“Well, he is Scotch, you know.”
“Don’t tell me! He’s only Scotch when it suits him. There are others like him in the Lords. He was never Scotch in my house—where he shall never show his face again, never!”
Tom was not deceived by this explosion of wrath. He knew very well that Mr. Greatorex was only relieving the tension of his feelings, and working off his nervous excitability on the most convenient object. “Les absents ont toujours tort,” he remembered. Mr. Greatorex presently calmed down, and heard the rest of the story in comparative quietude.
“And what are we to do?” he said at the close. “Swob doesn’t matter; we’re not bound to lift a finger for him; but we can’t leave Ingleton and M’C—— and Oliphant in the hands of those wretches. They’ll break up our machine, too, and play the very deuce with my property. What are we to do?”
What Tom answered is shown by subsequent events. Two or three hours after his return to the yacht, when he had had a thorough rest and a good meal, a well-armed party, consisting of the whole ship’s company except the cook and one seaman, left the yacht, on which all lights had been extinguished, and rowed with muffled oars to a sheltered cove on the south side of the bay—that furthest removed from the Arab encampment. Mr. Greatorex had insisted on joining the party. In vain Tom pointed out that a hard march was before them, suggesting delicately that Mr. Greatorex was not so light as he once was. The merchant puffed the objection away. They disembarked in dead silence, and, leaving two of their number to take the boat back to the yacht, made their way cautiously up the cliff.
Led by Tom, the party, ten in all, struck off in the direction of the village. Thanks to the light of the moon, which now lay a little above the horizon, Tom was able to make a fairly straight course for the plantation in which he had hidden during the previous day. Once or twice he strayed from the proper track, and ultimately found that he was nearly a mile from his objective; but this was not bad, considering that there was no beaten road, and they had to tramp across rough country. When he reached the plantation he was no longer in doubt as to the true direction; during his long stay among the trees he had had time to take his bearings pretty thoroughly.
Mr. Greatorex was blown by the time they came to the clearing in which the airship had descended, and Tom begged him to remain hidden in the plantation while the rest went on to the village.
“Pff!” panted the perspiring old gentleman. “Never gave up anything yet; on you go!”
But a slight halt was made while Tom completed arrangements for his night raid. The village was walled; the gates would no doubt be shut, as at Ain Afroo; the wall must be scaled. Captain Bodgers selected the biggest men to give their more active comrades a “leg-up.” These latter were provided with ropes, by which they might haul up the others when they had themselves gained a footing on the wall. Tom impressed on them all the necessity of maintaining dead silence. He estimated that the village contained about a hundred fighting men, and if the approach of the raiders were discovered in time for the walls to be manned, the chance of a successful coup would be small indeed.
All carried firearms except Mr. Greatorex. He had a knobbed stick, capable of dealing a very damaging blow.