He looked at his watch. It was twelve o’clock. The storm that had brewed and burst with the diabolical suddenness peculiar to Black Sea hurricanes had begun to pass over. Tears in the pall of sooty vapor rushing north-east showed patches of chill blue sky and blinks of frosty-pale sunshine. The batteries had never for an instant ceased bellowing and growling. Now men who had left off work, or play—to stare from the cliffs at the sight of war-steamers buckling up, and transports smashing like matchwood—went back to play or work again.
But, where the cliff lowered to a saddleback below the Fortress, a rescue-party of men of both Services—with lifebuoys and lines and a rocket-apparatus—were energetically busy—and the Ensign joined them and asked the reason why? When they pointed to the brink of the cliff, he crawled on his hands and knees, and, craning his neck over—saw that shipwrecked mortals no bigger than swarming bees were clinging to a fragment of wreckage—jammed amidst jagged rocks and boiling surges, a sheer three hundred feet below.
The question argued was, who should be lowered down and make fast a line, by which these perishing wretches might be hauled into safety? They would have settled the thing by drawing of lots. But Fate stepped in in the person of the bullet-headed young subaltern of the Cut Red Feathers, who shouted as he unbuckled his sword-belt, untied his sash, and threw off his mud-stained fur-coat.
“I’m the owner’s son, and this is my affair, I’m blest if it ain’t! I’m dam’ if anybody goes down that cliff but me!”
He had not the least desire to die, but it had suddenly been revealed to him as by a mental lightning-flash, that there was but one way to cleanse the tarnished name of Jowell. Not by discarding it—but by good deeds purifying it, and sweetening it in the nostrils of honest men.
As they made fast the line about him, he fumbled in his breast and pulled out a little note-case, calling out:
“I want some fellow to take charge of this!”
No one volunteering, he scanned the faces of the throng about him—and lighted on one that, despite a shag of crimson beard—he knew. He said, moving over to the owner, a tall, broad-shouldered, ragged soldier, in the tatters of a Lancer uniform, and holding out his hand to him:
“You’re the man who saved me in the wreck of The British Queen, and wouldn’t tip me your fist afterwards. Have you any objection to doing it now?” He added, as Joshua Horrotian complied shamefacedly: “And as you’re a kind of cousin, you might look after this ’ere note-case. There are some flimsies in it, and two letters that are to be posted, supposing I don’t come up from down there! You can keep the tin in the event I’ve mentioned, and spend it as you choose! Do you twig? And have my sword and sash sent to my mother! Now, ain’t you beggars about ready to lower away?”