulled the cloth away from the soft thing beside me, and it was the body of the officer who'd been shot in the square. Ugh! that was rather beastly. An old chap came along—the boss of the fort, I suppose—and jawed to me in French and Spanish, and got savage when I couldn't understand him. He thought I wouldn't.
He soon got tired of this, and I was led across the courtyard by a band of ruffians with fixed bayonets and loaded rifles (I saw them load their magazines). We passed behind the crumbling old walls, where a party of soldiers were cleaning out the saluting guns, and I was shoved into a kind of store-room, dug out of the rock or in the thickness of the walls, and shut in there by a big iron gateway of a door, on the outside of which a miserable little beast of a half-nigger sentry leant and smoked cigarettes.
There were seven others in there, all quiet individuals in plain clothes, who rose and bowed to me when I was brought in, thinking at first, I suppose, that I was Gerald. They looked very relieved when they saw that I wasn't. Two of them had rosettes of black and green with the stripes horizontal, so I knew why they were there. One very courteous old gentleman put a cigarette between my lips, lighted it with his own, and then slacked off the ropes round my wrists and arms, the sentry, turning round to watch us, simply shrugged his shoulders when my arms were free again, and I commenced whirling them round and round to try and do away with the numbness and the 'pins and needles.' He just half opened the breech-bolt of his Mauser rifle, pointed very suggestively at the cartridges inside, turned round again, and went on smoking. Somebody offered me an empty cartridge-box and I sat on it, watching the other chaps busy writing things in notebooks or even on their shirt cuffs.
It struck me that possibly they were writing their 'wills.'
Well! that was a funny ending to my first day ashore, if you like, though so long as Gerald got clear away I didn't mind, and so long as Bob and his chum had fetched up at the Club I knew that things would turn out all right.
It was jolly hot in that hole of a place, and as the afternoon went on the sun shone straight in through the gratings of the door and it was like an oven.
I sweated like a pig.
Every now and then I heard a cart rattle across the drawbridge. That generally meant a fresh arrival, some other Horizontal caught, and he'd be shoved in with us. At first I was terribly afraid lest I should see Gerald brought along; but four o'clock came, Gerald evidently hadn't been caught, and I began to feel quite easy in my mind about him.
I did wonder why nobody from the ship had come along, but wasn't particularly worried. Things would 'pan out' all right, and this was a rummy enough experience for any one.
Just after four o'clock there was great excitement in the courtyard outside. Soldiers ran about hunting for their rifles and formed up behind the saluting guns, trumpets sounded some kind of a 'general salute,' I heard a lot of horses' hoofs clattering over the drawbridge, and a few minutes later round the corner stalked the little President and a crowd of officers, the Governor of Los Angelos and his two A.D.C.'s among them.
He'd evidently come along to count his day's 'bag,' for he walked along the grating looking in at us. My aunt! he had the cruellest eyes I'd ever seen.
He first caught sight of the old chap who'd unfastened my ropes. Phew! he did give him a piece of his mind through the grating! and then the old fellow was dragged out and marched off to a bit of blank wall between two of the saluting guns. The fat little A.D.C. went up to him, and then I knew what was going to happen, for I saw him offer to tie a handkerchief across his eyes—he was going to be shot. But he wouldn't have his eyes covered, and for a moment I saw him standing bolt upright with his arms folded in front of him. Then some soldiers ran up, stood in a line between him and me, an officer gave an order, their rifles went up to the present; I turned my head away and saw the other prisoners clutching the gratings, their throat muscles all swollen, and their eyes starting out; there was a scraggy volley, and the President came back again.
Two more men were hauled out and shot, and I shall never forget the face of one of them as he was marched away. It was just like picking a fat hen out of a coop, and we were the hens. Then back the President came a fourth time, and I was dragged out.
He knew that I wasn't Gerald right enough, but his eyes simply spat fire, and he stamped with rage and was more furious than ever because I couldn't understand him.
"HIS EYES SPAT FIRE"
The fat little A.D.C. was called up to ask questions. He gave me a friendly wink, and I notched up a point in his favour.
He jabbered away to the President and I heard 'Wilson no Don Geraldio' and 'Hector buque de guerra—Inglesa—Los Angelos.'
He asked me if I knew where Gerald was. Of course I didn't and shook my head, 'No! old chap, I don't.'
The President didn't believe it when this was told him.
'El Presidente say shoot you if do not say where is Don Geraldio.'
Of course that was only bluff, and I smiled.
Then the firing party were called across, but that was still only bluff, I thought, and it didn't frighten me in the least till I saw the fat little A.D.C.'s face turn yellow under his brown skin.
Well, then I was in a mortal funk, if you like, and something inside me went flop down into my boots.
'Our cannon—cannon of Hector—shoot thirty kilometres,' I jerked out, remembering how impressed the A.D.C.'s had been with our after 9.2, my tongue feeling a bit sticky and my knees not altogether steady.
The old Governor, the two A.D.C.'s, and several other officers were evidently doing their best for me. I heard 'kilometres' mentioned once or twice, and then the President waved his hand majestically and I was taken back and the grating locked behind me.
My head was buzzing, and I don't mind telling you that I felt a jolly sight more comfortable inside than outside—just then. The little President and all his staff went away, and I heard their horses clattering over the drawbridge. Before he went away, my fat little pal came along and held out his cigarette case through the gratings. I bowed and smiled and took one cigarette; but he shook his head, he wanted me to empty it. I did this and then had a brilliant inspiration. My cigarette case was a pretty decent one, so I offered him mine.
'We change cigarette cases—for remembrance—I shall always remember,' I said.
The kind-hearted little chap seemed quite pleased, took mine as I took his, bowed, said 'Adios! I also shall remember,' and went after the others as fast as his spurs and his sabre and his fat little legs would let him.
I sat down on my cartridge-box and wondered what the dickens 'Old Tin Eye' was doing and what had become of Bob and the Angel, smoked one of my pal's cigarettes, examined the cigarette case—it was an oxydised silver one with black enamel work, probably made in Paris—and watched some black convicts with chains round their ankles filling in three graves under the wall opposite.
Phew! there might have been four if I hadn't remembered about the 9.2's and the thirty kilometres. I shivered and felt jolly sick, and wished to goodness I was back again in the Hector's gun-room.
CHAPTER IV
The Rescue of the Sub
Written by Midshipman Bob Temple
'Cut along to the Club and find the Skipper,' Billums had sung out as we slid down from that window at the Hotel de L'Europe, and when we jumped to the pavement we saw all the soldier chaps—dozens of them—pouncing on him. They didn't pay any attention to us, and it was no good stopping there, so my chum, the Angel, and I scooted away as fast as we could go.
We wormed our way round the corner, out of the square all right, and then we lost ourselves, and were wedged in among an awful crowd of people, carts and mules, cavalry and artillery all jumbled up together, jostling and shoving and cursing. We could hardly move at all, or see where we were going.
We did get along presently, and kept looking down the side streets to try and see all those flags over the Club gate, but we'd forgotten exactly which turning it was. We'd work our way to the outside of the crowd and dart down a side street, looking for the flags and those two sentries, and dart back again into the main street, holding on to each other so as not to get separated, and push and push till we got to the next side street. It was awfully hot work; we couldn't find it and I simply felt terrified about Billums, when we ran into those four Hercules mids. whom we'd upset in the morning. I'd never been so glad to see any one before.
'Hello! Coal lighters! What's the hurry?' they sang out. 'Looking for coal?'
We didn't mind that in the least.
'Where's the Club?' we gasped. 'Quick! tell us! Our Sub's been arrested, and we want to find our Skipper.'
'We've just come from there,' they shouted. 'My aunt! what a lark! Come along!' and they turned back and all six of us pushed our way along. It was hot work, if you like.
'What's he been up to?' one of them asked me.
'They think he's an insurgent; he is just like his brother who is one.'
We saw the flags almost directly, dashed through the gateway into the Club, the Hercules mids. after us, and saw Mr. Perkins sitting under a punkah trying to get cool.
'Where's the Captain, sir?' we asked.
'Don't know! Was here ten minutes ago.'
We hunted everywhere—he wasn't in the Club—and ran back to Mr. Perkins.
'The Sub's been arrested, sir; they're half-killing him. They think he's his brother and have carried him off. What can we do?' Mr. Perkins whistled and scratched his head.
That big German man who had been playing billiards with cousin Gerald in the morning was sitting close by and jumped up, 'What you say? Gerald Wilson caught?'
'No,' we both piped out, 'not Gerald, his brother Bill, our Sub; they've collared him at the hotel near the cathedral.'
'Phew! that's awkward! Something must be done at once. They'd shoot Gerald Wilson if they caught him, and they may shoot his brother.' He spoke very rapidly.
'What can be done?' Mr. Perkins asked, his red face getting quite white.
'I'll drive you to the British Minister—it's a long way out of the town—he's gone there, I know—that's the only thing we can do—you'll have to wait till my carriage comes.'
We did wait, waited for half an hour—it seemed hours, and though Mr. Perkins stood us lemon squashes and cakes we were much too worried to eat anything. The Hercules mids. waited about—the greedy pigs—till Mr. Perkins had to order some for them too, and they finished the whole lot of cakes, ours as well as theirs. Then the big German called us, and he and Mr. Perkins and we two drove away. It was a quarter to three and Mr. Macdonald would be expecting us in a quarter of an hour—whatever should we do I The Angel and I couldn't keep our feet still—we felt so awful—because we could have walked faster than the carriage went in the crowded streets. When we turned down a side street, the nigger driver lashed the horses into a gallop, we got out into the country, and presently pulled up at a big white house with the Union Jack flying above it.
Oh! It was so comforting to see it.
Out we jumped, the German hurried us through a courtyard, a black footman in livery led us through a lot of beautiful cool rooms into a garden with palms and fountains, and we saw a whole crowd of people—English ladies too—sitting in the shade. We forgot to be shy, we were so frightened, caught sight of Captain Grattan and Captain Roger Hill, and, without waiting, simply ran up to them through all the ladies, and told them all about it.
'Tut, tut, tut, tut,' our Captain said, jumping out of his chair and screwing in his eyeglass. 'Tut, tut, that's serious. Come this way,' and he took us in to the British Minister—a big tall chap with a nose like a hawk and great bushy eyebrows, dressed in white duck clothes. We had to tell our story again, clutching each other; he made us so frightened, looking at us so fiercely. You couldn't tell from his face what he thought of it, but he told the Captain that he'd change into uniform and take us to the President right away.
'It's serious,' he said. 'Gerald Wilson is too openly mixed up in politics to claim our protection, and things may go badly with his brother.'
We felt so jolly relieved that something was at last going to be done that we did have some tea then, the ladies crowding round the Angel and helping him, though they weren't so keen on me—they never are, which is a jolly good thing. 'If I'd a face like a girl's they'd fuss round me too,' I told the Angel, and he was beastly rude and called me 'Old Pimple Face,' and made them all laugh at me. I could have kicked him.
The Minister was back again before we'd finished stuffing, and then hurried us away—he and the Captain in one carriage, and Mr. Perkins and we two in another.
We drove as fast as ever we could back to the town, and the soldiers we passed looked as if they'd like to shoot us. They scowled so much that I was jolly glad that the Minister was in his gorgeous gold braid uniform and the Captain and Mr. Perkins were in theirs. We had to pass close to San Sebastian, and we told Mr. Perkins that that was probably where Billums had been taken. 'Mr. Macdonald told us they take all the revolutionary people there.'
Just as we'd told him this, we heard a scrappy kind of a volley from inside the walls.
'Good God!' Mr. Perkins nearly jumped off his seat, his red face turning quite yellow; 'they're shooting people already. Why can't we go faster?' I almost blubbed.
We were back again in the city now, the streets simply filled with soldiers, leaning up against the walls, trying to find a little shade and some of them shouting rudely at us as we passed.
At last we stopped opposite some big iron gates through which soldiers were coming and going in hundreds. The sentries there wouldn't let the Minister pass through at first, till an officer came along. Then we all got out and walked in, following the Minister, who stalked along, head and shoulders taller than any of the officers standing about, and pushed his way into a big room crowded with very excited people, most of them officers, half of them niggers and the other half not much lighter. They left off chattering as we appeared, and bowed and clicked their heels when they saw the Minister, but didn't look at all pleased.
'They hate us English,' I heard the Minister tell the Captain. 'Most of us favour the Vice-President's party, though only Gerald Wilson has been fool enough to do so openly.'
We stuck very closely to him whilst officers and orderlies kept on streaming in and out of a small door leading into another room. Most of their uniforms were jolly smart—either white with yellow facings or khaki with white facings. Cavalry officers had a light-blue striped cotton tunic fitting very tightly and very bulging khaki riding-breeches. They looked awful dandies, and all wore stiff white shirts with cuffs although it was so hot—the blacker they were and the more like niggers, the more stiff white cuffs they showed.
What the Angel and I noticed chiefly about the infantry officers was that they didn't seem to worry so much whether their clothes fitted them, and they nearly all wore patent-leather 'Jemima' boots, with the elastic generally worn out and quite loose round the ankles.
'The President is not here—won't be here for some time—he's gone to San Sebastian,' the Minister said in a low voice.
You could never tell whether he was worried about it or not—his voice and his face never changed. 'We shall have to wait. He's a fiery little chap—thinks he is the Napoleon of the west, and loves to show off before us Europeans. He'll be in a pretty bad temper to-day. He meant to arrest the Vice-President, de Costa, as he left the cathedral, but he and his friends got wind of it and left by a side door; smuggled away as priests or nuns, some say, and have slipped through his fingers. He meant to "scotch" the revolution which is coming, and he's failed badly, so he'll be a pretty handful to tackle.'
'Well, he might be able to tackle him,' the Angel whispered, and we both thought that he looked perfectly grand in his uniform. Then there was a great clatter outside; we could hear officers calling their men to attention; trumpets were blown, all the officers in the room took their cigarettes out of their mouths, stood bolt-upright, and in came the President just as we'd seen him in the procession. Every one made a lane for him to pass into the room beyond, and he spotted us, but hardly took any notice of the Minister's salute or of our Captain's either, which made the Angel and me very angry, though we were really too frightened at his very cruel-looking eyes to be angry.
Several people followed him—all very gorgeously dressed—covered with medals and with green and yellow sashes over their shoulders, and the last to come in was the little A.D.C. from Los Angelos with the big spurs and the curved sword.
The Minister spoke to one of them, who seemed to be doing 'orderly' officer, but he only shrugged his shoulders, went into the little room. We heard a few fierce words and back he came, shrugging his shoulders all the more.
'He says the President is too busy to see me,' the Minister told the Captain, who was gradually getting angry at being treated like this. Then there was another commotion, and in came the grand-looking old Governor of Los Angelos and the black A.D.C. He seemed to be a friend of the Minister, for he stopped and shook his hand, bowed and yarned quite pleasantly. He too went into the other room.
'I've told him that I must see the President,' the Minister said, and we waited again, though even he wasn't successful, and came back shrugging his shoulders and spreading out his hands, his great sword clanking along the floor.
The Minister's face never altered the slightest bit. 'He refuses to see me—will only receive the senior foreign Minister—that is the Comte de Launy, the Frenchman. It's no use waiting here any longer—we must go and find him—it will take an hour.'
His voice never altered in the slightest degree, but the Captain was 'tut tutting' and polishing his eye-glass, whilst Mr. Perkins was bubbling over with wrath.
As we went out we saw the officers all sneering at us, but the Governor sang out something very angrily, and they stood to attention and he himself bowed us out. We were jolly glad to get out, I can tell you, because it was such a horrid feeling to have all these strange fierce-looking officers all round us without being able to understand a word they said, and to feel certain that they'd like to murder us.
'Well, the old Governor's a gent, isn't he?' the Angel whispered.
We drove back to the Residence—I was feeling awfully sick with funk about Billums—and there we were left whilst the Captain and the Minister drove away again to find the Frenchman.
It was long after four o'clock; Mr. Macdonald would be on his way down to Los Angelos, and we hadn't the least idea how we should get back; but we didn't want to go back so long as old Billums was shut up in San Sebastian, and might be shot any minute.
There were only three ladies there now, the Minister's wife and her two daughters, and they did their very best to cheer us up. The Angel was in great form—he always was when ladies were about—and sang his rotten songs; but as I couldn't sit still, I wandered out into the courtyard, and fed some goldfish in one of the fountains. It was fairly cool there, and every time I heard wheels I ran to the gateway, but they didn't come back till nearly six o'clock, and when I rushed out, hoping to see Billums with them, there was only a dried-up little man in another gorgeous uniform—the French Minister.
'No good, Temple,' the Captain said, looking awfully serious.
'He won't let him go till his brother surrenders—does it to humiliate us.'
'What are you going to do now, sir?' I asked him, but he didn't answer.
They all three drove away again, and Mr. Perkins told me that they were going to collect all the foreign Ministers, and intended to see him in a body.
Then he and we two mids. had to do more waiting—it was terrible. The sun went down, it got dark quite suddenly, and we couldn't help thinking of the awful road down the mountains to Los Angelos and how we were going to get down there at night.
The Minister's wife gave us some dinner and tried to be jolly, but I couldn't be, and couldn't eat anything. She and the girls were pretty nervous too, because, all the time we were pretending to have dinner, there were noises as if a riot was going on in the town. We were all fidgeting, and the black men-servants in their scarlet liveries were very jumpy. You could see by the way they moved about that they were frightened too.
The Minister's wife made them close the big windows and that drowned a good deal of the noise, and I couldn't see the dark creepy shadows of the palms outside and felt less uncomfortable. She kept on saying, 'I wish your father would come back,' and, just as we were going to have some coffee, we heard the banging of rifles. The black footman dropped his tray, and all of them simply trembled. It was no use to sit any longer at the table, the two girls began to cry, and then it was our turn to do something to help.
The firing sometimes seemed to be coming our way, so we three went round the garden and made sure that all the gates were locked—a jolly creepy job it was out there in the dark, and I jumped every time I heard a rifle go off. The servants were all standing about, whispering and looking frightened, which made it all the more horrid; so, to give them something to do, we sent them to close all the shutters, though we couldn't get them to go into the street to close some there, and had to do that ourselves. Then we made the three ladies come into the drawing-room, lighted all the lamps, and tried to cheer them up. The Angel played the piano, and Mr. Perkins, who hates singing, bellowed out some sea-songs and made them join in the choruses. That wasn't much of a success, so he scratched his funny old head and did a few tricks. One was to stand straight upright and then sit down on the floor without bending his knees, and he did it so jolly well that it nearly shook the ornaments off the mantelpiece, and the bump frightened them all. Then he showed them how he could fall flat on his chest without bending his knees, and did it, but banged his chin hard on the polished floor, so that wasn't quite a success either.
We couldn't think of any other tricks.
Nine o'clock came, and ten o'clock—there was no firing now—and half-past ten came before we heard several carriages coming towards the house, and went out into the courtyard to the street gate.
The Minister, the Captain, the tall German, who turned out to be the German Minister, and was in a grand-looking uniform, the little Frenchman, four or five others, and the United States Minister in ordinary evening dress, got down, and then several ladies, closely wrapped up, came in too.
All the Ministers disappeared into another room by themselves, only the Captain and the ladies coming into the drawing-room. He was saying 'tut, tut' all the time, and all we could get out of him was, 'We've been treated like children—tut, tut—by a miserable half-bred savage—he won't listen to us.'
'A lot of firing going on in the city, isn't there, sir?' Mr. Perkins asked.
'Only a few drunken soldiers letting off their rifles,' he grunted, and then he was sent for, and a few minutes afterwards a man-servant came in to ask the Minister's wife to speak to her husband. She went out, and we could hear her speaking to him, and back she came looking very pale. 'Captain Grattan' (that was our Captain) 'has asked us to stay on board the Hector, my dears; we are going down with him to-night.'
