Chapter Nineteen.
Bob gets “Blown Up.”
The unexpected explosion, though, caused no confusion, nor indeed any apparent excitement such as would have at once occurred had the accident happened on shore; for, thanks to the admirable discipline always observed on board a man-of-war that flies the glorious old Union Jack, not a man stirred from his station.
It was only through the unusual stillness that prevailed for a moment or two afterwards, that those not on deck became aware that something out of the common had occurred.
“Anybody hurt?” sang out, presently, the officer commanding the ship from the bridge, near the conning tower, where he had been directing her steering—“Anybody hurt there, forrud?”
“No, sir,” promptly replied the gunnery lieutenant in charge of the firing-party, who was standing close by the exploded gun. “Not a soul, sir!”
“Thank God!” said the other in a tone of deep feeling, the anxious expression clearing from his face. “It’s a wonderful escape!”
It was—and more. It was a merciful interposition of Providence!
There were three flag-officers, four post-captains, and several others of lesser rank, in addition to a number of blue-jackets in the immediate neighbourhood of the exploded gun when it burst; but, strange to say, although the muzzle of
the weapon had been blown off completely from the chase at the trunnions, and some hundred-weight of the fragments scattered in all directions, many of them piercing the deck and screen bulkhead, every one fortunately escaped injury.
While exchanging congratulations with the other officers, all at once Captain Dresser looked about him for Bob.
But, nowhere was he to be seen in sight.
“By Jove, he must have been blown overboard, and that was the splash in the water I heard!” he exclaimed in alarm; and, turning to his friend the young lieutenant, as they now advanced further forward to have a nearer view of the still smoking gun, he said, “Where, Neville, did you last see the boy?”
“There!” replied the young officer, pointing to the ledge outside the bulkhead, just over the iron ladder-way that led down to the fo’c’s’le, the scene of the accident. “He cannot well have fallen overboard from there!”
“No,” assented the Captain, doubtfully; still at a loss to account for Bob’s mysterious disappearance. “Where can the boy be, though?”
They were just about instituting an organised search through the ship, both in great anxiety; when, who should crawl up from below but the missing young gentleman!
Rover’s look of dejection on being left behind at home in the morning was nothing to that of his young master now; the latter appearing, from his blackened face and rumpled collar, not to speak of his soiled suit of flannels, so beautifully white and clean the moment before, to have “been in the wars” with a vengeance!
“Why, what have you been doing with yourself?” exclaimed the Captain, in blank dismay. “Where have you been?”
Albeit dilapidated in his general exterior, Bob had not lost his voice; his powers of speech being happily still unimpaired.
“I’m all right,” he answered with an attempt at a grin. “I’m all right!”
“But where have you been?” repeated the Captain, whom this off-hand statement did not quite satisfy. “Where have you been?”
“Oh, I got blown up,” explained Bob. “When the gun fired I felt an awful pain in my ears, as if somebody was running a red-hot needle through them going right down to my boots!”
“You must have long ears, youngster,” remarked the young lieutenant slily here. “Very long to reach so far!”
“I didn’t mean that my ears went down to my boots,” replied Bob, rather nettled at the insinuation; and he then continued the account of his experiences of the explosion. “But, as I was saying, I first felt this pain; and then I seemed to be lifted off my feet, tumbling down this ladder here, and after that through a hole in the deck, amongst a lot of coal-dust and oil-cans, that messed my clothes a bit.”
“A bit?” queried the Captain, chuckling now with much satisfaction at seeing him unhurt—“I should say a good deal, judging by appearances, Master Bob!”
“Really?” said he surveying himself ruefully, turning and twisting so as to get a view of his back. “Well, I certainly am dirty, but I didn’t look half so bad before I came up.”
“Ah, it’s the light that does it,” observed the lieutenant, chaffing him. “However, if you will go rolling in the coal-bunkers and making love to the engineer’s oil-cans, you must take the consequences!”
“I didn’t,” replied Bob indignantly. “You don’t think I tumbled down there on purpose, do you?”
“Perhaps not,” said the other, smiling. “But, pray remember, you were told to keep away from the gun; and, if you had obeyed orders, you wouldn’t have got into any mischief.”
“Well, let us be thankful it is no worse,” observed the Captain cheerily. “I hope you are not hurt, Bob, by your roll dawn the hatchway?”
