"At present," said the boy, showing his fine white teeth as he grinned broadly, "you are bound for the Warrior Reefs. That was why I boarded you."
Ching spoke briefly to a sailor who was with him on the bridge, and then dropped down to the chart-room beneath. The boy mounted the bridge ladder, and took a comprehensive look round. What he saw did not please him. His blue eyes hardened—they were bright steely blue, very unusual eyes even in an English face, and incredible in a native of the Torres Straits—and going straight to one of the engine-room telegraphs pulled the lever over to half speed astern. The bell clanged.
As a wounded tiger bursts open-mouthed and raging from its ravished retreat in the jungle so Ching furiously burst from the chart-room at the sound of that bell. And for my part I would sooner face a wounded tiger in the jungle than a mild-mannered Devonshire ship captain upon whose engine-room telegraph I had set my lawless hand. The Skipper sprang on the bridge pushed the boy away so roughly that he sprawled over the weather cloths, snapped the telegraph back to STOP, and roared:
"Chuck this nig—young feller into his boat and cut him adrift." It says much, very much, for the inherent kindliness of our Robert Ching that even under stress of an unparalleled trespass upon his prerogatives as commander, he bit back the offensive word "nigger."
The sailor sprang at the boy, who evaded the rush with lithe ease. He was quite calm, and still grinned cheerfully.
"Wait," cried he, in a tone so gleefully significant that the sailor stopped, and even Ching looked up curiously. "Wait," cried the boy, holding up his hand. They waited until one might count perhaps ten, and then that for which they waited befell:
G-RRR-H, G-RRR-H, G-RRR-H!
The Humming Top took the hidden reef with a slow grinding crash which made her shiver, and under pressure of wind and tide she bit deeper and deeper into the coral. It was well for her at that moment that between her steel plates and the reef there interposed the faithful baulks of previsionary teak.
The boy, with a heedless courage which to me seems almost sublime—after all a skipper is a skipper and a very great man on his own bridge—the boy pushed past the Captain of the yacht, laid his brown sacrilegious hand once more on the engine-room telegraph, and banged the lever over to FULL SPEED ASTERN.
"Go," he said sharply to the amazed sailorman. "Jump into my yawl, and fend her off as we go astern."