She tried to look cheerful, but they and we knew what that meant—that it wasn't safe for them in Santa Cruz any longer—and the girls began to cry again. All three of them went away to get ready.
'Phew! Great smokes,' Mr. Perkins whistled, 'it's come to a pretty pass—that ass of a Sub has stirred up a hornets' nest, if you like.'
'It wasn't his fault, sir,' I said; 'he couldn't help it.'
Just then the Captain and the Ministers trooped in. They looked as though they'd come to some decision which pleased them, and it made the Angel and me feel more happy about poor old Billums up there in San Sebastian. We both wondered whether he'd had any dinner, and what he thought had become of us—all this time. Some more ladies came in, all wrapped up in furs because the night was very cold, and in the middle of all the hubbub we heard a lot of cavalry coming along. They stopped outside the house, and a moment later the Governor of Los Angelos, with his two A.D.C.'s, came in. Weren't we pleased to see him, that's all! There was more bowing and scraping, coffee was handed round, and we two edged alongside the little A.D.C. who had talked English in the gun-room yesterday. He recognised us then and said, smiling, 'We take you to Los Angelos to-night—the señoras and the señoritas also—we have many horse soldiers—the road it has much danger.'
'How about Billums—William Wilson—our Sub?' we asked, 'up in San Sebastian.'
He smiled, and pulled out—what d'you think?—old Billums's cigarette case—I knew it jolly well—and said, 'I give him my—he give me him,' but shut up like an oyster, shrugged his shoulders, and shook his head when we asked him if Billums was coming with us. That made us miserable again, and we went out to see what the cavalry escort were like. They had dismounted, and were swaggering into the courtyard, looking absolute villains, most of them niggers, their carbines and bandoliers over their shoulders, revolvers in their belts, and swords, which clanked and rattled whenever they moved. The servants were giving them cigarettes and some food, but, for all that, they didn't seem at all friendly, and the whites of their eyes showed up under the swinging lanterns, and made them look more like brigands than ever. The Angel palled up to them and made them show him their rifles, but I felt too frightened and only hoped that the Governor was coming with us. The carriages drove up, all the ladies came out and were put into them, the dear old Governor of Los Angelos handing them in and bending down to kiss our Minister's wife's hands in such a jolly manner that the Angel and I could have hugged him.
We felt that he could be absolutely trusted, and weren't we jolly glad again when his horse was led up and he and part of the escort rode away with the ladies.
In the last carriage the Captain, Mr. Perkins, and we two mids. were stowed, and away we went after them with the two A.D.C.'s bobbing behind on their horses and the rest of the escort, leaving the Ministers all standing together under the lamp which lit up their faces and all their beautiful gold lace.
'They don't look very "sniffy," do they?' I whispered to the Angel, 'I should if I was letting my wife go away like this.'
'Not if you'd got those uniforms on and had a Frenchman or a German or a Dutchman watching you,' he whispered.
I expect he was right.
The Governor came clattering back on his great horse to see that we'd started, and then went on ahead again, the black A.D.C. bumping along after him.
You can imagine what a row we made, and how, as we got into the streets, all the shutters of the windows were thrown back and people peered at us from behind the bars; dogs, too, flew out and barked from every doorway. It was a wonderful night—a big moon and millions of stars, the tops of the mountains showing up all round us. Jolly cold it was, too, and the Angel and I were glad to snuggle together under a rug.
We seemed to go a long way round, skirting the city, and though sometimes at street corners pickets and patrols challenged us, they were quite satisfied. Presently we passed close to a great shadowy building high up on our right. It had a funny little tower at one corner, and we recognised the shadow at once—it was San Sebastian.
The Angel and I squeezed each other to buck ourselves up, and kept our eyes on it all the time. It looked most awfully gloomy, and it seemed horrid to think that only twelve hours ago Billums had driven past it with us, and now he was inside and we were going back without him.
'What will he think of us?' I gulped. 'Poor old Billums!'
Well, we got on to the main road, left the city behind us, and presently began to go downhill. Mr. Perkins went to sleep soon, his jolly red face rolling from side to side as the carriage bumped, and the Captain snuggled down in the other corner, and we knew when he went to sleep, because his eyeglass fell out, and he didn't 'tut, tut,' and put it back.
We didn't go to sleep for a long time—we were too miserable and cold—and watched the troopers riding on each side of us with their blankets over their shoulders, and every half-mile or so, flaming fires at the side of the road, with soldiers sitting round them. We could hear them challenging the carriages in front, but when we got up to them, they only stared at us, or called out to the escort, and wrapped their blankets round them more closely. There was a huge nigger chap riding on my side of the carriage, and both he and his wretched thin horse seemed nearly asleep. I watched him bobbing and lurching from side to side in his saddle, waking up with a start whenever his poor brute stumbled, and then must have gone to sleep, because the next I remember was finding that we were going past rows of houses—pitch dark, with not a sound coming from them—and knew that we'd got down to Los Angelos.
I was colder than ever, because the Angel had all the rug, but the smell of the sea was grand.
We drove down to the wharf where we'd landed in the morning. The carriages all stopped—I could hardly stand when I got out because my legs were so cramped—and two of our barges were waiting for us, their mids. holding up lanterns and singing out to let us know where they were.
The cavalry escort clattered away, the old Governor kissed the hands of all the ladies as he helped them into the boats, the two A.D.C.'s, looking frightfully sleepy, clicked their heels and bowed, the Captain said, 'Tut, tut,' a good many times and shook the Governor by the hand, the Angel and I managed to get hold of the fat A.D.C. and shake his hand, and off we all went.
It was simply splendid to be in a boat again and to hear the oars go 'click, click' in the rowlocks, and when we'd got round the end of the breakwater to see the lights of the Hector and Hercules. The other chaps who had gone back before us had taken orders for the two barges to wait in, all night, if necessary; that was why we'd found them there.
The Angel and I were both of us dead tired, and went down below to turn in, but there was a lot of scurrying up above; we heard the Gunnery Lieutenant sent for, and the Captain's Clerk was turned out. Evidently something exciting was going to happen, so we ran up on deck again and, peeping down the ward-room skylight, saw our Captain and the Captain of the Hercules, the Commander, and most of our senior officers all sitting round the table, which was littered with papers and confidential books.
We stole away, because the officer of the watch whacked us over the back with his telescope, and were undressing in the gun-room flat when the bugler sounded the 'officers' call' and 'both watches fall in.' We heard 'Clear lower deck' being shouted along the mess decks and bugles sounding aboard the Hercules, so instead of undressing we shifted into uniform, whilst every one else tumbled out of their hammocks and shifted into theirs. We all clattered up on deck.
'Everybody aft' was piped, and the men came streaming through the dark battery door into the glare of the group light on the quarterdeck, buttoning up the tops of their trousers and stuffing their flannels down them.
The master-at-arms reported 'Lower deck cleared, sir,' to the Commander, he reported to the Captain, and the Captain, standing on the top of the after 9.2 inch turret, coughed, said 'tut, tut,' a good many times, and then told the men that Billums had been collared because he was so much like his brother, who'd mixed himself up in politics, that the President was going to keep him till Gerald surrendered, and that all the foreign Ministers were agreed that steps had to be taken jolly quickly to get him out of San Sebastian.
The men were as quiet as lambs, waiting for the exciting part and to know what he intended doing. You couldn't hear a sound. 'I want you to clear for action—now—do it quickly—I'm going to take the Hector inside the breakwater at daylight, whilst Captain Roger Hill'—he called him 'Old Spats,' but corrected himself—'gets under way in the Hercules and prepares to tackle the forts. They've got some—you've seen them—up on the hill above the town—but won't give us much trouble. If Mr. Wilson is not at the landing-stage at noon, the foreign Ministers will be, and they and all the Europeans who wish will come aboard this ship. That being the case, I shall then—acting under the Ministers' orders—take possession of the five Santa Cruz cruisers and gunboats inside and shall tow them out.'
You could feel the men getting excited, and then he gave several more 'tut, tuts,' and told us that a revolution had started, and that, as the revolutionary people came from both the provinces to the north and south, and the mountains separated them and made it impossible for them to combine successfully by land, the only way they could do so was by the sea, and as long as the President had his cruisers and gunboats he could prevent them doing so, and keep the upper hand.
'If we capture his ships, the insurgents can do what they like,' and he finished up with, 'There are ladies aboard—we couldn't leave them in Santa Cruz—so work quietly. Carry on, Commander!' We dug out like smoke, turning the boats in and filling them with water, getting down davits and rails, lashing the rigging, and working hard till daylight came.
Then all us mids. scrambled down below to get some hot cocoa and bread and butter, and were up on deck again in a jiffy, for the buglers sounded 'cable officers,' which meant that we were just going to weigh anchor, and we didn't want to miss any of the fun.
The Hercules, cleared for action, just astern of us, was looking awfully grim, her long guns simply bristling over the sides, and white ensigns lashed in her rigging.
Petty Officer O'Leary came up to ask about Billums—he was very worried about him—and, just as we began to steam ahead, a cloud of smoke shot out from one of the forts above the town.
'They're going to fight,' I sang out, not quite certain that I wasn't frightened.
But O'Leary growled, and said, 'No such luck, sir, anyway, that's only the sunrise gun—late as usu'l, sir.'
'General quarters' was sounded—we could hear it too aboard the Hercules—and we all had to rush to our stations. Mine was in the starboard for'ard 9.2 turret, and you may bet your life that directly we'd cleared it away, and had things ready inside, I got my head jammed outside the sighting hood to see what was going on.
We headed straight inshore, and then made a wide sweep round the lighthouse and the end of the breakwater.
As we turned, the white forts about the town came into view, and we tried to get our gun to bear on them, but though we gave it extreme elevation, cocking it up in the air, we couldn't elevate it nearly enough.
Mr. Bigge, the lieutenant in charge of my turret, was very angry about it, but of course nothing could be done. That was why the Hercules was steaming backwards and forwards, far enough outside the breakwater for her guns to bear.
As we crept up to the town, I kept my telescope glued on the forts, but couldn't see any sign of life in them.
'They aren't going to fight, sir, are they?' I asked Mr. Bigge, and he didn't think they were, which was very disappointing—one doesn't mind being fired at when one is inside a turret.
On the port side—the breakwater side—we were now right alongside the Santa Cruz Navy—miserable dirty little ships when you saw them close to us. Their people were awake and on deck, but hardly bothered to look at us, and were fishing over the side, smoking cigarettes, and spitting in the water, some of them washing clothes and hanging them up in the rigging. They did hoist their colours—the vertical green and yellow stripes—after a time, but that was the only thing they did. Not very exciting, after all we had been hoping for, was it?
Just before we got up to the end of the breakwater we'd dropped a kedge anchor made fast to our biggest wire hawser, and as we went along we paid the hawser out astern. Then when we'd got just beyond the landing-stage we dropped an anchor, and there we were in a pretty close billet, not enough room to turn, but our kedge ready to haul us out stern first, and everything as snug as a tin of sardines. We were not a hundred yards from the wharves where that guard of honour had been yesterday, but only a few people and some mules were moving sleepily about, and a lonely-looking sentry leant against a great pile of cocoa bales and yawned.
Well, we'd taken them by surprise right enough, and there was nothing to do but to wait till noon and see what happened. It was a jolly long wait, and I don't really know whether I wanted most to see Billums come off, or to capture the cruisers if he didn't. I know that all the other chaps didn't want him to come off. Outside the breakwater the Hercules still steamed backwards and forwards, with her guns trained on the forts in case anything happened, and during the forenoon got down her top-masts and wireless gear. This made her look all the more ferocious, and our Commander began bellowing and cursing 'that he'd have to do the same and spoil all his paint-work.' It took us a couple of hours, but it was much better than doing nothing, and later on in the morning crowds of people came down on the wharves to look at us, and watch us working. My eye! but it was appallingly hot in there.
At about ten o'clock the forts began to show signs of life, hoisting yellow and green flags and training their guns round and round. They had two dynamite guns in one of them—so the books said—and we felt as though they couldn't possibly miss us if they had fired. That sounded far too exciting—dynamite seemed rather unpleasant—-but the Gunnery Lieutenant's 'Doggy' brought the news that none of the guns in the fort could be depressed enough to hit us, which was rather a relief—really—though the others didn't think so. The cruisers, too, began to get up steam, let down their gun ports, and ran their guns out. We could see them being loaded, and then they were trained on us, which was very exciting when you remember that they were only fifty yards away.
Directly they had the cheek to do this our port guns were trained on them—the foremost 9.2 on one, the port for'ard 9.2 on another, two of the 7.5's on a third, and so on, with orders to fire directly the Santa Cruz ships fired.
Of course these poor little things wouldn't have stood a chance, but they kept their crews at their guns, and if they'd only been able to let off one broadside it would have swept our decks. This made it jolly interesting for all of us who were getting down the topmasts and had to work in the open.
I had never thought about how Billums or the Ministers were coming off, and when at seven bells the first and second barges were called away, you can imagine how excited I was, because the second barge was mine. They lowered us into the water, planked a Maxim gun in the bows, revolvers and cutlasses were served out to the crew, and I had my dirk and revolver.
The Commander bellowed down that we were to go inshore, lie off the steps at the landing-place, and wait for Billums or the Ministers.
I was in white uniform with a white helmet, and it was so boilingly hot that, though the men only had on straw hats, flannels, and duck trousers, they sweated under their cutlass belts before they'd pulled half-way inshore.
As we got close to the wharf it was more exciting still, because the people crowding there and the soldiers began shouting and jeering at us, shaking sticks and throwing stones—not to hit us, but to splash us. They weren't brave enough to do any more, because they could see all the starboard twelve-pounders on board the Hector trained on them. I felt jolly important, and when Blotchy Smith—the midshipman of the first barge and a pal of mine—sang out for me to 'lay on my oars,' we bobbed up and down only about ten yards away and pretended we didn't see them.
We waited and waited; eight bells struck aboard the Hector, there wasn't a sign of any one coming, and the black ruffians on the wharf became more irritating than ever. Several lumps of mud and dirt had been thrown into the boats, and one had struck my clean helmet, but I still pretended not to notice anything. It got so bad soon that Blotchy Smith sang out to me to train my Maxim on the crowd, and you would have laughed if you'd seen the brutes clearing away.
Then the Hector signalled across that carriages could be seen coming down the road from Santa Cruz, and after another long wait we heard the mob ashore groaning and hooting, and a lot of cavalry and several carriages came clattering and rattling along the wooden wharves.
You can guess how we wondered whether it was Billums coming or only the Ministers. It wasn't Billums, for we saw all the foreign Ministers, and knew that they would not have come with him.
Some soldiers made a way for them, and then we had to pull backwards and forwards, taking them and a lot of Europeans—Mr. Macdonald among them—off to the ship, and afterwards go back for their luggage.
'Well, we'll have a bit of a "dust up" after this, sir,' my coxswain said, and that was about the only comfort.
The Angel told me afterwards that when the Ministers got on board their wives came up and made asses of them, they were so jolly pleased to see them, but they'd all been sent below by the time my boat had been hoisted in. Then we had to collar the cruisers.
Well, even that was disappointing, because they never made any resistance, the officers simply shrugged their shoulders when we hauled their colours down and hoisted our own white ensigns, and ordered their men to pull ashore. You couldn't really blame them, because our 9.2 shells would have blown them to smithereens; but, for all that, it was very tame.
By half-past one we'd got hawsers aboard their flagship, the Presidente Canilla, and by three o'clock hawsers had been passed from her to the others, and we simply went astern, hauling on our kedge anchor till we were clear of the breakwater, and then steamed astern with the whole of the Santa Cruz Navy coming along after us like a lot of toy ships on the end of a string. It looked perfectly silly, and the last one—a gunboat as big as a decent Gosport ferry-boat—fouled the end of the breakwater till our chaps aboard of her shoved her off, and along she came after the rest of them. By five o'clock we and the Hercules had anchored, and all the prizes as well.
It was a jolly tame ending to all the excitement, and we all wondered what we should do next to make them give up Billums. The A.P. said that we should probably land and take possession of the Custom House.
He bucked us up a good deal, but not even that came off, because before we finished making everything shipshape for the night, out puffed the port launch, flying a huge white flag in her bows and the yellow and green ensign in the stern, bringing out our friend the Governor and his two A.D.C.'s. They came along to make complete apologies, and say that Billums should be given up next morning. He brought a letter from the President simply grovelling to the various Ministers and imploring them and the merchants to come ashore again. Wasn't that grand, although, you know, we couldn't help feeling that we'd been rather playing the bully?
When it got dark, the Angel, and I, and Mr. Bostock, the Gunner, with half-a-dozen hands, were sent aboard one of the ships, the Salvador, an old torpedo-gunboat kind of affair, to keep watch through the night. We had revolvers served out to us in case any chaps from shore tried to play the idiot; but they didn't, and we simply sat down under an awning with our coat-collars turned up, and took it in turns to keep watch, or, if we were all awake, got Mr. Bostock to tell us tales of Ladysmith.
In the morning we all went back to the Hector, and at five minutes past ten o'clock old Billums came along in the port launch, the Governor bringing him off and making more apologies. Billums was glad to get back again—he wanted a shave and a clean collar most awfully—and you can guess how jolly glad we were to have him. The Commander bellowed at him that he'd make him pay for all the paint-work which had been spoilt by clearing for action, but it was only his way—he couldn't help it—and the Hercules gun-room sent a signal, 'Sub to ditto. We are all jolly glad to get you back,' which was nice of him, though his beasts of mids. didn't join in with the signal—just like them.
Well, the Ministers and the merchants went ashore jolly pleased with themselves, but they left all the ladies on board, as they thought it wiser for them to go to Prince Rupert's Island with us till things had quieted down in Santa Cruz.
We gave Billums a rousing good sing-song, till the Commander ordered us to chuck it, and was appallingly rude to him; and next morning we left the Santa Cruz Navy for its own people to take back behind the breakwater, and shoved off for Prince Rupert's Island.
You should have seen the Angel looking after the Minister's two daughters! It was too asinine for words, and I told him so. He said I was jealous, and we jolly nearly came to punching each other's heads about them.
CHAPTER V
Gerald Wilson captures San Fernando
Written by Sub-Lieutenant William Wilson
Those thirty-six hours in San Sebastian are over and done with, and I shouldn't care to go through them again. They were the longest hours I have ever spent, and they, at any rate, taught me what it does feel like to be a prisoner, and to look through an iron gateway and envy everything outside it, and everybody. The other chaps—insurrectos they all were—had been jolly decent to me, although I could not understand their lingo, and the way they settled down and took things as a matter of course was simply extraordinary. Even when two more were dragged out the morning I was released, and shot against that parapet, the others only shrugged their shoulders and simply smoked cigarettes all the harder. You could only imagine that they were but half-civilized, had known no other way of carrying on the politics of the Republic, and were so used to violence and murder that, when their turn came to go 'under,'they simply bowed to the inevitable, their only consolation being that probably in another few weeks or months, if luck favoured their party, that same stuffy room would be crowded with President's men, and quite possibly the same villainous-looking firing-party would just as cheerfully prop them up against that wall and shoot them down. These same miserable-looking convicts, whom I'd seen with chains round their ankles, would almost certainly be there to dig fresh graves.
Of course, all those hours I wondered what our chaps were doing to bail me out, but didn't worry much—I knew things would come right in the end—and of course they did.
