There were almost tears in the poor boy's voice but nothing like them in his eyes when beside me he waded in knee-deep, and he was a wide-shouldered, round-chested lad with quick, strong ways to him. Knee-deep, I say, for by this time the uniformed natives were threatening to roll over us like some huge, advancing wave. And such natives as weren't in uniform stood to one side and cheered, or maybe hove a doby brick or two at intervals.
But not entirely one-sided was it, for every bluejacket or marine arriving by the blue-line cars, after a quick masthead view of the situation, took a running hop, step, and a leap into the middle of it.
Our numbers were increasing, and there were other matters to aid us. The pedlers at the tables were hurrying to remove their wares from the war zones, but the quick advances of battle overtook the most of them, and tropical things to eat and drink from above and beneath the tables were soon adding a grand variety to the first plans of battle. There was the ice that had been cooling the beer. You take a lump of ice about the size of a small man's head, point the same carefully at a range of three or four feet, and hurl it with the full power of a moderately strong arm and—but 'tis a bad habit, boasting. And a thick-bottomed bottle of native beer—'tis a useful little article, too, at close quarters.
It was a hot day. "Mucho calero, mucho heato, be quiet, you!" I admonished one of the enemy lying prone at my feet, and picked up a beer-bottle, taking notice that it was not empty and that the cold beads of a late icing still clung to it. And I snapped free the patent stopper, and, for better action, loosened the blouse about my neck, giving thanks at the same time for the lucky man I was to have a blouse left on me to loosen.
Now, if Regulations had been there to see, it is a fine sermon he could have preached on the evils of strong drink—how it brings its own punishment always in its wake. And not a word but would be true. But a man exalted by the clash of battle is no man to preach to. 'Tis then he delights in confounding the precepts of his betters. And, man, the hot day it was! In all my cruisings on that abandoned coast I never knew a hotter; from the melting asphalt the heat was rising in torrid waves. I placed the cold bottle of beer to my lips and felt the first trickle of it on my swollen tongue. But no more than felt it, when the enemy—who by all rights was out of the combat at my feet—stood up, and what it was he clouted me with on the back of my head I never learned, nor does it matter now; war is war. But in falling I remember saying sad like to myself: "A man that would do that would ship his mother in the navy!"
Elbow to elbow with me all this time was my new young friend, and he had in his hand at the moment of my fall the mahogany leg of a table, that fine-grained mahogany for which, as I had so often read in the ship's library, that Hot Coast is also justly famous. With the table leg, the same being of good length and moderately thick through, the lad reached over and tapped on the temple the party who had exploded the shell, or whatever it was, on the back of my head. And as McWarrish, an eye-witness, informed me later, my would-be assassin shared no further in the glory of that day.
It had been a pleasant and not unequal prospect up to then, but by now they had routed the colonel of the barracks from his box-seat in the bull-ring, and "Fix bayonetso!" he calls to his soldiers coming on at the double, and they fixed bayonets. "Advanceo!" he says, and they advanced and continued to advance until presently, the ice being melted and the beer-bottles expended—being, as I should have poetically said, short of ammunition—such of our bluejackets and marines as were not in the need of first aid to the injured might presently be seen making the best of their way back to their liberty boats.
In good time I revived, and I could taste it even then—that one teaspoonful of cold beer on the end of my swollen tongue, and, recalling the incident, "The green-eyed spig!" I says. "Is it any wonder they have revolutions every other week or so in their God-forsaken land?"
And what did I hear then but a voice calling me, and what did I see when I turned my head but my young friend with his head in the lap of the lovely Marguerite, and the rest I knew without being told, for Marguerite's stern mother was pouring water onto her lace handkerchief and applying the same to a lump topside of the youth's ears!
A large hearty-looking party was tending to my case. McWarrish was his name, and he was Marguerite's mother's brother, who managed a silver or lead (or was it a gold?) mine on that same Hot Coast, which, according to the ship's library, was likewise rich in oil, rubber, pepper, tabasco sauce, palm-leaf fans, and all manner of vegetable and mineral resources: a fertile and auriferous country that needed only the intelligence and energy of the superior northern races to make of it a marvellous commercial asset.