“Give way, men!” cried Mr Gilham, waving his sword over his head in a perfect delirium of joy at being at last no longer a mere spectator of the exciting scene. “Now, we have a chance, lads; pull like devils lest it be taken from us!”
But, the lieutenant might have spared his breath, for the men’s blood was up; and, with a bound, the heavily-laden launch dashed forwards as if she were a racing galley, distancing all her competitors, and being alongside the leading gunboat before the rest had got half=way up, our start giving us an advantage, which even their lesser weight could not lessen.
In less than a minute, the lot of us scrambled on board the Opossum, bluejackets, marines, gunners and all.
We found the engineer and one solitary uninjured stoker below, the others having all been killed by a bursting shell.
These men, however, were still sticking manfully to their posts in the engine-room, notwithstanding that they must have been longing all the while to scuttle up on deck and “have a shy” at the treacherous beggars who had caught us in such a villainous trap; and at once piling on steam, the gunboat in which we were in, followed by the Plover, hurried up to the front again to relieve the Lee and Haughty which were now standing the brunt of the fire from the enemy’s batteries, and looked decidedly as if they were getting the worst of it.
The Lee, indeed, had a hole knocked in her bows which a wheelbarrow could have been trundled into; while her consort had been hulled repeatedly below the water, and, being close in under the guns, these, as the tide fell, plunged their shot right through her bottom planking.
“Hot work, ain’t it, youngster?” observed Mr Stormcock to me, presently, when we came under fire and I had the pleasant sensation of a jinghal ball passing close to my ear, cutting a bit out the collar of my jacket and making me wince, though I can honestly say I was not frightened at this, my first experience of being really in action. “Keep moving about and there’ll be less chance of your being picked off. A lively man who does his work without thinking of the shot, seldom gets touched. So I found it two years ago, at all events, when I was in the thick of it at Canton!”
“That’s thrue, sor,” put in Corporal Macan, who had lately regained his stripes after a long spell of good behaviour that atoned for his debauch at the Cape which lost him his rank; the Irishman now being engaged in serving the bow gun of the gunboat with the utmost deliberation, taking steady aim with each shot which he pitched into the cavalier of the nearest battery and knocking the gun into “smithereens” at his third attempt, though, for every weapon of the enemy which we silenced they seemed to bring a hundred others to bear on us. “Jist kape hopping about an’ faith ye’ll niver be hit, sure. Och, murther, what’s that now?”
As he jerked out the sudden exclamation, he certainly acted up to his advice; for, he gave a hop that took him some ten feet in the air ere he fell down on the deck, all covered with blood.