Chapter Nineteen.
The Situation becomes desperate.
“Well, Tom,” said I, “what about the guns?—are they loaded?”
“Yes, sir, they is,” answered Tom; “and a most fort’nate circumstance it were that you ordered them guns to be loaded when you did, otherwise we should have been sent sky-high by this time.”
“Ah, indeed! how is that?”
“Why, you see, sir, when I was ordered to load the guns I nat’rally looks round for the ammunition for to do it with; and though this is the first time as I’ve ever found myself aboard a reg’lar genewine land-battery, it didn’t take me long for to make up my mind that if there was any ammunition anywheres aboard the thing, it must be in one of them there corner lockers. So I goes away and tries to open the door, which in course I finds locked. It didn’t take Ned and me mor’n a jiffy, hows’ever, to prise off the lock; and when I looked in, there sure enough was the powder—a goodish quantity—all made up into cartridges, and there, too, I sees the black stump of a fuze with a red spark on the end fizzing and smoking away—a good un. I knowed what that meant in a second, Mr Hawkesley; so I whips out my knife, sings out to Ned to prise open the other two doors, and cuts off the live end of the fuze at once, and just in time. There warn’t more nor an inch of it left. And when we got the other two doors open it were just the same, sir—half a minute more ’d ha’ done for the lot of us, sir.”
“But you have taken care to see that the magazines are now all right?—that there are no more live fuzes in them?” I exclaimed in considerable alarm.
“Ay, ay, sir; never fear for me,” answered Tom with a quiet grin. “They are safe enough now, sir; we gave ’em a good overhaul before doing anything else, sir.”
“Thank you, Tom,” I replied; “you have rendered a most important service, which, if I live to get out of this scrape, I will not fail to report to Captain Vernon. But I should like to take a squint into these magazines myself.”