But I did worry about Gerald and what his hare-brained adventures would lead him to. He had always been getting into trouble at home, and that was why the pater and mater had shipped him out to Santa Cruz, though they little thought that he'd take a leading part in a revolution, and the poor old mater would be fearfully worried when she heard about it. It was jolly to know that an Englishman, and my own brother, was such a boss among these fierce, blood-thirsty, half-Spanish people, but that wouldn't be much comfort to the mater if he was stuck up against the parapet of San Sebastian, which would certainly be his fate if he ever fell into the clutches of the President.
It was my chum of the cigarette case who actually fetched me down and took me aboard the Hector. Even whilst I was trying to thank him, the Commander began bellowing that 'He'd make me pay for the paint he'd spoilt clearing for action and housing the topmasts.' He was as rude as it was possible to be, but every one else—'Old Tin Eye' included—was all right, and Ginger signalled congratulations from the Hercules.
Of course my adventure was known all over Princes' Town before we'd anchored more than an hour or two, and reporters from the local papers and Reuter's Agent came bustling on board for more details, but were told nothing, except that I'd been arrested by mistake, and that, as a hint to the President to let me out again, 'chop, chop,' one or two of the Santa Cruz gunboats had been seized. We had all been ordered to give no political information to anybody, but you may imagine that their ears were rigged out for something more exciting than that, and you can jolly well guess who gave it to them—the Angel backed up by Cousin Bob. They saw their way to getting a cheap 'blow out' at the Savannah Hotel, and actually had the cheek to tell the two local reporters that if they'd stand them a dinner there, they would tell them all they knew about it.
They had put their names down in the leave book for the late boat and went ashore, but of course I had no idea what their game was. I had turned in early, and they woke me, by knocking at my cabin and asking if they could come in.
I switched on my light, and there they were, in their best blue suits, grinning from ear to ear.
They both began talking twenty to the dozen. 'We've given you such a "leg up"—we've had a topping feed at the Savannah, and you'll see all about it in the papers to-morrow!'
'All what?' I asked.
'All about you fighting dozens of soldiers, knocking them over, and of our trying to rescue you.'
'We put in a lot of extras to make it look better,' Bob squeaked.
'We told them all about knocking over the rotten Hercules mids., and about you being so like Cousin Gerald.'
'What!' I sang out, sitting up in my bunk. 'You blessed idiots, what rot have you been up to? You know you had orders not to speak of it.'
'We didn't say a word about politics, not a word,' Bob said rather nervously. 'It's quite all right; we never mentioned politics.' The Angel added, 'We didn't tell them the real way you escaped.'
'Out with it! What did you tell them, you fools?'
They were backing out of the cabin—rather sulky—but I yelled for them to come back. 'Now, none of your tomfoolery. What did you tell them?'
'Well, we gave ourselves a bit of a leg up too,' the Angel began, looking down his nose as good as gold.
'It really was all a joke,' Bob interrupted, 'it was their fault if they believed it. We told them that we waited till night under the walls of San Sebastian, wriggled over the parapet, and found your dungeon.'
'We told them that we'd whistled "Rule, Britannia!"—very softly—till—we—heard—you—whistle back,' the Angel stuttered out, choking with laughter, 'and that the sentry was asleep, and we only had to knock him down—and gag him—steal the key—open the door—all of us crawling away again over the walls and tramping it on our flat feet down to Los Angelos.'
'You don't mean to tell me that they believed all that rot?'
'We think they did—wasn't it a joke?' Bob said—he was beginning to see that I didn't think it a joke. 'We gave them the key of the dungeon—an old brass key we'd found on the armourer's bench before we went ashore.'
'It was the key of the bread-room that was broken yesterday,' the Angel gurgled, when he could stop laughing. 'And we said we'd all swum off to the ship in the dark.'
I wasn't in the humour to see how it was funny, and sent them out of it. 'If anything does come out in the papers, I'll beat you both,' I told them.
'Well, the feed was worth a hiding, and the joke too,' Bob mumbled, as they went away—thank goodness the Angel was no relation of mine and had no mother or sister who could write snorters to me, so he didn't dare to be rude.
You can guess how angry I was next morning, when the wretched local papers did come aboard, and saw in big letters: 'Romantic Escape of British Naval Officer—Plucky Middies effect Rescue,' and underneath it was the silliest nonsense you could possibly read. Honestly, even now I don't know whether it was put in as a joke, and whether, instead of Bob and the Angel pulling the reporters' legs, they were pulling ours. Angry! I was too angry to speak!
They described me as Sub-Lieutenant William Wilson, the celebrated United Service half-back, and the brilliant naval officer, specially appointed to command the Hector's gun-room by the Lords of the Admiralty as a mark of their appreciation of my services! Angry! My blessed potatoes! I sent for my dear cousin and the Angel and gave them six of the best over the gun-room table—as hard as I could lay it on—the first three for making their Sub look a fool, and the last three for disobeying the Captain's orders. I know which were the hardest whacks, and I didn't care a biscuit what Bob's sister, Daisy, thought or wrote. They went away muttering that the dinner was worth it—every time—which was meant to be rude, because they both had got it into their noddles that they'd actually given me a 'leg up,' and couldn't see that they'd only made a laughing-stock of me.
First of all the Commander sent for me on the quarterdeck. He had Perkins there as a witness, and before I ever had a chance of saying anything, bellowed out, 'You're the "brilliant naval officer," are you? You're a fool, and an idiot, and a useless idiot. You can't keep order in the gun-room, and the sooner you get out of the ship the better.' He bellowed till the maintopmen, painting masts and yards up aloft, left off painting to listen to him. He didn't ask me to speak, so I didn't—said not a word—which made him almost apoplectic with rage, his ugly red face getting perfectly crimson. Every time he stopped for breath, Perkins kept on trying to tell him that perhaps it wasn't my fault, which sprung him off again, and at last he turned round and cursed him for interfering.
Perkins twisted round on his heel and hobbled off, but the Commander called for him to come back, and he did, his jolly face all tightened out.
'Did you hear the Commander curse me on the quarterdeck?' he asked very quietly.
'I did, sir,' I said; and he turned to the Commander, 'Very well, I shall see the Captain about it. I'm not going to stand any more of it.'
You should have seen the Commander's face. His mouth opened, and he looked as if he would willingly have murdered the two of us, then he bounced off the quarterdeck, and into his cabin just inside the battery, and banged the door, like the childish bully he was. As he didn't come out again, I went below.
Then the Skipper sent for me. He was grinning all over his face: 'Those two boys have made a fool of you, Wilson; tut! tut! stop their leave—whack 'em both.'
'I've beaten them, sir, already,' I told him, 'and given them six apiece—as hard as I could,' and explained to him that I had no idea why they went ashore.
'Tut! tut! no harm done; they got their dinner all right; tell 'em to lunch with me, tut! tut!—if they can sit down—I'd have done it myself for a good dinner—thirty years ago.'
Old Ginger and I had arranged to go for a walk together that afternoon, to shake up our livers, and I was not particularly keen, after what had happened, to ask leave from the Commander, but I screwed up my courage and did so, and was flattened aback when he said, 'Very good, Wilson. Come and have "chow" with me in the ward-room to-night—celebrate your release.'
That was the rotten, or rather the irritating, part about him. After he'd been as rude as a fishwife, and long before you'd got over bubbling with anger at the sight of him, he'd come up as if nothing had happened and take the wind out of your sails.
Of course I had to say 'Yes,' although at the time I'd have much preferred to take him on with bare knuckles and punch his head to relieve my feelings.
Old Ginger met me at the Governor's steps, where we landed, and we had a fifteen-mile walk as hard as we could go—tearing along till we hadn't a dry rag between us.
Fifteen miles in that climate takes more out of you than twice the distance in England, so you can guess we were pretty well 'done' by the time we got back to the landing-steps.
Whilst we waited for our boats we sat under the shade of the fruit market and watched the niggers—all as cheerful as sand-boys—unloading a cargo of cocoa-pods from a small schooner. The washer-ladies were coming ashore, too, from the Hector and Hercules, cackling like hens because of the huge bundles of clothes they'd got. Perkins's friend, Arabella de Montmorency, was the first to waddle up the steps, grinning from ear to ear, and carrying a huge bundle. 'The good Lo'd be praised,' she sang out to a buck-nigger waiting for her, 'Massa Perkins pay Arabella the three shilling and tuppence—Massa Perkins know Arabella good vash-lady—no black trash for Massa Perkins. I pray de good Lo'd keep Massa Perkins in His strong hand.' She went back into the boat for more washing, but the other washer-ladies had bagged it, and there was a fine row. All their men friends joined in shouting, and yelling, and shaking their fists at each other, and we hoped to see a good free-fight, but the Sikh policeman on duty stepped majestically forward, said a few sharp words, and they all burst out laughing, Arabella waddling away with her man carrying the disputed bundle, and trying to look dignified, telling everybody: 'Arabella no black trash—Arabella vash for de British naval officah.'
It was too funny for words, Ginger and I were simply doubled up with laughter, when I felt some one touch my shoulder, and, looking round, saw a thick-set native chap, as brown as leather—like those soldier chaps we'd seen on the wharf at Los Angelos—in a blue striped cotton vest, which showed his lumpy chest muscles through it, and a pair of loose cotton drawers, his brown legs and feet naked. He was bowing and holding a broad Spanish grass hat in front of him with one hand. 'William Wilson,' he kept on saying.
'What is it, old cock? me William Wilson—all light—belong ploper. What's your game?'
His face beamed, and he pulled a dirty crumpled letter from under his vest and handed it to me.
It was addressed to me in Gerald's handwriting, and I tore it open, his face beaming again as he pointed a thin brown finger first to the address, and then circled it round my face, saying, 'William Wilson.' It was the only English he seemed to know. I read:
'DEAR OLD BILLUMS—Sorry to have cleared out so hurriedly the other day—just managed to give them the slip in time—heard news of your adventure and the Navy business—wish you chaps would collar the lot of them, for good. Keep a look-out for that little chap who was shadowing me; he'll try and get even with one of us. Tell the mater I'm having a ripping time—better than planting—will pay better than planting if our side wins. Tell her those socks she made me are A1. Look out for yourself—you're too much like me for this corner of the world. Don't send an answer.—GERALD.'
The nigger was still beaming and bowing, and he pointed to my hair. I'm jiggered if he hadn't spotted me by it.
That was a funny go, if you like, and I was jolly glad to know that Gerald was all right. It didn't worry me a ha'penny candle about that detective chap—I'd be only too jolly glad to see his ugly face and smash it. Ginger and I thought that the little messenger must have come in one of the many trading-schooners which slipped across from the mainland at night when the land breeze sprung up. We gave him all the small change we had in our pockets, and he smiled, and bowed, and disappeared among the merry crowd round us. He couldn't speak a word of English except my name, and my Chinese pidgin-English wasn't a success.
This was the only excitement and the only news I got from Gerald for several weeks. In the meantime the Hector and the Hercules carried out the gunnery practices which had been interrupted at Gibraltar, returning to anchor off Princes' Town every Thursday night till Monday morning, so we managed to get in a good many football matches. Ginger and I borrowed grounds and had some more gun-room matches as well, but they didn't smooth things over, rather the reverse, for when we beat the Hercules at rugby by a try, which, they swore, wasn't one, matters went from bad to worse. There actually was some doubt about it, for Perkins had been referee (we couldn't get any one else) and couldn't keep up with the ball on account of his game leg. We had to separate the two teams in the pavilion, and after that my mids. seldom came back to the ship from a tennis party, picnic, or dance, or anything in fact, without having some furious tale to spin.
Old Ginger and I pretty nearly washed our hands of them and let them go their own way.
There was no regular news from Santa Cruz all this time, because the President had closed the Telegraph Company's office, but the Pickford and Black steamers still called at Los Angelos twice a month before coming to Princes' Town, and they brought news of what was going on.
As it chiefly came from Santa Cruz, it was from the President's point of view, and if it was at all correct, most of de Costa's people were already in San Sebastian or flying in front of the President's invincible troops.
Our fat friend, Mr. Macdonald, appeared at the Princes' Town Club one day when I happened to be there, and he, too, gave me anything but cheering news. Nearly every week, he told me, the guns of San Sebastian fired a salute in honour of another victory over the insurrectos. 'They're not showing fight anywhere; the President's troops are scouring the provinces and driving them from place to place, whilst his cruisers and gunboats scour the coast and prevent any arms or ammunition being smuggled ashore.' This made me jolly nervous about Gerald, and very miserable too, for he also had told me that Gerald's rubber plantation had been entirely destroyed in revenge for his taking up arms. It may have served him right, but it was beastly hard luck on the pater, who had bought the place for him.
Of course we seemed to be in the thick of everything, because Prince Rupert's Island was only fifty-two miles from the nearest point on the coast of Santa Cruz, and, as it was the centre of all the foreign trade of the Republic, the revolution, which was going on there, was practically the only thing talked about. By listening to the English merchants and officials talking at the Club we got to know quite a lot about the military position and the chances of the two parties.
You see the Republic of Santa Cruz stretches for almost a hundred and fifty miles along the eastern shore of South America, and is made up of three big provinces.
Starting from the south, there was the province of Leon, with its vast swamps, forests of mahogany, and other valuable trees, and its rubber and cocoa plantations. It was on the northern border of this province that Gerald had his plantation.
The capital and centre of its trade was San Fernando, situated at the top of a narrow inlet of the sea called La Laguna. Most of this trade was in the hands of Europeans, and the town itself was held for the President by a General Moros with about a thousand troops. From what we heard, he didn't worry much about anything, except to loot the Custom House occasionally or take bribes from the merchants and captains of trading-ships. The President always had a 'down' on this province, and hindered its trade as much as he could without stopping it altogether; and, after his old General had had a 'picking' at San Fernando, every ship had to stop at the narrow mouth of La Laguna and pay more dollars. The President had a pretty modern fort there—El Castellar—to make them heave to if they forgot to stop, and directly the revolution started he had given orders that no ships whatever were to be allowed to pass, so you can pretty well imagine how the English merchants cursed. Then northward of the province of Leon came the towering mountain ranges and plateaus of Santa Cruz, arid, and scorched, and dusty, rising almost precipitously from the forests of Leon, and falling again in terrific ridges and chasms into the northern province of San Juan, the eastern slopes falling into the sea as we had seen at Los Angelos. The mineral wealth—copper, gold, and silver—of the Republic was in these mountains, and they absolutely cut off the southern province of Leon from any communication with the northern province of San Juan. There were mountain paths and dangerous mule-tracks, but what I mean is that no armies could possibly assist each other across them, and old Canilla could sit up in Santa Cruz, at the top of his mountain, and jolly well choose his own time to crush any rising in the provinces spread out at his feet, and, so long as his Navy was loyal, could prevent any insurgents from one province getting to the other by sea.
However, there was one thing 'up against' the President. The province of San Juan bred all the cattle and live-stock of the Republic, and he was obliged to keep a big army down in the northern plains to guard them. Once the insurgents got the upper hand in San Juan he would have to depend entirely on importing cattle from the neighbouring Republics or from Prince Rupert's Island—not so much to feed his troops, but Santa Cruz itself.
Now you will have a rough idea how the land lay, and can understand that, so long as his Navy was loyal to him and prevented the two insurgent provinces on either side of him from combining, the President would be cock of the walk.
That was the opinion of nearly every one in Princes' Town, and, though they all favoured the insurgents and wanted them to win, they'd shake their heads and say that old Gerald's chances were pretty bad.
Then came news, from Santa Cruz, that there'd been a great battle fifty miles or so to the north'ard of San Fernando, and that de Costa's insurgent troops had been defeated with great slaughter. There was a rumour going through the Club that Gerald had been killed, but I couldn't find how it had started.
'Don't you worry. All my eye!' my chum 'in the know' said; 'de Costa isn't such a fool as to try a pitched battle yet. Wait for another six months. The President is only trying to bluff the people who are finding the money to keep his end up.' Then he told me something more about that big armoured cruiser La Buena Presidente.
He had an idea that de Costa's people were trying to get hold of her. 'If they do,' he said, 'she can simply wipe the floor with all Canilla's rotten old tubs, and his game will be finished in a couple of months.'
I couldn't help worrying about Gerald and the mater—when she heard the news—for she thought he was still tapping his rubber trees. It may have been because of that, but I played abominably against the Prince Rupert's Island team that afternoon. It was fearfully hot, the sweat seemed to make my eyes all hazy; my fingers were all thumbs, I fumbled my passes, and if I did gather them properly, could think of nothing except to get rid of the ball quickly, without passing forward. I was playing centre three-quarters, so messed up the whole of our attack and we lost badly. The Angel at 'half kept looking at me with a puzzled face, wondering what was wrong, and all our chaps were shouting themselves hoarse, 'Buck up, Wilson,' but nothing would go right, and directly after the match I trudged down to the Governor's steps by myself, to smoke a pipe and wait for our boat.
You know what it feels like to have lost the game for your side; so I wanted to be alone, slung my heavy sweater over my back, with the arms tied round my neck, put on my coat over it, and sat down where old Ginger and I had sat that time before.
I smoked and watched a crowd of niggers hustling round me unloading a lighter which had come ashore from one of Pickford and Black's steamers lying off in the harbour—she had come in from Los Angelos that morning—and had just taken off my straw hat to light another match inside it, when I heard a naked footstep behind me, a fierce kind of a grunting hiss, and something struck my shoulder.
I was on my feet and had turned in a second, and there was that little brute who had been shadowing Gerald, and had nabbed me up at Santa Cruz. He had a long knife in his hand, and I knew him at once, although he was dressed as a coolie, by the scar on his forehead—the one my pipe had made.
I had hold of his wrist in a jiffy, but it was all oily. He wriggled himself free, I made another grab at him, but he was like an eel, and bolted through the crowd of niggers. It was all done so quickly that no one seemed to have noticed him, and, though I dashed after him, I lost sight of the little beast. Something warm began trickling down inside my jersey, and I gave up following him to see what damage had been done. The knife had made a gash in the skin over my left collar-bone, and I was bleeding like a pig. Like an ass, I must have fainted, for when I woke up my head was resting in the huge lap of Arabella de Montmorency, who was pinching up the skin near the gash; there were crowds of jabbering niggers all squashing round me; the tall grave Sikh policeman had his notebook out, and I heard her chattering away: 'The good Lo'd be praised. He send Arabella to sab de life of de British naval officah—some black trash hab done dis—no buckra niggah from Princes' Town—oh, de pretty yellow hair.'
Luckily for me Dr. Clegg and the rest of the football team came up and rescued me, or the old 'washa-lady' would probably have kissed me.
Of course I was all right directly, and Dr. Clegg stitched me up when we got aboard, but I was on the sick list for a week. The knife had cut clean through the knot in the sleeves of my sweater, and this had probably saved my life. Strangely enough, when I got on board, there was a letter waiting for me from my friend the fat A.D.C., telling me, in very bad English, that Pedro Mendez—that was the name of the ugly brute—had been dismissed the police force for bungling Gerald's arrest, and had left Santa Cruz burning to be revenged on us both. The letter and the ex-policeman had probably come across together in the Pickford and Black steamer which I'd been watching.
It was awfully decent of my A.D.C. chum to have taken all this trouble to warn me, because it must have been jolly hard work for him to write a letter in English.
He signed himself Alfonso Navarro, and I shouldn't forget his 'tally' in a hurry. It wasn't his fault that the letter had been a bit late, and it didn't make me the less grateful.
The Angel and Bob, pale with excitement, came rushing into my cabin directly Dr. Clegg had finished with me, and of course they wanted to see the letter. Bob wanted the stamps and begged the envelope. He gave a whoop. 'Look at that, Billums—on the back—it's in French!'
Scrawled in pencil very hurriedly was Votre frère est blessé seulement dans le bras droit.
