The evening before we had to start there hadn't been a breath of wind, and Dicky and I sat up whistling for it till very late. This was the first time we had spent the night aboard, and we really couldn't sleep because of the excitement and the fleas. The wind did come by the morning, but from the wrong direction, and the Ringdove, to save time, simply towed us away behind her.
It wasn't a very glorious start, but they gave us a grand cheer, and the Captain had shouted, "Good luck, Dick! pull your pound for the good old West Country," and that made me gloriously happy, because he had never called me "Dick" since the first day I joined.
When we had got round the corner, out of sight of the Vigilant, and knew that we were in for any amount of adventures, we felt simply ripping, and the sun came out too, and we sat on deck and dried our things.
We were so close to the Ferret that we could talk to Jim, and presently he came out of his "kennel"—he called his a "kennel", and we called ours a "rabbit hutch"—and yelled across to us to look. He had a huge cake in both hands. "You've got one too, I expect," he shouted, and we crawled into our hutch; and in a corner, under the sea boots, was just such another, all covered with icing, and "Chin Chin Joss from Ah Man" scrawled on it in sugar. Wasn't that jolly decent of the old messman? Of course we'd spent no end of money getting sardines and jam and biscuit from him—those sovereigns the Captain had given Jim and myself had come in jolly useful—but we never expected anything like this, and it just made us completely happy, and we had a piece each on the spot, and waved across to Jim whilst he and Mr. Trevelyan had slices too.
The pilot who came to us was named Ah Chee, a funny-looking old chap, and I'm sure you wouldn't have guessed his age within twenty years. He could talk a little "pidgin" English, and volunteered to do the cooking—in a tiny little galley place over a brazier belonging to the junk, and that boat's stove which we had fitted up—and did it jolly well too, except when he'd been smoking too much opium.
As I told you before, Scroggs was the name of one petty officer, a fine great chap, and Sharpe, a fat, good-natured little man, the other. They were both jolly good at their job, and the Commander had given us a good lot of seamen too.
When it got dark they started a "sing song", and Dicky and I each sang a song. I sang "We'll rant and we'll roar", and Dicky sang "Clementine", and we had an awfully jolly time, and were just as happy as anything, but for those wretched crawling and jumping things.
The Ringdove towed us along for two whole days, and on the morning after the second night Mr. Rashleigh had towed us to wind'ard of the Chung-li Tao group of islands. He then stopped her engines and hauled us alongside for orders. We took our charts with us, Mr. Trevelyan and I, and he told me I was to cruise to the eastward and search all the channels, and rejoin him to leeward of a certain island within four days—I forget the name of the island; and he told us a lot more of what we must do in case the weather or the wind changed, but as he had written it all down, it was not necessary to remember it. Then he said goodbye, wished us good luck, and his final orders were: "Keep your guns covered up with old tarpaulins, don't let your people show themselves when you're close to a village or a junk, and don't attempt to look too smart. Don't hoist your sails as if you were in a blooming hurry, and if you're not sure where you are, anchor for the night. You're intended to be ordinary merchant junks, and you're just bits of bait—sprats to catch a whale—and you have to get hold of some of these fellows for the Captain, and get 'em alive too—he doesn't want dead 'uns. If you meet more than you can tackle, just run down to me, and," he added solemnly, "if other things happen, keep one cartridge in your revolvers for yourselves."
That made me feel rather creepy and coldish, but not exactly frightened, because Mr. Rashleigh is so plump and so—well—funny looking that, however solemnly he tried to say anything, you really wanted to laugh.
Just before we went away Dr. Hibbert, the jolly Surgeon of the Ringdove, gave Mr. Trevelyan and myself two big wine bottles each. They were marked "Foretop" and "Maintop". He winked cheerily at us: "You'll find 'em useful, you fellows. If any of your chaps gets a pain below the belt, shove in a big whack of the 'Maintop' bottle; if he gets a pain above the belt, give him half a dozen whacks of the 'Foretop'."