“No, Captain,” he answered, brightening up again after the snub of the lieutenant anent his disobedience, “I fell on the coal-sacks quite softly and haven’t got a scratch.”
“That’s all right then,” echoed Captain Dresser in his joking way; adding to the young officer on his other side, “I wonder if all the ‘cocked hats’ have done examining the gun, and whether there’s a chance now for an old retired fogey like myself having a look at the damage?”
“I should think so, sir,” replied the young officer. “The Admiral, I see, has gone away, and the fellows also from the Ordnance department; so, you’d better come and have a glance round while the coast is clear.”
“I will,” was the response of the old sailor, as, in company with the lieutenant and Bob, he made his way through one of the watertight doors in the forward bulkhead on to the fo’c’s’le; the trio then grouping themselves round the broken breech of the exploded weapon, all that was left now of the whilom big forty-three ton gun!
“Ah! I can see how it happened,” said the old sailor, after a cursory inspection of the fractured portion. “The gun was strong enough at the breech, but went at the muzzle. It has given way, of course, at its weakest point.”
“Yes,” agreed the young lieutenant. “It has parted just here, where the last protecting coil of steel has been shrunk on; the tube of the gun has burst at this unprotected portion of it, right in front of the chase.”
“What’s the reason, sir,” asked Bob, “of its bursting there like that?”
“I suppose because the metal was unable to withstand the strain of the powder charge,” said the Captain. “So, Bob, it went!”
“Pardon me, but I don’t think you’ve got it quite right, sir,” observed the lieutenant apologetically. “The gun was strong enough for the old ‘pebble powder’ it was originally intended to be fired with, the force of whose explosion would have been expended in the breech, which you can’t say is weak?”
“No,” asserted the other, “the gun seems strong enough there.”
“Well, that being the case,” continued the young officer, “the gun might have been fired as many times as you please with the heaviest charges of that powder without its sustaining the slightest injury. Our wise Ordnance people, however, having taken a fancy to a ‘slow combustion powder,’ whose force, instead of being expended in the breech, is sustained throughout the whole length of the gun, as the particles of powder ignite and expand, bethought themselves they would, for cheapness’ sake, use this ‘cocoa powder,’ as it is called, without going to the expense of building additional coils round their heavy guns to enable them to resist the extra strain!”
“So this is the result,” said the old Captain. “It’s just like putting new wine into old bottles!”
“Precisely,” replied the lieutenant, joining in his laugh. “But, don’t you feel hungry, Captain Dresser?”
“I do,” he promptly rejoined. “This sea air give; one the very deuce of an appetite; and I confess to feeling slightly peckish.”
“So am I,” said the other, leading the way to the nearest hatchway. “Let us go down below and see what they’ve got for luncheon. Mind how you step, it’s all dark here, as they haven’t fitted her up yet.”
“That’s plain enough as I can feel!” muttered the Captain in reply as he stumbled against the projecting ledge of one of the watertight bulkheads, knocking his shin. “These new-fashioned ships are all at odds and ends, it seems to me, in their accommodation below. Give me one of the old sort, where everything was really plain sailing and one hadn’t to dive down here and climb up there to get for’ard or aft!”
“Ah,” rejoined the lieutenant, holding out a hand to guide him, “you’d get used to it in time.”
“Just as the eels do to skinning!” growled the Captain, rubbing his sore shins. “I’d rather be excused the practice, though, on my part.”
Bob sniggered at this; and, passing along a narrow dark passage, its obscurity rather increased than diminished by the solitary illuminating power of a single “dip” in a ship’s lantern hung up against the side, the lieutenant stopped the Captain from any further grumbling by introducing him into the ward-room, which, being well lit up with little electric lamps, offered a marked contrast to the other parts of the vessel they had traversed.
To the Captain, indeed, it was like passing from purgatory to fairyland, as he said; the more so from the fact of his seeing a well-spread table before him, and there being a savoury smell permeating the atmosphere.
So, he took his seat with alacrity, prepared to do ample justice to whatever viands were brought forward.
Bob, who came in a little later, his curiosity being attracted by the sight of the open torpedo-room adjacent, with its stores of Whitehead tubes, gave the witty young surgeon, who was facing the door, an opportunity of cracking a joke at the expense of his smutty face, which he had been unable to wash since his tumble amongst the coals.
