“Very good, sir,” replied Mr Gresham, taking up a revolver and box of cartridges he had brought on deck with him, and going towards the after gangway, abreast of which the steam pinnace was lying, buzzing away like a little wasp alongside; the intimation on the part of our captain that he would ‘like’ a thing being done being quite equivalent to a command to do it! “You mean, sir, that queer-shaped headland some twenty miles down the coast?”
“Yes, we passed it when we came back from the wreck,” replied ‘old Hankey Pankey,’ pointing with his hand away to windward. “You will then cut off the retreat of the dhows, while we head them off farther up the coast.”
“Very good, sir,” said Mr Gresham, accepting this as a final dismissal. “I will attend to your orders, sir. By George, those Arabs will have to be precious sharp if they manage to steal back past us to their haunts!”
So saying, Mr Gresham went down the side, without any further palaver; and, when he was seated in the sternsheets, the pinnace went off in a bee-line to the sou’-west in the teeth of the monsoon, which was beginning to blow now pretty briskly.
The first cutter was then piped away, Larrikins and I being the two first to jump aboard her when the bowman laid hold of her painter and drew her up alongside.
Lieutenant Dabchick came with us in command, as soon as she was fully manned and armed, an ammunition-chest being lowered down with a supply of ‘pills and pepper’ for the little nine-pounder boat-gun we carried in our bows; when, we sheered away from the ship’s side and lay on our oars, and the second cutter hauled up alongside to receive her crew and equipment like ourselves.
This did not take long in doing—the whaler being also manned and the senior midshipman sent in charge of her, with the boatswain to check his rashness; and then, the three of us, first cutter, second cutter and whaler, were all taken in tow by the Mermaid, which went off full speed ahead after the Arab dhows that were now only some five miles off us, the cruiser shaping a slanting course so as to prevent them from making for the wide stretch of open water that lay to the north’ard, should they try to escape in that way.
Their retreat to the port whence they had sailed was cut off by the pinnace; and, as their only refuge now when we overhauled them would be the rock-bound coast lying between Binna and Ras Hafim, they were, as I heard Mr Dabchick say to the coxswain, ‘between the devil and the deep sea!’
The reckless beggars, too, were so busy looking out in the direction of the stranded steamer for which they were making, that somehow or other they did not catch sight of us until they were nearly within easy range of our six-inch breechloaders; the leading dhow, which was what the Arabs call a ‘batilla,’ and carried two large lugs or lateen sails on wide yards, besides a sort of square jib forwards, rigged out on a bowsprit like a spritsail boom, caught sight of us as we luffed up to let fly at her.
For a second or two they seemed all of a heap, like a covey of frightened partridges; and then, getting their tacks aboard as smartly as if they were English seamen and not rascally Somali Arabs, they hauled their wind and made in for the shore, thinking, no doubt, ‘Old Nick’ was after them.