I saw that it was Miller, one of the armourers, and I remembered that he had gone with Mr. Whitmore's party, and I forgot all about worrying about where we were for a second.
"Did we smash that gun?" I cried, and tried to sit up in my excitement, but fell back again pretty quickly—my left arm was so painful every time I tried to move.
Miller yawned and shook his head dolefully: "We never got nowhere near it, sir. Jerusalem!" he gasped, "you do look a fair 'knock-out', sir, that you does."
"Well, tell me. What happened? Did Mr. Rawlings get hurt?"
Then he told me that Mr. Hoffman had guided them all right, but they made a goodish deal of noise themselves, and our party (the Commander's party) had given the alarm too soon, and they simply found themselves running into hundreds of Chinese, and had to fall back again.
"You see, sir, it was like this. We went along all right till those huts began a burnin', but the light from 'em just gave the show away, and let 'em see where to fire. Mr. Rawlings was knocked over, an' a lot more, sir, an' the last as I seed of 'em was going back, very slow, a-carryin' some people, an' stoppin' and firin' back—occasional."
And all the time we had thought how jolly comforting those flames were, and that they might help them to find their way back. I tried to get more from him about Jim, but he didn't know any more, except that there had been a lot of firing, and he had seen him fall, and two men lift him up. But that was enough to make me feel frightfully sad, though I didn't really seem to imagine that it was all quite real; and the pain in my head was so bad, and my arm was so painful, and I was so stiff and cold and cramped all over, that nothing could make me much more miserable, not even knowing that we had been captured by the pirates, or Jim had been badly wounded.
"I fell into a ditch or something," Miller went on, "an lost my way and got be'ind'and, and tried a-takin' a short cut, and something 'it me on the head and fair dazed me, and them ugly devils came up and collared me—came up from be'ind, they did. I never got a chance.
"I've got a bit of a scratch 'ere, sir," and he crawled over to me, and stooped to show me a groove across the top of his head. A bullet must have done it, and the hair was all matted together with blood.
"How did they catch you?" I asked Martin.