“Ye’r a fine chap, Tom, to give a fellow h’infumation,” he said with a snigger. “I could ’a told you as much meself. Why, carn’t I see with ’arf a h’eye we’re steerin’ to the north’ard up the coast, with the munsoon a-blowin’ right in our teeth and the sun on our starb’rd ’and!”
I laughed, too, at the sharp wag’s rejoinder.
“Well, Larry,” I said at last, after polishing up the ratchet of the Nordenfeldt I was working at to my personal satisfaction, hoping to have the aiming of it bye-and-bye, “I can’t tell you any more than that we are bound up the coast, and are likely to have a brush with the Arabs along there somewhere; but where that somewhere is, my joker, I’m hanged if I know!”
“I can tell you, mate,” put in a man who was rubbing up the gun at the end of the bridge hard by where we were standing. “We’re off for Mombassa again. I heard ‘old Square toes,’ the navigator, tell Mr Chisholm just now. He said we were agoin’ to meet the Merlin there, and purseed further up the coast together.”
“Oh!” said Larry, “that means business, Tom.”
“Ay,” said I, “it does, my hearty, and to tell the truth, Larry, I’m jolly glad of it.”
So were all hands on board, when the news spread through the ship; and, on our reaching Mombassa late in the afternoon of the same day, steaming fifteen knots all the way, pretty nearly our full speed when the stokehold was not ‘closed up,’ we found the Merlin there before us, as the man on deck had told Larry and me in the morning.
This made assurance a certainty, every man-jack of the crew being cock-a-hoop with excitement, when, after a lot of signalling between the two cruisers, and the Merlin’s gig bringing her captain alongside, he being junior to ‘old Hankey Pankey,’ the two of us sailed off in company just before sunset.
Our destination was Malindi, at the mouth of the Sabaki river, where it was reported the Somalis had made an inroad into the British protectorate, and burnt one of the out stations of the East African Company, slaughtering all the whites and natives employed by the traders.
This place was only some sixty miles to the northward of Mombassa; and all the arrangements for our landing having been completed, and ‘old Hankey Pankey’ settled his plan of operations with Captain Oliver of the Merlin, we did not hurry on the passage to Malindi, timing ourselves to arrive about daybreak, casting anchor in front of the town, as near in as we could get without shoaling our water, at Six Bells in the morning watch to the minute.