“Hullo, Pompey!” cried out this worthy, who by the way had been previously chaffed by his brother officers, such is the levity of sailors in imminent peril, about the gun accident not having provided him with any patients. “Hullo, Pompey, you’ve forgotten your banjo and bones!”
Bob did not see the point of the joke at first, although there was a general titter round the lower part of the table where the young surgeon was seated; when Master Bob did, however, he blushed pretty red, looking uncommonly sheepish.
But the lieutenant came to his rescue.
“He has left his bones behind advisedly, Phillips,” said he to the young surgeon, who was smiling still at his own witticism, “because he knew, if he brought them, you would only carve and saw them about as you served those fossils at the hospital.”
This turned the laugh against the other, enabling Bob to sit down in peace and enjoy his luncheon, during which he was much amused at the fun going on amongst the junior officers at their end of the festive board about the splendid chances offered for promotion and “unfortunately missed” by the bursting cannon.
“Just fancy!” observed one of those, speaking in an undertone, so that those of superior rank at the upper end of the table could not hear him. “Three ‘flags,’ four ‘posts,’ half-a-dozen commanders, and two ‘first luffs,’ all within range of that blessed muzzle that carried away; and not one vacancy on the list!”
“It’s positively awful,” chimed in another, in cordial agreement with his brother sub, “we may never have such a chance again!”
The Captain subsequently explained to Bob that they meant that had the several admirals and other officers of rank who stood behind the forty-three ton gun been killed or materially injured when it burst, these thoughtless juniors believed they would have “received a step” on the list, or in other words, would have been probably promoted—which Bob thought extremely wicked and reprehensible on their part.
After the explosion, of course, there was no more gun-practice, the Archimedes slowly making her way back to Spithead, and then into harbour; the broken breech of the unfortunate weapon that had come to grief being carefully covered over with a piece of tarpaulin, so that those on board an Austrian frigate lying in the roadstead, which the ironclad had to go by, should know nothing of the burst, at least from passing observation. We do not like to show our failures to our friends—only our successes!
The Captain and Bob, naturally, got back all the sooner from the trial trip of the Archimedes being thus cut short, reaching “the Moorings,” indeed, just as Mrs Gilmour and her guests were going out for a stroll before dinner; when, Rover pranced up to his young master, all affection and oblivious of any “hard feelings” he might have entertained by being left behind in the morning, repeating his magnanimous conduct on a previous occasion!
“By Jove!” cried the Captain jocularly, addressing Bob’s father. “That son of yours is bound to turn out something great.”
“Really, what’s he been doing now?”
“Why,” replied the old sailor with his customary chuckle, thumping the pavement with his malacca cane to give greater emphasis to his words, “he was half-drowned almost the first evening he came down here; was wrecked in the poor Bembridge Belle the other afternoon; and now, to complete the category, has been blown up to-day.”
“Boys are like cats,” said the barrister smiling. “They all seem endowed with the same proverbial number of lives.”
“How funny, Bob,” observed Nellie here. “Papa says you’re like a cat; so, you must be like Snuffles!”
Bob, however, did not appear to see the joke of this; though it afforded his sister much amusement, which was increased anon by the Captain asking her a question.
“I say, Miss Nell,” he cried out in his jocular way, chuckling the while, “what colour is this celebrated cat of yours, Snuffles?”
“He’s black all over, Captain,” replied Nellie as distinctly as her giggles would permit. “Only, he has four white paws, just as if he had lamb’s-wool socks on, like those mamma makes Bob wear in winter.”
“Humph!” snorted out the old sailor, his beady eyes twinkling with fire and his bushy eyebrows moving rapidly up and down. “If you had seen Master Bob when he first emerged from the fore-peak of the Archimedes after his tumble through the fo’c’s’le and roll amongst the coal-sacks, you would have thought him, missy, more like Snuffles than ever. The only drawback to the likeness was that Bob had but two paws instead of four, and that they were as black as his face!”
“Oh, my!” exclaimed Nellie, shrieking with laughter. “Do you hear that, mamma?”
“Aye, my dear, I’m not joking,” went on the Captain, his face now as grave as a judge. “Do you know he was so black, that they mistook him for one of the Christy minstrels when he came into the ward-room afterwards!”
This finished poor Nell; even Bob, too, joining in the laugh against himself.