“Three cheers now, my lads!” he called out at the end of his harangue, which was interspersed with a lot of ‘ahem’-ing and ‘haw’-ing, ‘old Hankey Pankey’ not being much of a speaker—“three cheers for the old flag that has never been licked yet in the long-run!”
If you could have only heard the shout that went up from the lusty throats of the chaps standing round me and Larrikins, you would not have thought we had just been beaten off by those black devils nor had to mourn so many jolly shipmates whom we would never see again in this life!
But, sailors can’t afford to waste any time in ‘crying over spilt milk’; it would be a poor lookout for them, aye, and for our country too, if they did!
‘Old Hankey Pankey’ was of a like opinion.
So no sooner had the echo of our ringing cheer died away amidst the hills beyond Malindi, now purpling with the shades of evening, ere, turning round as well as he could with his bandaged limbs, still sitting in the easy-chair in which he had been brought up from below, he hailed the signalman and told him to make the Merlin’s number, calling Mr Gresham at the same time to his side, the two of them confabulating together.
Presently, in response to another signal from us, Captain Oliver came on board, when he joined in the talk going on between ‘old Hankey Pankey’ and Mr Gresham for a bit and then returned to his own ship; the Merlin shortly afterwards slipping her moorings and making off at full speed to the southwards.
“I tell ’ee wot, Tom,” said Larrikins to me on our going down to the lower deck just then, the ‘disperse’ having sounded, and it being our watch below, “she’s gone h’off fur to tell the h’admiral o’ the bloomin’ mess we’ve made on it!”
This we found was the case next morning when the captain’s steward came forwards as usual; this worthy being better than a newspaper to all of us, for he used to tell us of things before they occurred, and truly enough too, instead of waiting for events to happen and then garbling them, as some prints I have seen do!
Two or three days later the Merlin, which reported having had a long chase after the senior officer, going almost as far as Zanzibar and back to Mombassa before she picked him up, returned to Malindi, in company with the Bullfinch, another small cruiser attached to the East African squadron.
Captain Oliver also brought orders from our chief, that parties of bluejackets were to be landed to protect Malindi from any hostile attack of the Arabs, while he with the admiral and all the force on the station were busy preparing an expedition on a grand scale, to drive the Somalis altogether out of the British protectorate, and so prevent any further attempt on their part to invade the country for some time to come.