Phew! then there had been a battle after all, and I felt sick all over, because it struck me that my brother might have been captured, otherwise how would the A.D.C. know? And if he was captured, I knew it meant San Sebastian and a firing-party.
It was mail day too; I had to write home, and it was jolly difficult not to tell the mater what I'd heard about Gerald. I couldn't tell her about the little brute either—only about my having done so badly at football.
It was lucky I didn't say anything about Gerald, because three days later—Dr. Clegg still kept me in my bunk—one of our boats brought off another note to me.
'One of those nigger kind of chaps gave it me, sir,' the coxswain of the boat said. 'Didn't seem to talk English—nothing but your name, sir. He cleared out directly he'd got rid of it.'
I thought of Gerald's messenger and thought it must be from Gerald, though it wasn't in his handwriting. It was from Gerald, for all that, and I soon knew why the handwriting was so funny, for he wrote:
'We've had a bit of a scrap—got a bit of a shell in my right arm. Learning to write with my left—don't tell the mater. We got a bit of a hiding—my fault—I'm all serene barring the arm. You'll hear news, important news soon.—GERALD.'
Well, he wasn't a prisoner, which was the great thing, and I felt jolly cheerful again.
'Wouldn't it be ripping if we could get some leave and go over there and chip in?' Bob and the Angel said, their mouths and eyes wide open.
Of course that was what we all wanted to do, and wondered all this time why the English Government allowed the President to go on stopping our trade. It was jolly galling to all of us to see the fleet of local British steamers lying in Princes' Town harbour doing nothing, simply because the President up at Santa Cruz wanted to punish the insurgents. The English merchants were grumbling furiously, and wanting to know what use the Hector and Hercules were if they weren't to be used to protect their trade. Everybody was saying that it was a thousand pities that more people hadn't followed Gerald's example and gone in for the revolution 'bald headed.' In fact, Gerald had become a popular hero, and you can imagine how proud it made me. But then I got rather a nasty jar. The Captain sent for me, and I found him in his cabin with a lot of papers in front of him. He tut, tutted and hummed and hawed a good deal, and then burst out with: 'Look here, Wilson, you'd better give that brother of yours the tip to keep clear of Princes' Town or an English man-of-war. I've got orders to arrest him if I can get my hands on him. Look at this!' and he showed me a big document beginning,
'Whereas it has been represented to us by our Minister resident in Santa Cruz in the Republic of Santa Cruz that a person, Gerald Wilson—known as Don Geraldio—being a British Subject, has taken up arms against the Government of Santa Cruz Republic, that Government being at present on terms of friendship with his Britannic Majesty's Government, all law-abiding subjects of his Britannic Majesty are hereby warned, on pain of being indicted for felony, to abstain from affording any assistance to the aforesaid Gerald Wilson.'
I got very red in the face, and then came to the part,
'The utmost endeavour is to be made to arrest the aforesaid Gerald Wilson should he enter British Territory.'
That was roughly what I read, though I can't remember now the actual words, but it was so full of legal phrases that it made me feel cold all over. It seemed so beastly cold-blooded too, as if he hadn't already done more actually for old England than all the rest of us English out here put together.
'Well, boy, give him the tip to keep clear—that's all,' the Skipper said, screwing his eyeglass in and running his fingers through his long hair.
'I can't, sir,' I told him. 'I don't know where he is. He's wounded too, sir.'
Then I told him about the letters I'd received and how I'd got them.
'Well, well, boy, I can tell you. Tut, tut! Read that—I got it from our Minister this morning—brought across in a trading-schooner. You're not to speak of it till the news comes out.'
He was simply bubbling with pleasure, and handed me another paper.
'Received reliable news that General Moros abandoned San Fernando yesterday—insurgents, under Don Geraldio, occupied it immediately—Vice-President de Costa has formed a Provisional Government there. General Zorilla, Governor of Los Angelos, left Santa Cruz hurriedly this morning to take command of President's army in the south.'
That, then, was the important news Gerald had written to me to expect. I simply felt hot and cold all over with excitement and the pride of imagining him, with his yellow hair and his arm in a sling, head and shoulders above every one else, marching into San Fernando at the head of his troops; and to have the fierce old Governor of Los Angelos on his track—their best fighter—even that was simply glorious.
'Surely, sir, he won't be arrested if the insurgents win?'
The Skipper shrugged his shoulders. 'Those are my orders, whether he's a hundred Generals rolled into one, or even the President himself, so you'd better give him the tip.'
I went away feeling very proud of Gerald, but very upset about the other thing. It did seem such jolly hard lines after he'd risked everything to help the side that was friendly to Englishmen, and had made a great name for himself in the country, and made all these half-civilized people respect all Englishmen because of him. I was worrying about this in my cabin, and how I could manage to warn him, when Ginger came banging at the door.
'Look here, Billums, old chap, I've just come across from the Hercules. This has got to stop. D'you know what has happened now? One of your chaps in your picket-boat has smashed up our steam pinnace, rammed her whilst she was trying to get alongside the Governor's steps—cut her down to the water—did it on purpose.'
I had heard about it in the morning; Bob, who was running the picket-boat, had told me. Her pinnace had tried to get alongside before our boat, neither would give way, because the two mids. disliked each other so much, and there'd been a collision.
'It was your boat's fault, Ginger; she cut across our bows. I've reported it to the Commander.'
'Be blowed for a yarn. Our Padre was in the boat and said it was done on purpose—the whole boat's crew said it was. The mid. tried his best to get out of the way, and had his engines full speed astern. It was done on purpose, I tell you.'
'It wasn't,' I said, getting angry with Ginger. 'It was your confounded mid. who tried to cut across our bows, our Engineer Commander was in the boat and told me so. The picket-boat has had to be hoisted in with her stem smashed in. D'you mean to say you don't believe me?'
'Well, if it comes to that, d'you mean to say you don't believe me?' Ginger jerked out.
'No, I'm hanged if I do! you've got hold of the wrong end of the stick,' I said hotly.
'But, my dear chap, the Padre said——'
'I don't care a hang for your Padre—our Engineer Commander——'
'Then you won't take any notice of it?' Ginger was getting excited now.
'None,' I said, 'except to report your mid.'
'You won't cane your chap?'
'No, I'm hanged if I will. It was young Bob Temple, he's too stupid to try and do a thing like that. Your boat was simply poaching—I'm hanged if I'll cane him.'
Ginger's face looked as angry as mine felt, and he burst out with: 'Thank goodness, I haven't got a cousin aboard my ship, and ain't in love with his sister!'
Well, that finished me, and I swung off that if he thought that was why I didn't cane him he was welcome to think so for the rest of his blooming existence.
'All right,' he muttered angrily, 'I'll not trouble to try and patch things up again.'
'I hope you jolly well won't. If your chaps want to cut across our bows, tell 'em to look out—that's all.'
'You absolutely refuse?' he said very coldly.
'Absolutely,' I answered, just as icily, holding the door curtain back.
'All right; sorry to have troubled you,' and Ginger had gone up on deck before I could think of anything more, and I knew that we'd jolly well parted 'brass rags' at last—after all the times we'd sworn that we'd never let the gun-room quarrels make any difference to us.
I wanted to rush off to the Hercules and make it 'up' on the spot, but that beastly remark about Bob being my cousin—and the other thing—simply set me tingling all over, and I'd see him in Jericho first. If he thought that every time our midshipmen had a row, mine were to go to the wall, he was jolly well mistaken.
There was bound to be a row about the damaged boats, and there was—a regular Court of Inquiry—and a lot of hard swearing on both sides, the only result of which was that Ginger and I—we'd been glaring at each other all the time—got badly snubbed for not keeping better control over our gun-rooms.
Well, all this, coming directly after the worry about Gerald, made me feel pretty bad-tempered. I wanted Ginger to yarn with more than any one, but that was 'finish,' and, as my shoulder wasn't quite all right yet, I had nothing to do but wander about the ship like a caged monkey.
Every one knew about San Fernando in two or three days, and by the time my shoulder was all right and I could go ashore—you bet I kept my eyes skinned to see that chap who'd knifed me—news began coming pretty regularly from that town, brought by small sailing-boats which managed to get through at night—and most of it was pretty bad news.
Gerald and the insurgents had certainly got possession of San Fernando, but El Castellar, the strong fort at the narrow inlet to the bay, was still in the hands of the President, and still stopped all trade. Not only that, but, worse still, the Santa Cruz gun-boats slipped up there and amused themselves by bombarding the defenceless town. The whole Insurgent army didn't possess anything even as big as a field-gun, so the gunboats could fire away in comfort as long as their ammunition lasted. We heard that the warehouses and offices along the sea-front had already been practically destroyed by shell-fire. As these nearly all belonged to English firms, whose headquarters were at Princes' Town, the whole colony was in an uproar; and, much to our joy, our Skipper was ordered—from home—to take the Hector up to San Fernando and report on the state of affairs. You can imagine how excited we all were, and how I looked forward to seeing old Gerald bossing round in his General's uniform.
That chum of mine ashore—the man who seemed to be 'in the know'—came up to me in the Club, the day before we were to sail, and made me introduce him to the Skipper. 'I want him to take a few things to San Fernando for me,' he told me. 'I've got some machinery for one of our estates—it's been lying on the wharves for the last six weeks, and they can't get on without it.'
I didn't hear what passed between them, but knew that the Skipper was in such high spirits that he'd have done anything for anybody just then. And so it turned out, for that evening a lighter came alongside, and I had the job of hoisting in four large crates of hydraulic machinery, some boxes of shafting, and dozens of smaller crates. The Commander was furious, but the Skipper had said 'yes,' and although his jolly face fell when he saw how 'chock-a-block' the battery deck was, with all these packing-cases, he wouldn't go back on his word.
After we'd finished I was getting a bit of supper in the gun-room when O'Leary came knocking at the door and wanting to speak to me. He wouldn't come in. 'Beg pardon, sir, but I wants to 'ave a word with you, private like.'
'What is it?' I asked, taking him into my cabin.
He carefully pulled the curtain across, and then said in a half-whisper, 'We let down one of they small crates rayther 'eavy like, sir, and started one of the boards, sir.'
'That doesn't matter,' I said.
'Eh, but it do, sir! I banged 'im in again, but not afore I'd seen inside it—a hammunition box—sir—the same as what we've got for our twelve-pounder.'
My aunt! that made me all jumpy.
'Are you quite certain?' I gasped.
'As certain as I'm astanding 'ere, sir. That ain't no bloomin' 'ydraulic machinery—they boxes marked "shafting" be guns, sir, that's what they be.'
Hundreds of things rushed through my head.
'Did any one else see it?' I asked, and was jolly glad when he shook his head.
'N'ary a one, sir; I covered 'em up too quick; and I ain't going to tell no one neither, sir, for I 'ears your brother is takin' a leadin' part in this 'ere revolution, and maybe he'll be wantin' a goodish deal o' 'ydraulic machinery before he's through with it. That's why I tells you, sir. I couldn't keep it all to myself—in my chest—without tellin' some one.'
My brain was so hot that I couldn't think properly.
'Don't mention it to a soul; I'll think over it,' I told him.
'No, that I won't, sir; good-night, sir;' and O'Leary left me.
Well, if he was correct, and it was ever found out, the Skipper would get in an awful row; if any one found out that I knew about it, it would mean the 'chuck' for me, and if I told what I knew, and it turned out to be true, old Gerald wouldn't get his guns.
You can pretty easily guess what I did—kept as mum as a mummy—and how I gloated over all that jumble of boxes and packing-cases and the long boxes marked 'shafting for hydraulic machinery' when I walked through the battery next morning on my way to the bridge.
As we passed under the stern of the Hercules I saw Ginger on watch, and I was just going to wave to him when I remembered that we'd parted 'brass rags' and didn't. I wished to goodness that we hadn't quarrelled.
All that watch, as we drew nearer and nearer to the mainland, I kept on thinking of these crates and boxes, frightened lest any one else should have any suspicion about them, and couldn't help remembering the words in that document which the Skipper had shown me, 'All law-abiding subjects of his Britannic Majesty are hereby warned to abstain from affording assistance to the aforesaid Gerald Wilson, on pain of being indicted for felony.'
'Felony' has a jolly nasty sound about it. And there was another thing. Suppose Gerald came off to the ship when we anchored at San Fernando. Well, they couldn't arrest him unless he actually came aboard, and I determined to stay on deck all the time, and warn him off before he could get alongside. I'd tell all the watch-keeping lieutenants, and the 'Forlorn Hope' and the 'Shadow' too, for they kept watch in harbour.
CHAPTER VI
The Hector goes to San Fernando
Written by Captain Grattan, R.N., H.M.S. 'Hector'
As the English merchants in Prince Rupert's Island were kicking up no end of a fuss about the stoppage of their trade with Santa Cruz, I received orders from home to take my ship to San Fernando and report on the state of affairs there; so one morning I left old 'Spats' comfortably anchored off Princes' Town and toddled across. Young Wilson—my Sub-Lieutenant—has told you about that fort at the entrance to La Laguna, the fort which had been firing on our merchant steamers and stopping all trade to San Fernando, at the head of the bay, fifteen miles farther on, and as we steamed towards the gap in the high cliffs which marked the entrance, all of us on the bridge were anxious to know whether the insurgents had managed to capture it yet. We could see the little white lighthouse on the port side, the rambling white walls of the fort itself, perched high in the air, on the starboard side, and presently the yeoman of signals reported that a small cruiser, lying close inshore, was flying the Government colours—you could tell them because the stripes were vertical—so we guessed that it still remained in the President's hands.
The heat, however, was so great that the glare from the water and the mirage from the baking rocks made it difficult to see anything distinctly, and it was not till we drew nearer that we made out a large yellow and green flag, hanging limply down over the fort itself. That settled the question.
In another quarter of an hour we were passing through the entrance, when—well, I couldn't believe it myself, and I saw it, so can hardly expect you to believe it—the miserable sons of Ham in that fort had the colossal cheek to fire a shot across my bows.
'Accident, my dear boy!' I told Wilson, who was officer of the watch; 'of course it was an accident; but I'm blowed if, before we'd got a cable length past the entrance, a second shot didn't come along and make as neat a furrow across my fo'c'stle deck-planks as you'd see anywhere. It scattered the stokers and bandsmen basking under the awning, and I quite enjoyed their little obstacle-race into the shelter of the battery.'
'My dear boy, they don't mean it; but just put your helm hard a-port and go full speed astern starboard—if you please. Give 'em back a 9.2 common,[#] please, Commander; they've only fired by accident, but accidents are bound to happen sometimes in the best-regulated ships.' Round we swung on our heels—we just had room—and I dropped my eyeglass to laugh more easily, because that little cruiser—one of those piffling little things I'd towed out of Los Angelos six weeks ago—had hauled down her flag, and was scurrying off as fast as she could go. The poor idiots who'd had their little accident in the fort thought, I suppose, that we were running away, so didn't ease off again, and by the time Montague, my Gunnery Lieutenant, had reported the for'ard 9.2 cleared away, and the fo'c'stle awning had been furled, we'd turned and were coming back past the fort. 'Have your accident, Montague—as soon as you like; but I'll only give you one, so don't miss.'
[#] 'Common' = common shell, A thin-walled shell with a heavy bursting charge.
His accident was quite a success, and when the smoke of the bursting shell had cleared away, there was a hole in the walls through which even my coxswain could have steered the galley without breaking an oar, and that yellow and green monstrosity was being hauled down with a run.
Angry! Rather not! I can't afford to get angry; it's bad for my gout; I'd had my accident, and proceeded on my way quite ready to apologise for my gross carelessness directly they apologised for theirs. I suppose I should have had to be angry if that shell, or whatever it was, had killed any of my people—except my coxswain, and then I should have blessed them, for he was the most exasperating idiot I'd ever known.
An hour later we came up to San Fernando—a miserable deserted-looking collection of dingy white walls and warehouses, fizzling in the awful heat, and, 'pon my word, there was another dirty little cruiser there at anchor, with the yellow and green ensign flying, calmly potting at the town—firing a gun every other minute. We could not see what damage she was actually doing, but the white walls along the sea-front were riddled with holes, and that was good enough for me.
'Front row of the stalls, old chap,' I told my navigator, and though he'd have walked about on his head, or shaved it, if he thought it would please me, he hadn't a sense of humour, and looked puzzled. 'As close to her as you can,' I explained, 'between her and the town;' and there we dropped anchor, and awaited the next item on the programme. It was jolly lucky for her that she didn't have any accidents. We hadn't been comfortably anchored for more than five minutes before dozens of black and green flags were hoisted over the town, people began to venture out into the front street, and I had hardly gone below, when one of the signalmen came running down. 'A boat's pulling this way, sir, from shore, sir, with a black and green flag flying.'
My coxswain—I called him the 'Comfort' because he was such a nuisance to me—pulled my cap out of my hands and gave it me, seized my telescope from under my arm, rubbed the bright part up and down his sleeve, and handed it back, gave me two right-hand kid-gloves from the table, and I was ready to receive anybody, the Insurgent Provisional Government, or the Queen of Sheba, on my quarterdeck. A clumsy white boat, with a huge ensign, came wobbling off, very careful to keep us between her and the little cruiser. The crew were rowing atrociously, each man pulling the time that suited him best, and it occurred to me that perhaps the Provisional Government might possibly accept the services of the Comfort for their official barge. Then they were near enough for me to see that there was a white man there, among several dark-skinned people, under the stern awning—a white man with yellow hair and his right arm in a sling, my Sub's brother, as sure as life. I looked round and saw Wilson himself, the colour of a sheet, trying to attract the boat's attention, and looking piteously at me, 'Here! Hi! give me a megaphone—some one!' I sung out. A dozen people fell over one another to get one, and I shouted through it, 'Lay on your oars,' and when my Sub's brother had made them stop, I sang out, 'Is that Gerald Wilson aboard?'
"IS THAT GERALD WILSON ABOARD?"
'Yes,' he shouted, putting his head out from under the awning. 'Then, for goodness' sake, don't come aboard my ship, or I'll have to arrest you. I've got your warrant on board. You can come alongside, but don't leave your boat.'
'Thank you,' he shouted; and it amused me to see my Sub's face. I believe that he was even grateful enough to stop the mids. doing physical drill early in the morning over my head on the quarterdeck. The Provisional Government—for that it actually was—did manage to get alongside, and the first man to tramp up the ladder was the Vice-President—de Costa himself. I recognised him at once from having seen him in the cathedral at Santa Cruz. Poor chap, he had on a black frock-coat and beautifully brushed tall black hat—in that awful heat too. No wonder, if it was necessary, as head of the Provisional Government, to wear it, that he looked ten years older than when I saw him last.
His face looked more yellow and flabby, and his black eyes more shifty than ever. He bowed, and I bowed, and then he waved his secretary at me—a little chap in another frock-coat and silk hat who followed him. The little chap's patent-leather boots were giving him trouble, and he came along the quarterdeck on his toes, like a cat walking along a wall covered with broken glass. Fortunately he could speak a little English, and whilst his boss was mopping his forehead, he said, 'Presidente de Costa thank you for coming,' almost breaking himself in half, he bowed so low. Four or five more chaps came along, every one of them with an enormous black and green rosette in his coat. These were soldiers—two of them niggers—and very mild-looking soldiers they were, just the sort you'd imagine would hang about at headquarters, and get soft jobs where there weren't many bullets flying round. However, I was wrong in thinking so.
