“’Ere—you’re not gawn?” he heard whimpered during a lull in the barrage. And “Rather not!” he shouted back, reassuringly; and succeeded in tilting the half-rotten boards so that the bows rested against the slope while the stern remained still embedded; thus the concave bottom of the boat roofed a small dark space—an amateur dug-out.
Meanwhile, the second raiders were not suffered to pursue their leaders to London; the barrage waxed fiercer, shutting them in, driving them from point to point; a few bombs were dropped, and exploded with a dull concussion of sound quite distinct from gun-fire; and all along the Kent and Essex coast the shrapnel flew screaming.
“Hot stuff!” laughed Richard, as a moaning hoot snicked past his ears; he sprang up the bank again, and found the Corporal crying in a quiet agony, too exhausted to budge. Without explanation he lifted him gently; placed him “under cover” as he had desired. Then he blocked the aperture at the tilt of the boat with his own square stocky build. “Shut your ears with your arms, you won’t know anything more about it till the morning,” he shouted through the din.
Presently his companion said: “I’ve just remembered me name—it’s Plunkett—Ted Plunkett.”
“Oh—yes?” Richard was rather surprised at the formality in the midst of shell-shock during air-raid.
A pause. Then: “Well—ain’t you goin’ to tell me your name now I’ve told you mine?” reproachfully.
“Richard Marcus.”
“R! Got some pluck, ’aven’t you, Sonny Richard Marcus?”
And amusement twinkled in Richard’s deep-set eyes, as he reflected on the quality of pluck needful under bomb-fire by a person out for the express purpose of drowning himself.
“Ever heard the comic story of the servant who had never seen the sea?” he replied with seeming irrelevance, but thinking how the tide had temporarily baulked his intentions. “She was so dead keen on seeing it that she stole her mistress’ jewels to pay for the fare to Southend—and then they arrested her while she was waiting for the tide to come up.”