"I didn't fire it myself, though, Sharpe, did I?" he asked; and Sharpe said, "No, sir, you didn't hardly do that, but you was a-steadyin' of the cartridge belt, and seeing as how it was 'fed' properly, and a-knocking back the crank handle, and you was shoutin' and cheerin' like Billy Loo, that you was, sir. You was about the only one of us who wasn't skeared, or—well—if you was, you didn't look skeared," he went on, for he saw that Dicky wouldn't believe him.
"We was all a bit skeared, eh, sir?" and he winked his eye at me.
I knew jolly well that I had been.
The others all wanted to be very civil to him now, but Jim and I boomed them off. He belonged more or less to us, and we weren't going to have them shoving their oars in too quickly.
Jim and I were very excited when we heard that the Commander was going to land with the marines and try and blow up the six-inch gun. We hung about outside his cabin, and shoved ourselves under his nose up on deck all the afternoon, so that he shouldn't possibly forget us. We expected that he would take one, if not two midshipmen with him, and we didn't see why we should not go, and you can imagine how badly we wanted to go. Everyone wanted to land with him especially, for he was such a "ripper", and so jolly pleasant, and was always "smoothing over" things when everyone was cross and bad-tempered, and felt he wanted to bite everyone else's nose off. He was very strict "service", but he never did small irritating things, and treated us Mids and Cadets as though we were human beings; several of the ward-room officers didn't seem to think so, quite. He had a great leathery face like the Captain's, and was tremendously popular with the men. We heard that he had nothing but his pay to live on, and had a wife and family to keep. That was quite enough, the A.P. used to say, to make any man solemn at times. He did very often look worried, but when anything was "doing", he was always as "buckish" as any of us.
Nobody had ever seen him in a bad temper, so no one ever minded having to report things to him. If we had to report anything, a light or a change of course, or anything like that, we had often to screw up our courage before we tapped at the Captain's door, for often he would nearly bite our heads off. It was jolly different with the Commander, for time after time I have had to wake him, at night or during his afternoon sleep, and he would say, "Right you are, boy", as cheerfully as anything. I remember once he said, "No trouble to wake me, Ford, eh?" and I couldn't help smiling, and he asked me what the joke was, and I told him that I had just called the Captain, and—well—he hadn't enquired very civilly whether I had had trouble in waking him.
He knew all the Captain's family. He used to go down there to shoot, and had met my father and mother there too, so that was probably the thing that just made the difference when he had to choose a midshipman, because he did choose me.
Wasn't that absolutely splendid? And Jim was to go with Mr. Whitmore; so we were both simply wild with delight, and rushed down to tell everyone. He had sent for us in his cabin, and he looked very grim and sad when we went there, but he didn't look quite so serious when we left. He was so amused at our being so jolly excited, I expect; but we couldn't help that.
He had shown us the map thing which Mr. Hoffman had drawn, and explained exactly what he was going to do; and told us to take revolvers, not dirks or cutlasses, as they would only get in the way, and to wear the boots with the broadest soles, as we should have to wade through mud; and as they would be slippery afterwards, to get big nails put in them, because we should probably have to do a lot of scrambling.
We were the only two midshipmen who were going to actually land; but Withers was going inshore in the barge, Jones in the first cutter, and Webster in the steam pinnace.