They spent half an hour on board, explaining that the Dictator's flag (Canilla's) flew nowhere throughout the province of Leon, except over El Castellar—the fort which had had the accident two hours before—and of course swore that they were now strong enough to march on Santa Cruz itself, and intended to do so very shortly. The upshot was that they demanded official recognition from the Foreign Powers. That was the whole matter; they wanted recognition so that they could buy warlike supplies from abroad openly, for of course at the present time no Foreign Power would allow its subjects to assist them. 'We have this policy foreign, we encourage the merchants, and we permit all trade very much of the foreign peoples, and very much the Inglesas also. Always they shall be first now that the noble Inglese ship of war visit San Fernando—the first ship to come,' the little secretary told me.
He looked so diminutive and so important, and was evidently in such discomfort with his boots and his tight frock-coat, that I had to screw my eyeglass into my eye till it pained—I wanted to laugh so much.
Not a word did they say about the little cruiser which was lying close by, waiting for a chance to pot them on their way ashore, or about the shell-marks on every wall. Not much, for that would have drawn attention to the perfectly obvious fact that they could do nothing till they had command of the sea, and also to the fact that they were absolutely without any artillery. A couple of well-fought six-pounder guns, if they'd had them, would have been quite sufficient to drive off the wretched little cruiser-gunboat kind of affair. Poor chaps! you couldn't help seeing that they were terribly in earnest, but I couldn't possibly give them any hopes of their Provisional Government being recognised, the most I could do was to forward their demand by 'wireless' to the Hercules at Princes' Town for her to cable home. I saw them over the side, and interrupted the brothers Wilson yarning at the bottom of the gangway.
'Ask your brother if he'll show me round the place if I come ashore for a toddle,' I sang out.
'Certainly, sir; he'll be only too pleased,' my Sub answered.
'If he dyed his hair I might ask your brother to dine with me to-night,' I told him, as we watched them slowly splashing ashore; 'I shouldn't recognise him with his hair dyed—not officially.'
Botheration take it! I'd never said anything about that wretched hydraulic machinery I'd been bullied into bringing across. Still, you can't talk to Provisional Governments about packing-cases, can you? However, my Sub relieved my mind on this point.
'I told Gerald that we had a lot of things for a firm here, sir,' he informed me. 'He's going to tell them.'
'Good lad! Good boy!' I said, and went below. The commander of the cruiser wasn't showing any signs of calling on me, in fact he was beginning to raise steam, so I got ready for my toddle ashore.
'Yes, please; usual leave to officers,' I told the Commander, who hammered at my door (he always was noisy, thought it made him breezy—it didn't), and sent the Comfort with my compliments to Dr. Watson, my Fleet Surgeon, and would he come ashore with me for a walk. He was so lazy that he wouldn't be able to walk far, and would therefore act as a check on my Sub's brother if he wanted to rush me over the country. I had thought of taking my Sub himself, but he couldn't come, had to get out that hydraulic machinery.
The Comfort and five loafing sons of sea-cooks, whom the Commander had given me as my galley's crew, pulled us ashore, and a miserable-looking place it was, a long sloping beach covered with rubbish and stinking seaweed, dead dogs here and there, and live ones, not much more healthy-looking, prowling about in search of food.
We ran alongside a crumbling wooden jetty, and Wilson was waiting for us, dressed in white duck riding gear, smart brown gaiters, and with a smart white polo helmet on his head. His arm in the sling gave just the wounded-hero appearance to complete the picture. He had a carriage waiting for us, but before we got in he pointed out a very weather-beaten pillar of granite, about five feet high, standing on the shore. 'Pizarro landed there with thirteen men in 1522 or thereabouts to conquer this country—thirteen men, their armour, and ten horses. Just think of it!'
This pillar was one of the most sacred things in the Republic, and there was a white flag flying close to it, so that the gunboats could give it a wide berth when they shelled the rest of the town. There were traces of shell-fire everywhere, but it was astonishing to see how little actual damage had been done. 'Five men and a little girl killed, and they've fired over six hundred shell into the town during the last fortnight,' Wilson told me. There was one two-storey house close by with at least twenty holes in the side facing the harbour, and yet it seemed little the worse—rather improved, from my point of view, because the holes increased the ventilation.
The place was swarming with people, practically all were men, and nine out of ten of them had rifles slung round their necks—a ragged unkempt-looking lot of scaramouches they were, you couldn't call them soldiers. Most of them had no equipment at all—a cotton bag to hold cartridges slung with string over their shoulders, a loose white shirt, and a ragged pair of cotton drawers, legs and feet bare, and very often nothing on their heads at all, or, if they had, a rough-plaited, wide-brimmed grass hat. Their attempts to salute, as Wilson and we drove along, were praise-worthy but ludicrous. There were shrill cries of 'Viva los Inglesas!' and they would have followed us if Wilson had not stopped them, but they were eminently respectful, and the slightest word he spoke seemed law to them.
'You're a bit of a nob here,' I said. I wanted to say 'my boy,' but I'm hanged if I could. He was two or three sizes too big for me, was Gerald Wilson. I'm a pretty big boss on board my ship, but I'm hanged if I was in it compared with him on shore. I've cultivated the 'for goodness' sake, get out of my way; don't you see it's me' air pretty successfully, but he'd got it to perfection, apparently without knowing it, and when he stopped the carriage, and we got out, he strode along with the chin-strap of his polo helmet over his grand square jaw—simply a blooming emperor.
He was taking us to the cathedral, on one side of the usual Plaza you find in all Spanish types of towns, and as we passed the 'Cuartel de Infanteria,' two or three hundred so-called troops were hurriedly forming in front of it. The trumpeter was the only chap in anything approaching a uniform.
'Kicked out of the regulars for blowing so badly,' Wilson said; and I didn't doubt his word when I heard him try to sound some kind of a salute.
'My dear chap!' Thank goodness, I stopped myself in time and didn't say that, but wanted to ask him if he thought it possible to knock the troops I had seen in Santa Cruz with these he had here.
There was something in his face, 'a keep off the grass' look, that made me, me a Post-Captain commanding one of the finest armoured cruisers in the Royal Navy, take soundings jolly carefully before I spoke to him.
He saw what I was thinking, and smiled, 'I'm licking them into shape gradually. We've only just begun.'
He took us into the cathedral, a crumbling old place with a huge crack across one side—the result of an earthquake some years ago—and the cool, musty, religious gloom inside was very comforting after the dazzle and glare of the sun outside. Two little stars of light, far away at the end of the chancel, made the gloom all the more mysterious, and then, as our eyes became more accustomed, we could make out the gaudy image of the Holy Virgin, looking down, with calm patient eyes, on the high altar and its tarnished gaudy tapestry.
At the foot of the steps, below the altar-rails, many women, shrouded in black hoods, were praying before it.
'They come here when the gunboats start firing; the cathedral is spared,' Wilson whispered, as we tiptoed out into the glare again.
'Where do the men go?' I asked.
'They carry on with their work,' he answered; and that came with rather a 'thump' after seeing the men. Perhaps they were better chaps than they looked.
'Not one shell in twenty bursts,' he said, as an afterthought.
Then he took us across the square to the English Club, the only clean, cool-looking building there, with a shady creeper-covered verandah all round it, and long easy wicker-chairs simply inviting rest.
'I shan't get you away from here, doctor, I fancy,' I said to the Fleet Surgeon, who was already streaming with perspiration, and I didn't. He went to sleep the whole of the afternoon in one of those chairs. We always chaffed him about the book he said he was writing: 'Clubs I have slept in.'
In the reading-room all the dear old English papers and periodicals, ten weeks old, were neatly laid on a table, and about a dozen thin, lantern-jawed Englishmen had come to welcome us. De Costa, looking nervous and uncomfortable, was there too, with his secretary (he'd changed his boots). We all had a green bitters, and I was given the longest cigar, and the best I'd smoked for many a day.
I wanted to do as Watson had already done—stretch myself on one of those long chairs on the cool verandah, with my feet up, and stay there till it was time to go aboard—but I was much too afraid of Wilson, and drove away again. 'I'll take it out of my Sub if his brother bullies me too much,' I chuckled to myself as we bounced along into the country to see what preparations were being made to defend San Fernando against the army which fierce old General Zorilla was leading to attack it. Luckily the carriage had an awning, but it was horribly hot all the same.
We got out of the town, passing along shady lanes, with little palm-hidden villas standing back in the shadows of olive groves and vineyards, and gradually clattered up to some high ground, a regular tree-covered ridge, at the back of San Fernando, from which we had a grand view of the town at our feet, the square cathedral tower, the grand sweeping bend of the head of La Laguna, and, far away to the left, the faint outline of the rocks which marked its inlet—El Castellar could not be seen because of the dazzling haze and mist which hung on the water. The wretched little cruiser had just weighed, and was steaming slowly past my ship, covering her with black oily smoke. I only hoped that the Comfort, or the officer of the watch, had had the 'savvy' to shut my stern windows.
Wilson turned me round to look inland.
Sloping gently downwards at our feet was some open ground, dancing in the heat, and pigs and goats and some wretched cattle were lazily browsing there. The road in which we were standing ran down it, a broad red streak, to a sluggish stream at the bottom, crossed it by a ford, and gently rose over some more bare, parched, open ground, and was swallowed in the dark shade of a forest. Everywhere beyond, look which way I would, there was nothing but forest, stretching away in the distance in every direction till the outlines of the trees were lost in a dim confusion of mist on the horizon. The town of San Fernando, but for that bare ground on each side of the stream which swept round it, was simply built in a great clearing, and it gave me the impression that that dark motionless forest was silently awaiting the opportunity to claim its own again and swallow it up.
'That is our first line of defence, and our last,' he said, sweeping his arm round the horizon.
'Sometimes, when it is not so hot, you can see the dim outlines of the mountains of Santa Cruz away over there,' Wilson said, pointing to the north. 'You see that road—Queen Isabella's road they call it—it runs straight as a die for fifty miles through the trees. Three hundred years ago the Spaniards cut it through the forest, and from here to Santa Cruz you could travel by coach in five days, but now the part through the mountains has been destroyed by earthquakes.'
'But where are your defences—your trenches?' I asked.
'We have none,' he said, 'we don't want any. General Zorilla is marching down that road to attack us. He is a grand old man' ('I know him: he is,' I said, beginning to understand), 'and a grand soldier, but his only way through fifty miles of virgin forest is along that road. It is a big job, and he knows it. Six days ago he and his army plunged into it, and they will never leave it, for my little brown forest-men, with rifles and machetes, hover all round him. We are drawing him on, the farther he gets away from Santa Cruz, the greater difficulty he has to feed his troops—he has four thousand of them and artillery—and is already short of food, sending out strong parties to forage, but they find nothing, and we capture fifty or sixty of his men every day.
'You see that dark mass over there?' he pointed.
I pretended I did see it.
'There's a big clearing close there—just twenty-four miles from here—and his army camped in it last night. My little chaps gave them a rotten time.'
I could not help thinking of those little brown-skinned, half-naked natives, with their bags of cartridges and their rusty rifles, gliding from tree to tree, through the thick undergrowth, and never giving the regulars a moment's rest, day or night. At night-time too! I shuddered to think of it, and began to have a most wholesome respect for those tattered ragamuffins of his.
'How many have you?' I asked him.
'I don't know,' he said. 'We have something like five thousand rifles, but whenever there is a spare rifle there are hundreds to claim it. Here come some who would be soldiers—that is, riflemen; they are taking food to the front.'
A long train of heavily laden mules came past us, ambling wearily down towards the stream, each mule led by a little native. As each passed he doffed his hat to Wilson, who stopped one of them and made him show me the machete he carried in his waistband—a long curved knife something like a bill-hook, only heavier, and not so curved and the blade broad at the end. I felt the edge; it was very keen.
'They can cut an arm clean through at a stroke,' he said; 'these machetes are better than rifles—at night,' and I shuddered again as the little man, with a grin of pride on his face, ran after his mule. It wasn't the kind of warfare I'd been brought up to. We watched them all splashing across the ford, forcing their mules through it as they tried to stop and drink. Before the last mule had entered the forest, the head of another train began to emerge from it.
'Those aren't mules,' I sang out, as they came towards us.
'They're horses,' he said, and walked down towards them.
There were thirty or more thin, hungry-looking beasts, with military saddles and equipment, each led by a little native, whose eyes sparkled with pleasure as he saluted Wilson.
'That's good news,' he said, after speaking to one of them; 'we cut off a whole squadron of Zorilla's cavalry early this morning. These are some of the horses. Look at the boots the men are wearing!'
I hadn't noticed them before, but now I couldn't help smiling, for the little half-naked men were shambling along with big cavalry boots on their feet, the soft leather 'uppers' half-way up to their knees.
'Quaint little chaps, aren't they? Their whole ambition is to be proper soldiers. The first thing they want is a rifle, and the next boots. They'll wear these now till their feet are so blistered that they can't walk with or without them.'
'Surely Zorilla will have to fall back,' I said, as we drove back to the town.
He shrugged his shoulders. 'My only fear is that he will break away towards El Castellar. About sixteen miles along that road there is a forest track leading there, and he may have to fall back on it; but he'll have to leave his wagons and his guns if he does, and his reputation will be lost. He's been ordered to attack San Fernando, and the fierce old man will do so, even if he and his two "A.D.C.'s" are the only ones left.'
We rattled past the string of captured horses, and drove down to the shore where I had landed, calling at the Club, on the way, to wake the Fleet Surgeon and bring him along.
Two big lighters were aground at the bottom of the beach, and hundreds of natives were swarming round them, wading into the water, bringing ashore the packing-cases of hydraulic machinery, and making a noise like a lot of bumble-bees as they dragged them up the sloping foreshore.
Thank goodness we'd got rid of them at last, for the Commander had been like a bear with a sore head ever since those cases had lumbered up his battery.
'Why the dickens don't they get rid of their rifles when they're working?' I asked, because most of them had rifles slung over their backs.
Wilson smiled, 'That's a regulation I've made. If a man drops his rifle for any purpose whatsoever, any man without one may pick it up and becomes a soldier and a caballero—a gentleman—and has a machete man to carry his food for him on the march. That's why they won't part with them!'
That was a quaint idea if you like.
My galley was waiting alongside the little tumble-down jetty, and the Comfort pushed his way through a crowd of awestruck natives to give me a signal-paper. 'The Commander thought you'd like to see it, sir—a "wireless" from the Hercules.'
I read, 'La Buena Presidente, under command of Captain Pelayo, left the Tyne yesterday.'
I thought it would interest Wilson, so I read it to him.
His eyes gleamed. 'What! Captain Pelayo! That's Captain don Martin de Pelayo—our man—a de Costa man—he's managed to get hold of her after all,' and he sang out some gibberish to the natives standing round. In a moment they had leapt in the air, shouting and waving their hats, and hugging each other, bolting away towards the town screaming shrilly, 'La Buena Presidente! La Buena Presidente! Viva Capitaine Pelayo!'
I had some inkling of what had happened.
'Don Martin was the best captain in the Navy,' Wilson told me; 'chucked out because he demanded ammunition for his ships. We sent him to England, and if that telegram is correct, he has managed to get hold of the big cruiser. In three months de Costa should be President of Santa Cruz.'
I could not help telling him—not officially, of course—how glad I was; and as my lazy crew pulled us aboard, the town seemed to be buzzing like a bee-hive, the bells in the cathedral ringing joyously, and green and black flags hanging over every building.
'Your brother wants you to ride out to the front with him to-night,' I told my Sub. 'You can go when you like.'
As usual, the most beautifully cool crisp night followed the terrible heat of the day, and the town of San Fernando looked extremely picturesque, a mass of white roofs and clear-cut shadows, bathed in the light of a full moon. The road leading up the ridge behind the town stood out a silvery streak, and the mere thought of it, plunging into the appalling shadows of that grim forest beyond, made me shiver as I held my breath and listened for sounds of the struggle I knew must still be going on twenty miles away. Huddled together in some clearing of the forest, or strung wearily along the road, brave old Zorilla and his half-fed men were still surrounded by those fierce, silent, little forest-men with their terrible machetes, their bags of cartridges, and their rusty rifles. I turned in feeling rather creepy, and hoped that my Sub wouldn't do anything foolhardy.
What he did he will tell you himself.
CHAPTER VII
General Zorilla falls back
Written by Sub-Lieutenant William Wilson, R.N.
You may bet that I was glad to see Gerald, and to know that, although he still kept it in a sling, his arm was practically well again. I had a long yarn with him in that boat alongside, and told him my suspicions about the so-called hydraulic machinery we had brought across from Princes' Town. He knew that two 4.7's on field-carriages, four field-guns, and two pompoms, with plenty of ammunition, had been waiting there for weeks, so I pretty well guessed that they weren't very far away now, and implored him to send lighters off for them as quickly as he could, before any one else gave the show away. He had to wait for the Provisional Government, but could not have wasted a moment after he did land, for hardly had the Skipper and the Fleet Surgeon gone ashore than lighters came hurrying off, and I had the job of hoisting all those packing-cases into them, my heart in my mouth all the time lest anything should happen. Careful! Why, I lowered them down as if they were new-laid eggs or valuable china.
'What the Moses d'you mean by taking such a confounded time?' the Commander bellowed, and stood by my side yelling down orders to hurry. Thank goodness, O'Leary was in charge of the working party, and wouldn't be hurried for any one, although the Commander kept on shouting that he was a disgrace to his uniform, and that he'd disrate him to ordinary seaman.
Didn't I feel relieved when the last little lot had shoved off from the ship and was on its way ashore, the Santa Cruz cruiser taking no notice whatever. She didn't seem to suspect anything, got up her anchor, and steamed down towards El Castellan.
When we received that wireless message from the Hercules, nobody had the slightest idea that La Buena Presidente had actually been collared by the insurgents, so you can imagine how happy I felt when the Skipper came off and told me. He was as pleased as I was. 'Fine chap, your brother! The Provisional Government isn't in the running with him. He's the boss.'
He told me, too, that Gerald wanted me to ride out to the front with him that very night, gave me forty-eight hours' leave, and, fearfully excited, I dashed below. Bigge, Montague, Perkins, the Forlorn Hope and the Shadow, Dr. Clegg—nearly every one, in fact—came along to have a word with me, whilst I tumbled into riding breeches, flannel shirt, and jacket—they would all have given anything to be going too. The Angel and Bob filled my 'baccy' pouch, and I stuffed some sandwiches into a haversack; the Angel lent me his panama hat, and then I jumped into the skiff, and was just shoving off when O'Leary came running down the ladder.
'The petty officers, sir, are going to ask leave to-morrow, sir. I'm thinking that that 'ere 'ydraulic machinery kind of wants a little putting together, sir.'
'What the dickens d'you mean by delaying my skiff? Shove off in that boat or you can swim ashore,' the Commander bellowed at me, from the top of the ladder, as a parting shot.
I was so happy that I can hardly describe how I felt when I did get ashore. It was just getting dark, and the last of those packing-cases was being carried away by a crowd of men still chanting, 'Viva los Inglesas! Viva La Buena Presidente!' and the little messenger who had brought Gerald's letter to Princes' Town was waiting for me, with a broad smile on his face. He was dressed very smartly as a groom, with a clean white shirt and clean white duck riding breeches. He had one of Gerald's old polo helmets on his head and a brilliant red sash twisted round his waist, but his feet and legs below the breeches were bare. He looked very proud of his finery, and guided me quickly to the Club, along dark narrow streets, and across the square, where hundreds of natives were lighting camp fires.
Gerald was there.
'Come along, the horses will be round in a minute. You will do all right,' he said, glancing at my rig-out. He introduced me to several Englishmen; they all shook hands; we toasted La Buena Presidente and Captain Pelayo, the Hector, 'Old Tin Eye,' and the King. My head was in a whirl; horses came round; I sprang on one, half-a-dozen chaps were round me making my stirrup-leathers comfortable; Gerald was helped into his saddle (his right arm was still in a sling); some one sang out from the dark Club verandah, 'Three cheers for the two Wilsons,' and off we cantered, the little groom, with his red sash, on ahead, and half-a-dozen natives clattering behind us on more horses.
