With Cochrane the Dauntless

by G. A. Henty

“I shall take you first to my wife. She will be delighted to see you again, and so will the children. You can give her an outline of your story. If you had been three days later you would not have found me here. For the last four months I have been endeavouring to get my ships fitted out, but in vain, and I am putting to sea no stronger than when I came back, and there can be no doubt that, profiting by their last lesson, the Spaniards will have made Callao stronger than before. However, we will do something which shall be worthy of us, though I fear that it will not be the capture of Callao.”

A few minutes later the admiral’s gig was alongside, and the admiral, his captain, and Stephen went ashore. Lady Cochrane greeted Stephen as warmly and kindly as her husband had done, and the children were exuberant in their delight at the return of their friend.

“He has a wonderful story to tell you, my dear,” Lord Cochrane said. “It has taken him more than three hours to give me the details, and you will have a greater treat listening to them this evening than I shall have at this state dinner.”

“It was too bad, Don Estevan,” one of his friends said to [pg 239]Stephen next morning, “that the admiral should have taken you on shore with him yesterday after you had been with him all the afternoon. We had been looking forward to having you all to ourselves, and hearing your story. You may imagine that we are all burning with curiosity to hear how it is that you came back all alone in that curious craft astern, and, above all, how you have brought with you this prize-money. All we have heard at present is that the whole of the boat’s crew that went with you are dead. I promised the others that I would not ask any questions until our morning’s work was over, so that we could hear your story together.”

“It is just as well not to tell it by driblets,” Stephen said. “It is really a long story, as it consists of a number of small things, and not of any one special incident. It can hardly be cut as short as I should like to cut it, for I am but a poor hand at a yarn.”

After the usual work of exercising the men at making sail, preparing for action, and gun and cutlass exercise had been performed, anchor again cast, ropes coiled up, and everything in apple-pie order, the Chilian officers rallied round Stephen, and, taking his seat on the breech of a gun, he told them the story, but with a good deal less detail than he had given to Lord Cochrane. This relation elicited the greatest admiration on the part of his hearers. The fact that he and two others alone, and without any tools save swords, should have built the stout little craft astern, and that he should, single-handed, have sailed her some thirteen or fourteen hundred miles was to them nothing short of marvellous. All had, the afternoon before, gone on board of her, and had seen that she only wanted paint to be a handsome little boat. Unaccustomed to manual labour, it seemed wonderful that three men—two of whom were officers—should have even attempted such work with only the materials from a wreck to build with.

Stephen had passed very lightly over his four days’ nursing of Jacopo, but this incident surprised them more than anything else, save the construction of the cutter. That, after the man had murdered the captain and attempted to shoot Stephen, with the intention of obtaining possession of the whole of the gold, the latter should have nursed him back to life instead of finishing him at once, seemed to them an incomprehensible piece of folly.

“But the man was a murderer, señor; he deserved death. Why should you have troubled about him, especially when, as you say, the natives might have come at any moment and taken the craft that had cost you so much pains and labour, and carried off the treasure.”

“You see, when he became powerless, he was no longer an enemy,” Stephen replied. “He was a criminal, it is true; but the temptation had been great. The man saw a chance of possessing himself of what to him was a fabulous treasure; better men than he have yielded to such a temptation; and though I do not say that he did not deserve death, the punishment of seeing the failure of his plans, and of being left, probably for life, a prisoner on that island was a severe one indeed. He will, at any rate, have time to repent of his sins, and some day he may be picked up by a passing vessel, and thus be able to retrieve his errors. At any rate, he will do no harm there.”

“Well, no ill came from it,” one of the officers said; “but I own that, for my part, as soon as I had knocked him down, I should have put my musket to his head and blown out his brains, and should never have repented the action afterwards.”