“Well, sir, all I really know about it is that your son came to me and asked me to allow a lantern to stand on the barricade. Of course I said that there was no objection to that. Then we went back fifty or sixty yards and placed another lantern on a window, so that the two lanterns together were in the exact line with those guns. At midnight Rex and his two friends, with the Chinaman, went out, and that is practically all I know about the matter. I certainly had no idea that Rex had kept the affair a secret. It is certainly a thing of which he had a right to feel very proud, for it was a plucky business, and one which I was very much tempted to take part in.”
“Now then, Bateman,” Major Johnston said, “you see your light cannot be hid under a bushel, so you had better make a clean breast of the affair.”
Rex saw that it was of no use making any further mystery of it, so he briefly explained how the idea had come into his mind, and how Watson and Laurence had agreed to join him, the steps they had taken for placing the lantern to enable them to find the guns in the dark, how Robinson had explained the working of the various parts of the guns to them, and how they had carried their plan into successful execution.
“You ought not have done it,” his father said, when he had finished.
“But,” Major Johnston said, “I donʼt think, Mr. Bateman, that your son is to be blamed. It was a splendidly plucky action for which everyone in the settlement should thank him, for it appears that these guns were doing an immense amount of damage. It was an act which I or any other officer in Her Majestyʼs service would have been proud to perform.”
“I admit all that,” Mr. Bateman said, “but Rex is always running into danger. I grant that so far he has got through safely, but you know the result of taking a pitcher to a well too often.”
“I donʼt think he is likely to come to harm,” the major said, “for it is not as if he undertook these things without thoroughly working his plans out, so that failure is almost an impossibility. On our way up he gave me a brief account of how he had got his cousins out of that rascally governorʼs yamen. I could not get the full details out of him, but judging from what he told me it was certainly an admirably–managed affair. I think, Mr. Bateman, that you have a right to be very proud of him. If he had been in the army he would certainly have earned a V. C. for the way in which he silenced those guns.”
“Yes, I admit all that,” Mr. Bateman said, “and wonʼt scold, but all this keeps his mother and myself in a state of great anxiety.”
“I donʼt think, Father,” Rex said, “that in an affair of this sort the risk is anything compared with that which one runs in a regular fight. These little excursions I have made have had very little risk in them—practically none. When you come to think of it, I can pass anywhere as a Chinaman, and as I have always travelled at night I have been exposed to practically no danger whatever.”
“And so you had sharp fighting here, Mr. Bateman?” the major said, changing the subject.