My horse was one of Gerald's own—Jim—a grand little stallion with a mouth as soft as anything, and he arched his neck, snorted, and danced about like a kitten. 'I wish you'd given me an English saddle,' I told Gerald presently, for this one was a huge native thing with a back to it and a big raised pommel in front. It was impossible to fall out of it, except sideways, and you could not do that very easily, because the stirrups were such a queer shape that your feet couldn't slip out of them. But every other second either the back or the front part thumped against me.
'Lean well back, Billums, you'll find it all right then—you'll be glad of it soon—we've got a twenty-mile ride in front of us.'
I did get used to it in time.
It was absolutely dark now; Jim had stopped cantering and had fallen into an amble; we got into some lanes under trees, and fireflies were darting from side to side ahead of us. It was simply grand, and I jolly well wished old Ginger was there with us; he would have enjoyed it immensely. I was so annoyed, and despised myself so much for having quarrelled with him, that it really made me miserable every time I thought of him. At the top of a ridge we stopped, Gerald wanted to speak to some native soldiers who silently stole past us in the darkness, and got me to fill his pipe for him. Off we went again, the soldiers cheering my brother and the big ship which was coming to knock the Santa Cruz Navy out of time; down a hill we clattered, splashed through a ford, trotted uphill, and then suddenly plunged into absolute darkness.
'We're in the forest, Billums,' Gerald sang out; 'old Zorilla's in the middle of it. You'll hear bullets before the sunrise.'
I didn't feel quite so enthusiastic about bullets just then—it was too gloomy under those trees—and it was lucky that the horses could see where they were going, for we ourselves could not.
We kept on meeting long strings of pack mules on their way back from the front, and some of them were carrying wounded men. It was jolly disconcerting at first, because they came upon you so suddenly, and made so little noise—the men being barefooted and the mules unshod. On ahead we'd hear our little messenger-groom sing out something, and then we'd come right on the long string of dark shadows, the mules breathing heavily under their creaking packs as they shuffled past.
Gerald told me they were clearing the country of food, and were taking it all into San Fernando.
'How did you learn all this war business?' I asked him, after he had told me his plans.
'Common sense, Billums, common sense!'
There was no need for me to ask him why he'd left his rubber plantation.
'Getting enough excitement?' I asked.
'Not yet,' he said, stopping for me to fill his pipe again.
'Do you know,' he said presently, 'that, nearly three hundred years ago, twenty-two Spanish cavaliers rode along this road, as we are riding to-night, to capture Santa Cruz city. San Fernando was a fortified Spanish settlement then, and a native ruled in Santa Cruz. He'd collared the Governor's daughter; she'd been shipwrecked somewhere up the coast whilst on her way to Spain, and the twenty-two in their armour—fancy armour in this climate—riding their big Spanish horses, with a couple of hundred native bowmen in their quilted cotton armour[#] to help them, actually sacked the town. They stopped there, too, and built the fort of San Sebastian.'
[#] In those days the natives wore thick quilted coats, stuffed with cotton fibre, as a defence against sword-cuts.
'Did they rescue the girl?'
'Yes,' Gerald told me. He was full of such stories—the good news about La Buena Presidente had made him quite talkative—and you can imagine how the glamour of the past chivalry excited me. I almost imagined to myself that I was in armour, and should presently have to put lance in rest and charge through crowded ranks of archers and swordsmen.
At about nine o'clock that night we crossed a small stream, and stopped at a Posada, or wayside inn—very cheerful it looked under the trees, with a blazing log-fire gleaming through the open windows. People came hurrying out to take our horses, and Gerald and I had a grand feed. They cooked a ripping omelette, and their home-made bread was grand.
'Feeling better now?' Gerald asked me, as I stretched myself and asked for another omelette.
Before we had finished, a lot of officers rode up and came in—all very courteous—and I looked at them curiously; for they had just come back from the firing line, and their white cotton or blue-striped uniforms were covered with mud. When they first came into the room they all stared at the two of us, not quite knowing, for a moment, which was which. One of them, who particularly attracted me, was very short and fat with bandy legs. He had a broad-brimmed, soft felt hat on his head, the front turned up, his face and neck almost hidden by great bushy black whiskers, and he was so stout that his sword-belt wouldn't meet, and was fastened with cord. He had jolly, twinkling eyes, as black as night, and in the flickering shadows of the wood-fire looked like a gnome or goblin under that huge hat. He was very proudly handing round a large revolver for every one to look at, showing grand white teeth as he smiled, and shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands. Gerald handed it to me: 'He captured a cavalry officer this morning, and bagged this.'
The little 'Gnome' drew his stool across and explained its action. It was a Webley-Foster automatic revolver, and as I had not seen one before, I was jolly interested. I liked the little chap very much, and could just imagine him tackling one of those beautifully dressed dandies of cavalry officers we had seen at Santa Cruz.
These officers had come to tell Gerald how everything was progressing at the front, and they seemed to be holding a council of war, or rather listening to what Gerald had to tell them; for my brother was laying down the law pretty considerably.
At last everything was satisfactorily settled, there was more bowing, and most of them rode off again into the forest.
'Everything going on all right,' Gerald told me. 'Come along; hope you aren't getting stiff.'
We left the cheerful fire; the innkeeper refused any money; my brother sang out, 'José! José!'; the little groom with the red sash brought our horses round, and, with the 'Gnome' and three or four other officers, we were just going to mount when a dozen little machetos came up, leading some men. As they got into the light I saw that these were regular troops, and had yellow and green rosettes on their hats, tall, gaunt, hungry-looking chaps they were, and very much relieved when they saw my brother. He spoke to them and the excited little chaps guarding them, and then off we started.
'Deserters,' he told me. 'They all have the same tale; not enough food.'
Although 'deserter' has a horrid sound to it, I felt sorry for them, they looked so miserable, and meeting them seemed to make Zorilla's army, of which I had heard so much, much more real. I watched them being taken away to San Fernando, till they were lost in the darkness.
A full moon had risen whilst we were having our meal, and where the trees did not meet across the road there were patches of very comforting light. However, the moonlight on the road made the forest on either side of us look blacker and more forbidding than ever, and when two of the officers turned into it, by a path their horses seemed to know, I felt jolly glad I wasn't going with them.
'We had a bit of a scrap this afternoon, Billums,' Gerald told me, 'and lost a few people. Old Zorilla fought his way along to another clearing, but we captured some more of his cavalry, and he's left a field-gun behind him. The horses and rifles will be very useful to us.'
'How far off is he now?' I asked excitedly.
'About eight miles: Zorilla has halted for the night and our people are all round him again. He can't move till daylight. He has only advanced four miles since yesterday; his men are so played out, and his horses too. I can't understand him. It seems absolute folly to do what he is trying to do, especially as his chaps are deserting.'
My supper had made me rather sleepy, but presently, a long way in front of us, I heard the report of a rifle, and sat up so quickly that I bumped my back against that wretched saddle.
'That was a rifle! That's the first I've heard fired in war,' I cried out, and I felt fearfully excited, wondering where the bullet had gone. You bet that my ears were tingling to hear more, but none came for some time, only the crackling and rustling of dead branches snapping in the darkness on either side of us. Then three or four went off, still a long way ahead, and as each one cracked I could not help thinking: 'I wonder what that hit.'
Without meaning to do so, I dug my heels into Jim's ribs and made him go faster, but my brother sang out, 'No hurry, Billums,' and I pulled him back. I believe the little stallion was getting as excited as I was.
Away to the left there were some more shots, and then suddenly, right in our faces, a red glare shone through the trees, coming and going so quickly that I'd only time to say 'Oh!' before it had disappeared, and almost immediately afterwards there was another brighter glare and a tearing bursting noise. It didn't seem a hundred yards ahead of us, and the little stallion, Jim, began jumping about.
'What was that?' I sang out, though I knew perfectly well that it was a shell, but couldn't help singing out, my nerves were so jumpy. A scraggy spluttering volley came back from the trees, and then all was still again.
'Zorilla is firing a field-gun down the road,' my brother said; 'I wonder what good he thinks he is doing.'
I heard a crash and a noise of breaking branches. 'What's that, Gerald?'
'My chaps are cutting down trees to haul across the road,' he answered; 'making a barricade.'
That glare—more distinct now, and right in front of us—showed up again, and a shell came tearing and crashing through the trees on one side of us, and we heard a soft 'plump' as it buried itself in the ground without bursting. There was the crash of another volley, and then nothing but darkness and silence.
'Our chaps see them when they fire that gun, and let "rip" with their rifles,' Gerald told me. His coolness irritated me, for my nerves were tingling all over with excitement and the funny feeling inside me of being under fire for the first time. I rather wondered whether Ginger would have felt as—well—nervous if he had been here. I'd never known him frightened at anything. A little further along a couple of wagons slowed up in a patch of moonlight at the side of the road, some ragged little natives hovering round them. Gerald stopped a moment to speak to a white-faced officer, and on we went again. 'That's our only doctor, Billums; we keep him pretty busy.' If that was the doctor I knew that we must be close to the firing line, and my heart began thumping very rapidly. We could only go very slowly now, because the road was blocked with wagons and mules jumbled together.
'Jump off, Billums; keep close to me!' Gerald sang out cheerily.
I was jolly glad to be on my feet again, and followed him, José taking the horses. On each side of us I heard axes chipping, a tree fell with a crash quite close to me, and then we got up to the barricade which they were building across the road. Men were swarming here, some dragging more trees out of the forest, others cutting off small branches with their machetes.
'The field-gun is right ahead,' my brother said; 'they'll be firing again in a minute or two.' He'd hardly spoken before I saw the glare of it, heard the dull bang, and a shell burst overhead. It lighted us for a second; I saw hundreds of the little brown chaps in their white shirts scurrying about among the trees, and then a regular hail of shrapnel bullets spattered on the road and against the tree-trunks, more rifles went off, and bullets sang past. Behind me a mule screamed, fell on the ground with a thud, and began kicking. I felt myself wriggling up against the barricade for shelter, but Gerald sang out for me, and I followed him round it to the road, in between it and the gun. I didn't like being there, in the open, a little bit.
'Must do it, Billums—we're the only Englishmen here—must go to the outpost lines—they're a hundred yards ahead of us—come on,' and he began striding along the road, very conspicuous in his white clothes, and, as far as I knew, walking straight towards that field-gun.
I found myself trying to walk behind him, but pulled myself together and walked by his side. 'We're at the edge of the clearing now,' he said; 'bear off to the right,' and you may guess how glad I was to step off the road. We wormed our way in among the trees, and Gerald had just whispered, 'We're right in the skirmishing line,' when a rifle went off not two yards from me, and I jumped almost out of my skin. Rifle firing burst out to right and left—I could see the little spurts of flame among the trees—and then a very short way in front and below hundreds of rifles went off and bullets flew past, branches and leaves falling down behind me.
Gerald pulled me round some thick undergrowth and whispered, 'Look down there.' I peered through and could see nothing at first, but our people fired again, and immediately I saw hundreds of little spurts of fire—a whole line of them. Then that field-gun fired—the flash seemed almost in my face—and for a second I saw the glitter of the gun itself and the dark figures of the men fighting it.
'The whole of Zorilla's army is there,' Gerald was saying, when we heard cheering running far into the woods on each side, down below, and then sweeping far away—it seemed to be running round a huge circle. I could hear 'Viva La Buena Presidente! Viva La Buena Presidente!'
'They've heard the good news; old Zorilla will pretty well guess what it means. Like a shot, Billums?' and Gerald sang out to the native crouched down beside us. He gave me his rifle with a soft cooing 'Buenos, Señor!' and I leant it against a branch and tried to see something to shoot at, my fingers trembling with excitement. 'Wait till you see the flashes of their next volley, and try and get your sights on,' Gerald said, and I knew that he was smiling. I didn't wait, I thought I saw something, and fired, the recoil bumping my shoulder because I hadn't held the rifle closely enough. It seemed to start every one else firing, and the regulars began firing volleys; you could see the ring of rifle spurts below us, thousands of them, and bullets were flying overhead, pit-patting against the trees, and cutting off branches and leaves.
'"Any one assisting the aforesaid Gerald Wilson will be——"' Gerald chuckled.
'Shut up, you ass,' I sang out. The native gave me another cartridge, and, the field-gun blazing again, I just had time to get my sights more or less 'on' and fire, which started all our chaps easing off too.
'Can't afford to keep you in the firing line,' Gerald chuckled, and took me back. 'You've made my people waste about two hundred rounds, and I can't afford to waste one. Listen to Zorilla's chaps. You'd imagine they had millions to blaze away.
'Something's wrong, Billums; I can't make it out. He usually keeps quite quiet, he's too clever at this game to throw away a single round. You'd imagine from that field-gun firing down the road, and from all those volleys he's firing, that he means to advance this way.'
He was talking as coolly as a cucumber; I was sweating with excitement. 'There's a mule track through the forest from here to El Castellar, and I believe he means to break away there. That's why I came out to-night—to make sure which way he's going. We'll know soon.' We got back behind the barricade, and several hundred of the little brown, whited-coated men began gathering there, gliding noiselessly out from the trees. The moon was hidden now, and it was pitch dark, so that I couldn't see them, except for a moment when the field-gun fired, but only hear them murmuring to each other all round me.
To know that there were four thousand regulars standing by to attack us, in the dark, was anything but comforting, and the bullets whipping past were not any too comforting either. All this while Gerald had been talking to some officers, the 'Gnome' among them, but now they went away, and he came to me.
'This excitement enough?'
'I should think it was,' I told him—rather too much if I had told him the truth. I supposed I should get used to it, but suddenly to find myself in the middle of a fight, in a forest, in the dark, was just a little bit too trying, especially when not a soul, except Gerald, could understand a word I said.
Just then I heard a lot of firing much farther away on our front, and some messengers came dashing up, singing out, 'Yuesencia![#] Don Geraldio!'
[#] 'Yuesencia' is a contraction for 'excellencia.'
'It's just as I thought, Billums; that firing at us was all a bluff. Zorilla has broken through our chaps on the right and is marching along the track to El Castellan.'
Somebody brought a lantern, and he began scribbling orders, tearing the pages out of a note book and handing them to messengers, who ran off. He was doing it quite calmly, and was actually smiling. Some officers sitting on the ground, with their swords over their knees, looked absolutely played out, but they roused themselves when Gerald spoke to them, got on their feet, and took their natives into the forest again.
'If these messengers do their work in time,' he said, 'Zorilla will never get through to El Castellan. I've turned on the machetos. We'll go round there and see how things are going.'
I shuddered to think of these little chaps, with their awful-looking machetes, gliding among the trees all round them.
He had just sent for our horses, when another bare-footed messenger came panting into the light and was led up to him.
Something glittered in his hand; he held it out to Gerald, and what do you think it was? My cigarette case!
'It's mine,' I sang out; 'I changed cases with Navarro, Zorilla's fat little A.D.C., when he was decent to me in San Sebastian.'
'Well, he's a prisoner now and badly wounded,' Gerald said, after he'd spoken to the man. 'He's sent it to me hoping I shall recognise it and do something for him. He was in command of a foraging party we cut off this morning, and is lying with the rest of the wounded in some hut about two miles away—so this man says.'
Well, it was up to me to do something for him, and I told Gerald so.
'Right you are,' Gerald nodded. 'This chap will show you the way. You'll be as safe as a house with your yellow head of hair. Do what you like. He's badly wounded, I fancy. Get back here by daylight, and if you don't find me, make your way into San Fernando.'
I looked at my watch by the lantern light. It was ten minutes to one, and there would be another two hours and a half before daylight.
In five minutes I was on my horse, the man who'd brought my cigarette case was leading him, and we had plunged into the forest to the left of the road, Gerald going away to the right, after Zorilla. How the little chap found his way I don't know, but he did somehow or other, cutting through the brushwood with his machete, and jabbering to me in Spanish all the time.
The bush and the fallen trees were so treacherous that, after Jim had stumbled badly once or twice, and was trembling with fright, I got off and helped to lead him too, and wished I'd left him behind.
Now I had a job of my own to do, I didn't mind the beastly darkness, and gradually gave up jumping with funk whenever some natives glided past, speaking softly to my little chap, and then hurrying away to the right. I'd hear, 'Yuesencia!' 'Hermano!' 'Don Geraldio!' and they'd disappear.
The field-gun had stopped firing, but rifle firing was continuous, and seemed to be travelling away towards El Castellan.
Once we met quite a large party, with an officer, all hurrying after Zorilla, and he would not let us pass till he'd struck a match and seen my face. That was enough for him, and he passed on, full of apologies.
This made me think, more than ever, what a 'boss' old Gerald was, and what a 'boss' I was, too, simply because I had the same coloured hair.
Somehow or other, after barking my shins and elbows a dozen times, we got to a small clearing, where there was a kind of a hut and a jolly welcome light burning in it.
Some one shouted, 'Quien Vive!' my guide answered, 'Paisano! La Buena Presidente!' and a score of natives thronged round us, bowing, taking my horse, and saying, 'Buenas,'[#] Yuesencia!' I went into the hut, and found about fifteen men lying on the ground or propped up against the wall—cavalry men all of them—and I spotted my little friend, although he'd grown a scraggy beard.
[#] Short for 'buenas noches!' = good-evening.
He was as white as a sheet, and seemed rather 'off his head.' 'El Medico,' he sang out, as I went in—all of them sang out, 'El Medico,' holding out their hands to make me notice them.
'William Wilson,' I said, and held out the cigarette case he'd sent me, but he only looked at it vacantly, muttered, 'El Medico!' again, and his chin dropped on his chest I thought he was dying, and was in a terrible stew. I couldn't see any wound about him, and felt his arms; they were all right, and I felt his legs. Ugh! then I knew, for half-way above his left knee the bone was sticking through a rent in his breeches and they were sticky with blood. He groaned when I touched it, muttering, 'El Medico'—'San Fernando!' 'Ag-ua! Agua!'
One of the machetos brought him some water.
I scratched my head, I didn't know what to do, and he went on rambling, 'Zorilla,' 'El Castellar,' 'William Wilson,' 'Don Geraldio'—'El Medico'—'San Fernando.'
'All right, old chap, I'll get you to San Fernando if I can,' I said to myself.
Well, I knew enough about 'first aid' to lash the two legs firmly together, and somehow managed to make the natives understand that I wanted a stretcher. They made a rough litter out of branches in next to no time. I found a blanket tied to the saddle of a dead horse outside the hut, and covered the litter with it, and then I told off four of the most sturdy of the machete men to carry him. They obeyed me like lambs.
I hated to have to leave these other wounded men there—they cried piteously when they saw me going—but there were not enough natives to carry them, so I could not help it. I would try and get Gerald to send for them.
Phew! it was bad enough for me, but poor little Navarro, in his stretcher, had a most awful time as we stumbled back through the forest—he was shrieking with agony,—and when we struck the old Spanish road again, after a most fearful time struggling among trees and brushwood, he was quite delirious. You can imagine how thankful I was to feel it under my feet, and, leaving him on his litter by the roadside, and tying my horse to a tree, I tramped down towards the barricade.
It was just getting light enough for me to see some empty deserted wagons standing at the roadside and the fallen tree-trunks dragged across it, but there was not a single living man there, only one or two dead men hanging across the barricade, with their machetes still in their hands.
I had not heard the field-gun firing for at least an hour, the rifle firing had died away almost as long ago, and it was quite plain that every one had followed Zorilla towards El Castellar.
