“I tell you it wasn’t easy,” said the boy. “We promenaded all round the place, and I tried like fun to shake him off. I sent him errands and hid behind trees, and talked of how we were going to shoot him to-morrow—but it was all no blooming good! I was at my wits’ end at last, and had almost made up my mind to tie him to a tree and run for it, when I got a bright idea. I pretended I had dropped my canteen under a banyan a mile behind the town, a kind of cemetery banyan, full of dead men’s bones—a rummy place, I can tell you. And when we got down near the boat, I took the nigger on one side and bade him go and fetch it. ‘And don’t you come back without it, Billy,’ said I. ‘I’ll be dismissed the service if I can’t account for that canteen!’ Then he asked how long I was going to stay, and I said a week; and he went off like a lamb, while we squared away for the ship. Didn’t you see the jossers pull!”
It had been the merest pretence that had taken the war-ship into Port McGuire, and now that her merciful errand had been so successfully accomplished, and Billy reluctantly torn at last from those who had to kill him, Captain Casement lost no time in ordering the ship to sea. But as the winch tugged at the anchor, and the great hull crept up inch by inch to the tautened chain, a sudden yell roused the captain on the bridge and struck him as cruelly as one of those poisoned arrows he feared so much.
“Billy, on the starboard bow!”
Sure enough, a black poll protruded above the rippling bosom of the bay, and two frantic arms were seen driving a familiar dark countenance on a course towards the vessel. It was Billy indeed, his honest face marked with anguish and despair as he fought his way to regain his prison.
Casement groaned. And for this he had been holding the cruiser two long weeks in those God-forsaken islands, and had invented one excuse upon another to delay his return to Sunflower Bay! Billy had been given a hundred chances to escape, and now, like a bad penny, here he was again, ready to precipitate the catastrophe which could no longer be postponed.
A great laugh went up when Billy presented himself on deck, exhausted, dripping like a spaniel, and sorely hurt in spirit. He began at once to blurt out the story of the canteen, and made a bee-line for Burder; but that intrepid youngster could afford to listen to no explanations, and in self-defence had to order Billy into the hands of the marines, who led him away protesting.
Casement’s patience was now quite at an end. He headed the ship for Sunflower Bay, and spared no coal to bring her there in short order. Three hours after they had passed out of the heads of Port McGuire the Stingaree was at anchor off the blow-hole.
Facey was drinking a whisky-and-soda, and preparing himself, as best he could, for the ordeal he knew to be before him, when the captain’s servant entered the ward-room and requested his presence in the cabin.
“Mr. Facey,” said the captain, “take the doctor and the pay and forty men well armed from the ship, and when you’ve assembled the village take that Billy and shoot him.”
“Yes, sir,” said the lieutenant, turning very pale.