Before Bush could answer him Abbott was hailing from the gun platform.
“Guns clear, sir. May I draw powder charges from the magazines?”
And then before Bush could give permission here was young Wellard, trying to elbow Pierce on one side so as to command Bush’s attention.
“Please, sir. Please, sir. Mr. Hornblower’s respects, sir, an’ could you please come up to the tower there, sir? Mr. Hornblower says it’s urgent, sir.”
Bush felt at that moment as if one more distraction would break his heart.
Chapter X
At each corner of the fort there was a small bastion built out, to give flanking fire along the walls, and on top of the southwest bastion stood a little watchtower which carried the flagstaff. Bush and Hornblower stood on the tower, the broad Atlantic behind them and before them the long gulf of the bay of Samaná. Over their heads waved two flags: the White Ensign above, the red and gold of Spain below. Out in the Renown they might not be able to make out the colours, but they would certainly see the two flags. And when having heard the three signal guns boom out they trained their telescopes on the fort they must have seen the flags slowly flutter down and rise again, dip and rise again. Three guns; two flags twice dipped. That was the signal that the fort was in English hands, and the Renown had seen it, for she had braced up her mizzen topsail and begun the long beat back along the coast of the peninsula.
Bush and Hornblower had with them the one telescope which a hasty search through the fort had brought to light; when one of them had it to his eye the other could hardly restrain his twitching fingers from snatching at it. At the moment Bush was looking through it, training it on the farther shore of the bay, and Hornblower was stabbing with an index finger at what he had been looking at a moment before.
“You see, sir?” he asked. “Farther up the bay than the bakery. There’s the town—Savana, it’s called. And beyond that there’s the shipping. They’ll up anchor any minute now.”
“I see ‘em,” said Bush, the glass still at his eye. “Four small craft. No sail hoisted—hard to tell what they are.”