I climbed round the barricade and walked rather nervously down towards where the field-gun had been, and stopped because the weirdest sounds were coming up from below.
CHAPTER VIII
Zorilla loses his Guns
Written by Sub-Lieutenant William Wilson, R.N.
As I stood there, rather nervous and uncertain what to do, listening to the queer noises which were coming up from the clearing, where Zorilla's army had camped the night before, I heard the sound of naked feet, and stepped back among the dark trees. There was just sufficient grey light for me to see the road, and, as I watched it, two natives, breathing very heavily, hurried past me. They were weighed down with all sort of things; one had a saddle over his head and a huge cavalry sword under his arm, and the other had covered himself from head to foot with a blue cavalry cloak.
I guessed now what those noises were, and felt certain that Gerald's people were busy in the clearing looting the camp. I don't quite know why I went down there, but I did, and it was a most extraordinary sight in the uncertain light. First I came to that field-gun which had fired at us, its wheels and small shields white with bullet-marks. An empty ammunition limber was standing behind it, and the naked bodies of two dead men lay close by, mixed up with some dead mules. I stepped across them, and came upon a lot of regulars sitting at each side of the road, quite a couple of hundred of them, with their hands tied behind their backs. Poor wretches, they looked as if they expected death at any moment.
Hundreds of natives were swarming round some wagons, hauling boxes out, forcing them open with their machetes and scattering the contents on the ground; and a dozen of them were fighting over a case of brandy, breaking the necks off the bottles, and cutting their faces and hands in their struggles to drink some of the stuff. Nobody was taking the slightest notice of two field-guns, with their limbers and mule teams, which were standing in the road a few yards further down. The little half-drunken brutes were simply looting as hard as they could, not even troubling to pick up the rifles which lay about in hundreds. I felt sure that Gerald had sent them to take the guns into San Fernando, and, jolly angry, strode down between the two rows of prisoners, who, seeing me, thought I was Gerald, and began singing out a whining 'Don Geraldio! Don Geraldio!' I saw by their uniforms that they belonged to the same regiment as those fellows who had collared me in Santa Cruz, and that didn't make me love them any more, but their mistaking me for Gerald gave me an idea.
Close by, an officer lay drunk as a fiddler, another had broken the neck of a champagne bottle, and was trying to swallow the stuff before it bubbled all away. I seized him by the neck, knocked the bottle out of his hand, and shook him.
He turned round, looked at me, and fell on his knees in absolute terror. I jerked him to his feet, singing out, 'San Fernando!' sweeping my arm round the camp, pointing to the guns, and then along the road towards the barricade.
'San Fernando!' I roared. He had a revolver in his belt, I pulled it out—it was unloaded, but that did not matter—and ran up to the wagons, kicking and cuffing the miserable wretches. They shrieked out, 'Don Geraldio!' and bolted, but two of them.—rather drunk they were—came for me with their machetes, and didn't stop when I pointed the revolver at them.
It was a jolly awkward moment, but I gave the first a blow on the point of his jaw, which knocked him flying, and before the second could get at me, there were shouts of 'Yuesencia! Yuesencia!' and the officer from whom I had taken the champagne bottle cut him down, clean from the top of his skull to his mouth. He did it with a machete. More officers—half fuddled—came running up, and whether they thought I was Gerald or not, they were in a hopeless fright, and began to lay about them with the flat of their swords, and soon got their natives into order, although I saw a good many of them stealing away among the trees, laden with spoil.
"I GAVE THE FIRST A BLOW ON THE POINT OF HIS JAW"
Ugh! the brutes had evidently killed all the wounded. It was a perfectly sickening sight. I was beside myself with rage.
Then just as some mules were being hitched to that first field-gun, I saw a native trying to lead away a big black horse. The poor beast was limping badly every step he took, and the man was beating him cruelly. I rushed across, and the man saw me coming, and ran off. The horse had a very elaborate head-stall and blue saddle-cloth, and I felt certain that I had seen him somewhere before. 'Poor old fellow,' I said, stroking his nose. He was simply sweating with pain, and seemed to know I was a friend. I rubbed my hand down his legs, and looked at his feet, and soon found what the mischief was. One of his rear shoes was half off, and a projecting nail had made a gash in his frog, so no wonder the poor old chap was in such pain.
I found a bayonet and managed to lever the shoe off altogether, and then led him up to the field-gun. He came along as gently as a lamb, still limping a bit, but I do believe he was grateful, and as I led him between the lines of prisoners, one of them got quite excited, struggling to his knees, then to his feet, singing out, 'Yuesencia! El General! General Zorilla! Caballo del General Zorilla.'
Ah! now I knew. He was the very horse on which Bob, the 'Angel,' and I had seen Zorilla ride across the square at Santa Cruz. He seemed to know the prisoner, so I thought he might have been his groom, and undid the cord round his arms. Directly they were free, he threw them round the horse's neck and loved him.
'San Fernando!' I said, pointing up the road, and he nodded, 'Bueno, Señor! Bueno, Yuesencia!' and was as pleased as Punch.
The officers had, meanwhile, found enough mules for all three guns, and I sent them rumbling and rattling up towards the barricade, which the natives were already hauling away. You may bet your life I was jolly glad to see them make a start, for I knew that they were worth all the world to Gerald, and there was always the chance of some of Zorilla's regulars turning up and recapturing them.
There were not mules enough for all the wagons—I felt perfectly certain that the natives had simply bolted into the forest with a lot of them—but there were sufficient for four, and I chose two, full of field-gun ammunition, and sent them up the road, and then we set about and collected all the rifles lying on the ground, and as many boxes of rifle ammunition as we could stow on another two, and I felt jolly pleased with myself when all four were jolting on their way to San Fernando. I made the officers understand that the prisoners' arms were to be untied, but it wasn't till I began cutting the cords adrift myself that they, rather sullenly, ordered their men to release the others. You can just imagine how gratefully they looked at me, and I felt certain that they wouldn't be such fools as to try and escape, with five hundred fierce little machetos all round them, and thousands more in the forest. It was quite light by the time every one was under way, and I began to feel most horribly hungry and tired. Up above in the clear sky a number of vultures were slowly circling round and round with their long necks stretching downwards, waiting till we went away before they came down for their horrible feast, and as I left the clearing, and looked back, I saw any number of the little brown men sneaking out of the woods again to carry on looting, but I couldn't be bothered with them, and they would keep those vultures away. I had rescued all that was most valuable, and wanted to get back to San Fernando as quickly as possible.
When we got up to where poor little Navarro was lying, by the roadside, I gave him some brandy from a bottle I'd stowed away in a wagon; it did him a power of good, and he now seemed quite sensible, looking very miserable when he saw the guns coming along.
'The horse of El General,' he said sadly, as the black horse limped past with the groom.
I put him on top of one of the wagons, but the jolting was so painful that he had to be carried on the litter again. He knew me all right now, and I gave him back my cigarette case, pulling his own out of my pocket to show him.
'San Sebastian,' he said, smiling; 'I remember always.'
Well, off we went, the three guns and the four wagons on ahead, the two hundred prisoners, surrounded by the little machetos, marching behind them, and Navarro, on his litter, the groom with Zorilla's black horse, and myself, on my little stallion, 'Jim,' bringing up the rear. I'd found some ammunition for that revolver, and had loaded it, but my face and yellowish hair was all that was wanted to make any one obey me, and I rode along on my tired little horse, absolutely bossing the show.
You may laugh if you like, but there I was in charge of the whole blooming crowd, feeling simply dead tired, but kept awake by the excitement of it.
'Any one assisting the aforesaid Gerald Wilson——' kept running through my head, and I grinned every time I thought of it.
At about ten or half-past we came to that wayside inn where Gerald and I had had those omelettes last night. It was most appallingly hot, and, though there was no food there, I determined to halt for an hour to rest the mules and men.
The prisoners lay down at the sides of the roads, under the shade, the little machetos curled up under the trees, and went to sleep in a twinkling, the officers went into the inn, and Navarro's stretcher was laid down outside it, in the shade of the projecting roof. I could hardly keep my eyes open, and dare not even sit down for fear of falling asleep, because I wasn't going to trust those officers again. They didn't look in the least pleased (of course by this time they knew that I wasn't Gerald), and a good many of their men had a sullen look on their faces, which I didn't like a little bit. Still, so long as I kept my eye on them I wasn't afraid of them playing the fool, and I spent that hour walking up and down the line of guns and wagons with their dejected mule teams, passing a word or two occasionally with Navarro, who was much brighter now, sitting up on his litter smoking a cigarette.
I thanked him for the letter which he had written to me from Santa Cruz, warning me about that ex-police agent. 'Very bad man—he will never cease from revenge—next time you see him kill him,' he said; and I rather wish that I hadn't mentioned it, because I hated thinking of the little brute. Of course he was as anxious to get to San Fernando as I was; he wanted to see a doctor as soon as possible, and have his broken leg looked after.
At the end of the hour I tried to push on again, but I'm hanged if I could. I walked up to the inn and sang out, 'San Fernando!' to the officers sitting inside it, with half-empty bottles of wine in front of them, but they shook their heads and didn't even stand up. This, I knew well enough, was meant to be rude. Only the chap who had killed the native as he was going for me, the one whom I had prevented drinking that champagne, stood up and came out, shaking his head, and jabbering Spanish. 'Mucho caliente! Mucho caliente!'
'He say no go San Fernando till night,' Navarro explained. 'Too hot.'
Well, as I've told you before, I've got a beastly bad temper: I wasn't going to stand any nonsense, and I was inside that place in a twinkling.
'San Fernando!' I shouted, pointed to the blazing white road, where the mules were lying panting in the glare.
They only smiled.
I pulled my revolver out and roared again, but they only pulled theirs out and shook their heads.
I knew that I was up against something 'tough,' and I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't heard my name called.
Navarro was beckoning to me, and I went out, the officers laughing, and only that one following me.
'Prisoners obey me—give them rifles—I want El Medico—San Fernando—quick,' and he pointed to where the regulars were all lying asleep.
I knew well enough what he meant, and was in such a towering rage that I'd have taken any risk. I held out my hand, he held out his, and we shook.
'Right you are, old chap, I'll trust them.'
He jabbered to the officer who had followed me, and then said, 'Take me to prisoners,' so we picked up the litter and carried him to where they were, the other officers laughing, and not even getting up from their benches to see what was going to happen.
Then he introduced the officer to me. 'Don Pedro de Castilio—Señor William Wilson,' and we bowed to each other. I thought it an awful waste of time when every second mattered, and what we had to do had to be done quickly.
He went among the regulars, waking them, and half-a-dozen glided to a wagon and came back with rifles. Don Pedro took four of them along to the inn, and I saw them pointing their rifles through the windows.
'Don Pedro make them prisoners,' Navarro whispered, with his eyes gleaming.
That was a jolly smart move, and the officers never made a sound. If they'd sung out or fired a shot, we should have had the machetos round us in a second.
As fast as the other two woke their comrades, they stole away and got rifles, some of them bringing back a box of ammunition.
Not a macheto moved, and you bet I kept my eyes skinned lest they should wake, handing out ammunition as fast as the regulars came up for it. By the time I had seventy or eighty armed, I made them climb on top of the four wagons, so that they could defend themselves better in case the little forest-men tried to rush us with their machetes; I lifted Navarro on top of one of them too.
One of these wagons was right in front of the inn, so that my five young friends inside it had about twenty rifle-muzzles to look at. Still not a macheto stirred—they seemed dead to the world—so I went across to the inn.
It was they who were up against something 'tough' now, and they knew it, stood up, began unbuckling their sword-belts, and were just going to hand them to me, when I heard cries of 'Señor! Señor!' heard men running, and, looking over my shoulder, saw the rest of the regulars swarming round the wagon with the rifles in it, making a tremendous noise as they pulled them out. I ran along the road, and, as I ran, I saw the machetos, under the trees, all rising to their feet, gripping those horrid machetes.
I pointed to the wagons, there was no need for orders, the regulars simply scrambled on top of them like drowning rats on a log, running from wagon to wagon to find room, and crawling underneath them when they couldn't. I jumped across to where Jim, my horse, was standing, got on him, and pulled him into the middle of the road.
The little machetos hadn't quite got the hang of affairs, and looked half-dazed to see the regulars on top of the wagons and the rifles pointing at them.
I roared out, 'San Fernando! San Fernando!' but they were too startled to obey; and Don Pedro and his four men, too frightened to stay where they were any longer, bolted for the nearest wagon, the officers bursting out after them, and plunging into the forest among their own men.
'San Fernando!' I shouted, pointing down the road, and some of the little forest-men seemed to want to obey, but I saw those contemptible officers going in among them and dragging them back.
My aunt! I was in a jolly awkward fix. If they only made a rush, my chaps would simply be eaten up. I dare not get them down from the wagons to stir up the mules, for I felt absolutely certain that that would only be the signal for a massacre. We couldn't move the wagons till the guns went on—the road was not broad enough to pass them—and the leading one was at least a couple of hundred yards away. I saw a lot of the machetos dart across the road ahead of us, and my heart went thump, for I thought they were making ready for a rush, but the little brutes simply unhitched the leading gun's mule teams and led them into the forest.
Well, that was checkmate with a vengeance.
One of the officers now came up to the wagon on which Navarro was sitting and spoke to him. He sang out to me, and I went across.
'He say, "No go San Fernando till night; if soldiers no give up rifles, machetos kill them. Officers tell machetos, soldiers take guns to Zorilla."'
He was in a funk himself; the trees on both sides of us were simply swarming with the fierce little men, and I didn't know what to do, my brain seemed all woolly, but I dare not let the regulars throw their rifles down.
'Oh! that I knew Spanish and could talk to the little chaps and explain things,' I was thinking, when there was the sound of a horse galloping along the road, behind us, and the 'Gnome' dashed up. I was glad to see him, if you like.
He looked at the regulars on top of the wagons, timidly pointing their rifles across the road, and at the crowds of machetos in the woods, and didn't know what to think of it. Before he'd caught sight of me, I saw one of the officers running to him. I knew he'd tell him lies, so I cantered up to him too. He looked startled to see me, but quite pleased, and I made him come to the wagon where Navarro sat. 'Tell him—ex-plain,' I sang out. They seemed to know each other very well.
You should have seen him after he and Navarro had talked for a few seconds. He was in a towering rage, and he rode backwards and forwards along the edge of the road, evidently telling the officers exactly what he thought of them, and I knew that things were going right, because Navarro looked so chirpy and the officers so ashamed of themselves. The regulars, too, began to put up their rifles, and those who had crawled under the wagons crawled out again. Then, at last, the little forest-men stuck their machetes back into their belts, and a couple of hundred of them came along, looking like naughty children, and took charge of the mule teams. My aunt! I was so relieved and thankful and tired and hungry and hot all at the same time that I would have done any mortal thing for my fat little 'Gnome.'
He sent the officers and the rest of their men away into the forest—to rejoin Gerald, I suppose—and jolly glad I was to see the last of them. Then we shoved off, rattling down the road, and you may guess that I never wanted to see that inn again. The 'Gnome' stopped with us for about a mile, and then, taking off his hat to me, galloped on ahead, leaving me with no one to question my authority any more.
Still, I didn't feel in the least sure that those other fellows wouldn't come back, so, with help from Navarro and Don Pedro, I got the two hundred regulars into some sort of order, fifty of them well in front of the guns as an advance guard, fifty between the guns and the wagons, fifty as a rear guard, and the remainder riding on the wagons themselves.
I wanted to make the little forest-men, who were leading the mules, give up their machetes, and explained that to Navarro, but he smiled, shook his head, and said, 'Machetos good men now,' so I had to be satisfied.
We tramped along like this, the mules getting slower and slower, till half-past one, when a violent thunderstorm made it almost as dark as night, and wetted us to the skin. It was jolly refreshing whilst it lasted, cooled the air splendidly, and afterwards we got along much faster. By three o'clock we were out of the forest; I had nothing to fear from the forest-men, and was as happy as a king. We rumbled down to the stream, splashed through the ford, after a lot of trouble with the mules, who would fill themselves with water before they'd come on, breasted the slope again, and got on top of the ridge looking down over San Fernando.
You can jolly well imagine how glad I was to see it, and the old Hector lying offshore. From here it was simply a triumphal procession. The 'Gnome' must have let the people know what had happened, for they met us in hundreds, flocking round me, trying to lead my horse, even to kiss my gaiters, dancing and shouting and clapping their hands, and fighting for the honour of holding on to the gun traces. 'Viva los canones! Viva los Inglesas!' they shouted, and dragged the guns along, much to the relief of the mules.
The cathedral bells were clanging joyously when we marched into the square, I in front, Navarro on his litter beside me, Zorilla's charger behind us, then the two hundred regulars walking in front of the leading gun. You can guess how jolly important I felt, for the whole population had turned out, huzzahing and throwing their hats in the air, and on the steps and verandah of the Club were a lot of the Hector chaps and the Skipper himself.
As I took off my panama hat to salute him, he sang out, 'Good lad! Good lad!' and Navarro, seeing them, called out, 'El Medico!'
Clegg, our Surgeon, was leaning over the verandah, so I stopped and had him taken in there. 'Look after him, will you?' I called out to Clegg; 'his leg's badly broken,' and on we went again.
The regulars, in their hated uniforms, were a bit of a puzzle to the crowd, but they thought they had deserted to the insurgents, and soon swarmed round them, shouting, 'Viva los cazedores!' tearing off their own green and black rosettes and pinning them on the soldiers' sleeves. Many of them had already got rid of their green and yellow badges, and you may bet your life they didn't object to the black and green ones, so long as their skins were safe.
Ever since I had been stabbed by that wretched little ex-policeman, and whenever I got in among a crowd of natives, I found myself looking round to see if I could recognise him. I was doing so now without knowing it, looking from face to face all round me. Perhaps it was because of what Navarro had said, 'He will never cease revenge,' but I had the most extraordinary feeling that he was there, somewhere, and had his cunning little eyes fixed on me. I couldn't see him anywhere, and thought the strange fancy was probably due to my being so sleepy. I pulled myself together, because we were now abreast the cathedral, the front of which had been hung with black and green flags, and, on the steps, the whole of the Provisional Government was waiting for me, bowing and taking off their top-hats. It was all I could do to keep from laughing, although I was so tired and sleepy and hungry that I could hardly sit in my saddle. They made me dismount, and would have kept me there for ages, but I seized hold of Mr. Don Pedro, pushed him forward, took my hat off, bowed, and led my plucky little stallion back to the Club. I knew that he would explain everything, and I always hate being fussed over. The crowd made way for me as if I'd been a blooming emperor; but I felt a touch on my shoulder and jumped, for I was still thinking of the little brute.
'Beg parding, sir,' I heard some one say, and there was O'Leary, his funny old face simply as excited as a child's. 'We'd just like you to see that 'ere bit of 'ydraulic machinery what we brought along with us, sir.'
'Right you are,' I sang out—I know I yawned, I couldn't help it—and he took me through a side street to the water front and a long low building, which ran along the shore, with a tumble-down 'yard' in front of it. Inside the tumble-down gates there were thirty or forty of our petty officers, with their jumpers off, digging out like pepper among a crowd of half-naked natives.
'Look what we've done, sir,' O'Leary grinned, and there I saw the long chases of two 4.7's sticking up from their field carriages.
'Pretty good work that,' I said, yawning again.
'They didn't know nothink about 'em, sir, but for us, sir,' he grinned; they were all grinning with delight, and the armourer's crew, as black as paint, came across from a forge, in a shed beyond, stood by the guns, and grinned too.
'Your brother's done a good day's work, we hear, sir,' Griffiths, the boatswain's mate, said, saluting me; 'these 'ere guns'll be a pleasant sur—prise to him when he gets back.'
