"They've fired the ship, captain—fired the ship!" says he, with just anger. "Aye, Heaven do to them as they've done to those poor creatures! Did man ever hear of such a villainy—to fire a good ship in her misfortune? It would be a sin against an honest rope to hang such a crew as that!"
I stepped forward to the water's edge that I might see the thing more clearly. Looming up upon that fair horizon were wreathing clouds of smoke and crimson flames, and in the heart of it all the outline of the ship these fiends had doomed. No picture ever painted could present that woful scene or describe its magnificence as we saw it from the watch-tower of the reef. It was, indeed, as though the very heavens were on fire, while the sea all about the burning hull shone like a pool of molten gold in which strange shapes moved and the shadows of living things were to be seen. Now licking the quivering masts, now blown aside in tongue-shaped jets, the lambent flame spurted from every crack and crevice, leaped up from every port-hole of that splendid steamer. I saw that her minutes were numbered, and I said that before the dawn broke she would sink, a mass of embers, into the hissing breakers.
"Good Lord, Mister Bligh!" cried I, the seaman's habit coming to me at the dreadful spectacle, "was ever such a thing heard of? And the poor people aboard—what of them now? What haven may they look for?"
"They've put the men ashore, sir," said Dolly Venn, hardly able to speak for his anxiety. "I saw two boat-loads go across to the bay while Mister Bligh was piling the ammunition. They've sent them to die on the island. And we so helpless that we must just look on like schoolgirls. Oh! I'd give all I've got to be over yonder with a hundred bluejackets at my elbow. Think of it, sir! Just a hundred, and cutlasses in their hands."
"Aye," said I, "and a tree for every rogue that rows a boat yonder. Well, my lad, thinking's no good this night, nor can you get the bluejackets by whistling. We haven't all served our time in a Queen's ship, Dolly, and we're just plain seamen; but we'll try and speak a word to Edmond Czerny by-and-bye, or I'll never speak another. Now, help me with your young eyes, will you, and tell me if that's a ship's gig yonder, or if it isn't———"
He said that it was a ship's gig, and he pointed out that which I had not seen before—a steam yacht lying off to the east of us and waiting for some of her crew to go aboard. Edmond Czerny would be on deck there, I thought, watching the hounds he had sent to the work; and if that spectacle of death and destruction did not gratify him, then nothing would in all the world. And surely such a sight even he had not beheld in all his years. That shimmering molten sea, the island catching the reflected lights and making its own pictures of them; the distant forests, whose trees lifted fiery branches and leaves of flame; the mist-clouds raining blood and gold, the burning steamer, the great arena of fire-flecked sea and the small-boats swimming upon it—what more of delight or devilry could Ken's Island give this vulture of the deep?
So much the night would show us as Providence willed and good hearts might determine.
Now, I have told you that little Dolly Venn had served in the Naval Reserve and knew more of gunnery than the most of us. To this, I bear witness, we owed much that night.
"You've got a skipper's part, Dolly, lad," said I, "and yon gig begins the trouble, if my eyes don't deceive me. Why, she's coming in here, lad, straight to this very door, just as fast as oars can bring her. And there's more to follow—a fleet of them, as any lubber could tell you."
"'Tis like a fête and gala on the old stinking Liffey," says Peter Bligh, peering with me across the busy sea. "A dozen boats, and every one of them full. I'd give something to see Mister Jacob to-night; indeed, and I would, captain. We are over few for such an 'out and home' as this."