“Enough to make ’em, Gnat. Look! What a shame!”
I looked, but I could not see any reason for Smith’s remark.
“Beg pardon, sir,” growled one of the men, who had a bandage round his arm; “you wouldn’t ha’ said so if you’d been there. They was all alike. The junk we took was burning like fat in a frying-pan, and me and my mate see one o’ them chaps going to be roasted, and made a run for it and hauled him away—singed my beard, it did; look, sir.”
Half of his beard was burned off, and his cheek scorched.
“Then my mate gets hold of his legs, and I was stooping to get my fists under his chest, when he whips his knife into my arm ’fore I knowed what he was up to. But we saved him all the same.”
“Here,” cried Mr Reardon, as the marines descended from the third boat, and stood at attention in two parties facing each other; “who was answerable for this? Why, it is an outrage. Brutal!”
“S’pose it was my doing, sir,” said the boatswain, touching his cap; “but I asked leave of Mr Brooke first, and he said yes.”
“What, to tie the poor wretches up like that, sir, and half of them wounded!”
“Beg pardon, sir; there was no other way handy. We lashed their arms behind ’em to keep ’em from knifing us, and then they kept on jumping overboard, and trying to drown themselves. We haven’t hurt them.”
“Cast them loose at once.”