Then Bob and the 'Angel,' Barton, the senior mid., Blotchy Smith, half-a-dozen more mids., and Marchant, the 'Inkslinger,' with their coats off, and covered with grease and dirt, came running across.
'What are you up to?' I asked, and they dragged me to another corner of the yard, and I found they'd been 'assembling' the pom-poms.
'We've just been giving the chaps a bit of drill,' Bob squeaked. 'We're having a glorious time. I wish we could stay on shore till the morning. We'd have everything finished by then. Won't Cousin Gerald be pleased?'
Well, I was much too tired to stay any longer, and shoved off, all of them hurrying back to finish their job.
O'Leary followed me out. 'They don't know how they came 'ere, sir. I gave them English gents the "tip," and they were all out of their packin'-cases when I comes along, innercent like, with all these chaps. We just looks in at the gateway, and sees 'em all lying "'iggle de piggledy" like, a-lying on the ground, and, well, I says to 'em, "Mr. Wilson, our Sub, what the Commander bullies, 'as a brother fighting for these 'ere niggers, so one good turn deserves another, so 'wot oh!'" and we just 'as a quiet arternoon's fun, and you sees what we've done, sir.'
'He'll be awfully pleased. Thank you very much indeed,' I said, and tramped back to the Club, more dead than alive, looking from side to side all the time, in case that little brute was lurking about anywhere with his knife. I was so stiff that I could hardly move one leg in front of the other, and my back aches now when I think of it.
Zorilla's black charger was tied up to the Club railings, the groom apparently waiting for me, and I handed over both of the tired horses to one of the Englishmen who was there, stumbled up the steps, and fell back in one of those easy-chairs on the verandah, pretty well played out. Dr. Clegg came along.
'What do you think of my pal?' I asked him.
'He won't be on his legs again for six months,' he told me, 'I'm going to take him on board the Hector for the Fleet Surgeon to see.'
I was absolutely too weary just then to worry about anything, but I know that there were a lot of formalities to go through before he could be taken aboard, and that the Skipper and one of the San Fernando Englishmen bustled about and managed it all right. The Provisional Government would have done anything for us just then. I was jolly glad, because I owed a great deal more to little Navarro than I could repay.
I don't know when I had felt so tired, and though any number of our chaps were crowding round me wanting me to talk, and the townspeople were thronging against the Club railings to see me, I hardly noticed them, and just wanted something to drink and then go to sleep. I really couldn't keep my eyes open.
CHAPTER IX
Zorilla attacks
Written by Sub-Lieutenant William Wilson, R.N.
I slept like a top for an hour, and woke up in a fright; I thought that little brute was trying to stab me, but it was only one of the local Englishmen, a man named Seymour, shaking me.
'I'll be more careful next time,' he said, smiling and rubbing his shoulder where I'd caught him 'one' as he bent over me. 'You yelled as if you were being murdered.'
'I thought I was,' I said, waking up.
He had just come back from Gerald, and had a message for me. Gerald wanted me to go out to him again. He was at a place called Marina, about eight miles along the coast-line, half-way to El Castellar, and was making it his headquarters for the night.
'You'll see lots of fun if you go out there,' Seymour told me, 'he has Zorilla's army surrounded just above Alvarez's farm, not two miles from Marina, and expects to collar the whole lot to-night or to-morrow morning. He's done a great day's work and has captured the last gun they have.'
He was sending his own buggy to Marina with Gerald's bag, and offered me a lift.
You may bet I jumped at the offer; there was just time for me to have a wash and some tea; along came the carriage with two jolly smart ponies in it; one of the Club servants brought down Gerald's kit-bag—one of the last presents the mater had given him before he left home—in I jumped, and away those ponies flew, bumping the carriage along at a fine rate.
There was no more going to sleep then—it was as much as I could do to hold on to my seat, and prevent myself being chucked out.
We rattled down to the foreshore and turned along the coast road, bowling along it at a great pace, every now and then meeting wounded men limping wearily towards San Fernando. Some of our own ward-room officers were tramping back to catch the 'dinner' boat off to the ship, and they must have envied me pretty considerably. Thank goodness, the Skipper had given me forty-eight hours' leave, and I hadn't to get aboard till to-morrow at noon. I was so jolly keen to see some more fun, and to tell Gerald how I'd managed to bring those guns back to San Fernando, that I forgot all about being so sleepy.
The road ran along the top of the beach, skirting the shore all the way, and the forest came right up to the side of it, and made it beautifully shady, but it was in such a terrible state of holes and ruts, crumbling down here and there on the beach side, and overgrown with bushes on the forest side, that it looked as if the sea and the forest between them would swallow it up pretty soon.
Four miles out from the town there were two poor chaps lying by the roadside; I expect they had been wounded during the night, and had tried to make their way into San Fernando, but died before they could do so. Horrid-looking crows, something like vultures, were hopping about round them. I hated the brutes—they hardly got out of the way of the wheels.
Just as it was getting dusk we passed some bungalows, and the native driver shouted, 'Marina! El Casino!' pointing ahead to a large building in front of us standing close to the beach.
'Don Geraldio!' he nodded.
Then we splashed through a stream, and it wasn't too dark for me to see a little native chap squatting by the side of a low garden wall there, or to recognise him. It was that ex-policeman—I could see the scar on his forehead—somehow or other I was expecting to see him—and, without thinking, I jumped out of the carriage, stumbled for an instant, and then sprang at him, but he'd seen me too, and fled. I had Don Pedro's revolver with me, and fired as he jumped the low wall and darted among some trees. I was after him in a second—of course I had missed him, I always was a rotten shot with a revolver at any time—and then he fired back, and a bullet sung past my elbow. I caught sight of his white shirt among the trees, and fired at him again, and he bolted out of the garden, across the road, and into the forest.
It was hopeless to follow him there.
The pistol-shots had frightened the ponies, and they were dashing madly along the road, Gerald's kit-bag flying out. I picked it up, and lugged it along to the front of that big building—a gaudy-looking kind of place, nearly all windows, with a flat roof, verandahs and balconies all round it, and 'El Casino,' in big gilt letters over the door, half-hidden by a huge black and green flag which hung down over the entrance.
Gerald, surrounded by officers, was standing at the top of the steps, and I was only thankful that that little brute had not gone on another hundred yards.
'Hello, Billums!' Gerald sang out. 'Got my bag all right? I thought, when the buggy dashed past a moment ago, that old Zorilla would get it. Come along with me, I'm going to have a shave and get into clean things.'
He took me along with him, and whilst he was shaving himself, and his little groom, José, was unpacking his bag, I told him about the ex-policeman.
'For goodness' sake, take care of yourself, Gerald,' I said; 'he'll get you if he dies for it,' but 'Don't worry,' was all I could get out of him, as he scraped his face. I don't mind telling you that I was thoroughly frightened—much more for Gerald than myself, though the more I bothered him to take some precautions, the more angry he got.
'Blow it!' he said; 'you've made me cut myself. Confound these safety razors. My dear Billums, if he's going to get me, he will. I'll keep my eye skinned for the beast, but they're all so much alike that you can't tell t'other from which—scar or no scar. Nobody's life is worth a cent in this country unless you trust to luck.'
'But why don't you have an escort?' I pleaded.
'Have an escort? My dear Billums, if I had an escort, they'd think I was afraid.'
I gave it up, and told him all about bringing those guns and ammunition-wagons back into San Fernando, and all the troubles I'd had with the officers and their men; I didn't forget to tell him about the 'Gnome' coming up in the nick of time.
He was jolly pleased, though he didn't say much. 'That chap you call the 'Gnome' is one of the best people I've got, I don't know what I should do without him.'
All this time orderlies came in and out, and Gerald did not seem to have a moment's peace. Then a man came in with a note.
'It's from Zorilla,' Gerald said. 'He wants to know what's become of Navarro, his fat little A.D.C. You ought to know—that chap with the cigarette case.'
I told him he had been taken on board the Hector.
'Jolly glad,' he said, sent for some paper, sat down with the soap lather on his face and a towel round his waist, and wrote a reply. 'Wouldn't be the proper thing not to write it myself.'
'Tell Zorilla we found his horse, and have brought him into San Fernando,' I sang out.
'Good stroke, Billums, good stroke. We'll send him back when he's fit—always make friends of an enemy, especially if he's a good chap like Zorilla,' and he added a postscript.
'Where is he?' I asked, as the messenger darted away.
'About three miles off—in another clearing, for the night.'
'But the horse won't be much good to him,' I said, remembering what the Englishman had told me. 'You've got him surrounded, and he must surrender, mustn't he?'
'Yes, I have,' Gerald smiled, 'three thousand men round about the same number. I don't believe I have more—hundreds have gone off to their homes with loot. I tell you what. Old Zorilla isn't beaten till he's dead, and he may be up to any tricks to-night. It's seven miles to El Castellar and it's eight to San Fernando, and he'll lose his job and his reputation if he falls back on the fort. He's lost his guns, and he'll get 'em back, and San Fernando too, if he dies for it. I know the dear old chap.'
'I thought you'd won,' I said, feeling very worried.
'Oh, bother! You've never won in this country. The more you win, the more enemies you make—there are plenty of people, on our side, who want me out of it. That is why those chaps wouldn't obey you this morning—they're as jealous as thieves. I run the show, and they don't like it—a good many of them don't—not the men, the officers. They want their siesta in the middle of the day, and eight hours' sleep besides—it's the custom of the country—they don't get it. They've always run revolutions on those lines, and I don't.'
He'd dressed himself now and brushed his yellow hair well back. 'That's better; come along and have some grub.'
Well, I hadn't any appetite, but he had—and ate a jolly good meal in spite of all the orderlies and officers coming and going. He did want to dine on the open verandah, close to the road, but I thought of that little beast creeping up with the revolver, and managed to get him into an inside room, by complaining of the cold. The air was so still that all the time he was eating we could hear firing going on far away in the forest, but that didn't interfere with his appetite in the least. 'Zorilla's not made a move yet,' he said at last. 'Come and have a game of billiards,' and we did actually play on a French table with balls as big as oranges, in a room overlooking the sea, the cool breeze blowing through wide-open windows, and the noise of rifle-shots almost drowned by the lazy noise of the water on the beach. José, who seemed to follow Gerald about like a dog, squatted in a corner, a young insurgent officer scored for us, and Gerald, playing stiffly with his bad arm, was as keen on beating me as if we had been in the pater's billiard-room at home. We were half-way through the game, and he was piling up cannon after cannon, sprawling over the table to make his strokes, and I was standing at his side, when I suddenly heard something snap outside, saw the insurgent officer look out—fright on his face—turned my head, and there was that little beast, with a joyful smile on his ugly face, pointing a revolver straight through the window at Gerald.
I don't know how I did it, but I'd pulled Gerald off the table, and he was sprawling on the floor, before the room filled with smoke and noise, and a bullet had cut clean across the green cloth. I saw the insurgent officer whip out a revolver and fire, I sprang out into the dark with mine, and José, with a yell, a machete in his hand, dashed past me, down on to the beach. But there wasn't a sign of any one.
People rushed into the room, the lights were knocked out, and then Gerald sang out, asking what was the matter.
'My dear Billums, I wouldn't have had that happen for worlds,' he said, when the lamps had been relighted, and I'd shown him where the bullet had ripped across the table.
'What happen?' I asked.
'Why, you knocking me down, of course.'
He was quite hurt about it, and wanted to finish the game, said the cut across the cloth would make it all the more 'sporting,' but the noise of firing in the forest became more furious, and orderlies came in with news that Zorilla was on the move at last.
Gerald wrote out more orders and shrugged his shoulders. 'He's marching towards El Castellan. I suppose he thinks I shall try and prevent him.'
'But won't you?' I asked.
'My dear Billums, of course not; he can go there as fast as he likes. He thinks I shall try and get in front of him, and then he'll double back to San Fernando. Not much! Come along and we'll have a look round.'
I followed him out of the Casino—it was quite dark, the forest absolutely black—we mounted horses, and, with a lot of officers, trotted down the road. I was so nervous and overwrought in the dark lanes, which we presently rode through, that my heart thumped every time I heard 'Quien Vive!' or 'Que Gente!' called out by sentries or pickets we couldn't see, and the murmurs of 'Yuesencia!' or 'Don Geraldio!' from hundreds of unseen mouths. Gerald found some officers and seemed satisfied; somehow or other we got back, and the night was so still, except for the distant firing, the rustling trees, and the very faint noise of the sea, and the darkness was so intense, that I was jolly glad to be inside the Casino again.
More orderlies were waiting for Gerald here, and a prisoner was dragged into the light.
'That settles it,' he said decisively, looking at the poor, miserable, frightened, whining brute. 'He's been caught in the El Castellar direction—where they are advancing. He belongs to the 5th Santa Cruz Cazedores—the worst fighters in the army. Old Zorilla wouldn't put them there if he was in earnest. I'm going to bring back every man I can get hold of, place them the other side of that stream—down the road there—it runs nearly straight inland for four or five miles, and I wish to goodness the moon would come out.'
Whilst he was speaking, a whole crowd of bare-footed riflemen and machetos went silently past, going back towards San Fernando, the officers, haggard and dirty, stopping to salute Gerald and ask for orders before disappearing after them. It was the noiselessness of them all that was getting on my nerves, and the feeling of hopelessness at not being able to speak to any one except Gerald. All this time, too, I kept looking out for that ex-policeman, expecting him to spring out at any moment.
Every one who came along I half expected to be he, and little José, I think, did so too, standing close to Gerald, just like a cat, with a machete in his hand. Gerald saw it once, and made him throw it away, but he picked it up again when Gerald wasn't looking.
The 'Gnome' appeared from somewhere, and I saw that my brother was very glad to see him—he came across to me, and we bowed, and I squeezed his hand. He was sent away along that stream with some men he'd brought. 'Come and finish our game of billiards, Billums,' Gerald sang out. Honestly I don't know whether he was showing off, or was nervous, or whether he did really want to finish it, but we heard a heavy carriage splashing through that stream, and the new President—de Costa himself—appeared. They both went into the Casino and, I was thankful to see, into an upstairs room, where they couldn't be shot at. I went with them and sat down in a chair—their voices seemed to be floating away somewhere—and the next I know was that little José was pulling at my sleeve, it was just getting light, very heavy firing was going on close by, yells and shrieks were coming from the forest, and men were running noisily along the road beneath the window. Gerald wasn't there.
I sprang up and followed José. The Casino was empty, and, as I dashed out, a window, above me, broke and fell in little pieces at my feet. I heard bullets flying everywhere.
I looked down towards the stream, and people were lying on the road, beyond the ford, firing in our direction. José pulled me back behind the Casino, and we ran along the shore, waded through the stream as it flowed over the sands, and got behind our people. Gerald wasn't there either, only the 'Gnome,' in his big hat, waddling backwards and forwards.
William Wilson and the Gnome
'Geraldio? Don Geraldio?' I asked, and he stopped a moment to point away up stream.
He was trying to stop the shooting, because there was nobody in sight, although bullets were flying past all the time, and very heavy firing was going on further inland. He managed to stop it presently, and then I had time to look round.
Just across the stream was the little wall under which the ex-policeman had been sitting last night. It enclosed the garden of a small bungalow, and one side of it ran along the road, and the other along the stream. It was light enough for me to see the road running up to the Casino, about a hundred and fifty yards further on—the black and green flag was still hanging there—and about three hundred yards beyond this it turned away to the left, and we could only see the glimmer of light on the water. As far as I could tell, we had none of our people in front of us, but it was impossible to make out anything in the forest, on the left of the road, and it turned out that we still had a lot of chaps there.
The 'Gnome' was extending his people down the beach, making them scrape up a kind of breastwork in the sand, right down to the edge of the sea. They began digging away like a lot of hungry wolves, and some of them had found fishing nets, and were laying them down on the far side of the stream. I suppose one always thinks the position one happens to be in must be the main point of attack, and I wished to goodness that Gerald would come along, for I didn't like the way the chaps lying in the road kept looking back. I guessed that what Gerald had expected last night had happened, and that Zorilla had turned at last, and thought what a grand old chap he must be, after all his bad luck, to be able to make his disheartened, half-starved troops attack us.
CHAPTER X
The Fight round the Casino
Written by Sub-Lieutenant William Wilson, R.N.
Well, if Zorilla intended to try and cut his way past us into San Fernando, I'd learnt enough about the old man to know that it would be jolly hard work to stop him, and it struck me that the little chaps, on each side of me, were not placed in a very good position to defend the road and the beach, and that the 'Gnome,' however plucky a chap he was, did not seem at all certain what to do.
The good sleep which I had had must have cleared my brain. Whatever was the cause, I seemed to realise, all at once, exactly what ought to be done. Of course I was tremendously excited, but I tried to calm myself by imagining that this was only a sham-fight, and to think what would be the natural thing to do.
It was all very well to make our little chaps lie down behind the ford and behind the stream where it trickled down the beach, but, however deep it was farther inland, it was so shallow here that it hardly covered one's boots and wouldn't stop a cat. To stop where we were, and leave that bungalow garden wall, on the enemy's side, unoccupied, was perfectly silly, and I looked about to see if there was not something we could use to barricade the road itself.
I saw those empty wagons standing in front of the Casino, and knew that if we only pulled them across the road and put some of our chaps behind them, it would be grand.
First of all, for that bungalow wall, I thought, and, almost before I knew what I was doing, I found myself dashing across the stream, and looking over it to see if it would be any use to make the little chaps fire over it. But for the giant palms and ferns, in the garden, I could see right along the road, and fellows behind it could easily sweep the road with rifle-fire. I called José, and he came, then the 'Gnome' came, stood on tip-toe, looked over, and knew exactly what I meant. I seized a machete, jumped over the wall, and began lopping down the palms, and in a minute he'd sent thirty or forty chaps to help me, and began bringing riflemen over to line the wall—he made some climb on the roof of the bungalow, too, where they could get even a better field of fire.
Now for those wagons, I thought, and began trotting down the road towards the Casino, hoping that the others would come along as well, but only José panted after me, singing out 'No, no!'
'No, Señor, no!' the Gnome shouted, but I wasn't going back, for another idea came to me. How about the top of the Casino itself?
I got up to the Casino, dashed in, and ran upstairs—I knew that there must be a way to the roof, as there were railings all round it, and it was flat. I found a staircase leading up there, and was on top in a jiffy, José following me and pulling me down to my knees, because, directly my head had shown above the railings, there were yells from the edge of the forest, and bullets came splattering against the house. I wriggled myself to the edge and looked down, really only wanting to see whether it commanded the road properly, but—my eye!—beyond that corner, three hundred yards further along, collecting there, as far back as I could see, were hundreds of cavalry, and the woods were thick with infantry.
I beckoned to José, and he crawled across and looked too; his face got almost white when he saw what I had seen.
I heard the people at the ford opening fire. 'Señor! Señor!' José cried, and pointed down into the road at our feet, and I saw there, right below us, twenty or thirty regulars streaming across the road from the forest to the front of the Casino—the leading ones were already springing up the steps.
We were down off that roof like redshanks, and as we got down to the first floor we heard them clambering up the main staircase. We raced down the corridor and saw the first of them. They saw us and yelled. I fired my revolver in their faces and dashed into a back bedroom, José slamming the door behind us. I knew there was a verandah outside, and we jumped out, swarmed down a supporting pillar—like monkeys—and swung off back along the beach, the soldiers firing at us from the verandah we'd just left. I split one of the knees of my riding breeches, I ran so fast.
I didn't run so fast entirely on account of those bullets, but because I wanted to let the 'Gnome' know what I had seen round that corner. José told him, pointing up the road.