Gunboat and Gun-runner: A Tale of the Persian Gulf

by T. T. Jeans

"No," he called back. "We've advised them to send away those two ladies—two are there, I hear—but nothing else. They're always crying 'wolf', and we can't keep a ship tied to the telegraph-posts all the time."

I had intended telling him that Jassim was in Muscat, but this news made me forget him and spoilt my pleasure at getting away from Muscat and being able to help my friends the villagers. It made me very uncomfortable to think of those two fragile ladies exposed to such dangers in those sunbaked telegraph buildings on the little promontory of Jask.

We were not ready for sea until next morning, and that night I dreamt that I had to rescue those two ladies, or, rather, choose which I should rescue, and I picked up the little yellow-haired lady with the grey eyes and tried to carry her down to the Bunder Abbas; but my foot wouldn't move properly, and an Arab with a flaming-red beard and a knife in his hand would have caught me had I not woke up.

However, if one always worried about dangers which might happen at some uncertain future one's time would be pretty well occupied. When once we were out at sea, and the little "B.A." was tumbling about with the tail end of the south-west monsoon swell sliding under her, our cares and troubles seemed quickly blown away. The whole crew had caught some of yesterday's gloom, and they too were now as cheery as schoolboys. Even Moore and Ellis—still enemies—exchanged a few friendly remarks, and the dismal cook and his "mate" chattered to each other as they carried on their everlasting scouring of pots and pans. Mr. Scarlett was a different being altogether. He was his natural colour again, and I could have sworn that he was fatter than the day before. As for Percy, his glistening brown cheeks were split with a smile which extended from ear to ear. He knew that there had been something wrong, that his hero had been in some danger, and his two solemn great eyes followed Mr. Scarlett wherever he moved. To him the gunner was the most wonderful thing his little world held, and if you had seen him squatting in a shady corner outside our cabin, whitening Mr. Scarlett's shoes or helmet, daubing here and there, then waiting for the damp places to dry in the sun, holding them up to see the effect and trying to make them look whiter than any shoes or helmet had been before, you would have felt a great liking for the little chap in his queer surroundings so far from his home and people.

All that day we steamed along that tremendous coast line of cliffs, and whenever some particularly barren rock stuck out into the sea I could not help, for the life of me, picturing the white telegraph buildings at Jask, and remembering the fluttering of a white handkerchief I had once seen waving "good-bye" from the corner near the flagstaff.

"No other tune you know?" Mr. Scarlett asked me cynically, whilst we were thoroughly enjoying the lunch Percy had furnished. "You've been whistling and humming the same old tune for the last three hours."

I'm hanged if I'd known it at the time, but it was "Two Eyes of Grey". Well, to know that those treacherous Afghans were threatening that isolated telegraph station was enough to make anyone think of the little grey-eyed lady imprisoned there.

In the afternoon we passed quite close to one of those buggalows which had gone to Kalat al Abeid to purchase the camels, and her deck was crowded with them. We met another as we threaded our way through the channel cut in the cliffs, also laden with camels. She was drifting out with the tide, and we had some difficulty in passing her.

When we anchored off the village itself, three more were half in, half out of the water, and we could see our friends the villagers trying to persuade more stubborn brutes to climb aboard along sloping gangways.

The head-man was along in a jiffy, bringing another sheep with him. I hardly recognized him for a moment in a green turban and a scarlet burnous with a flaming scarlet belt, into which he had stuck silver-mounted daggers (the green turban I found out afterwards was the one Jassim had lost that awful night, and I remembered that he was not wearing it when he followed his wounded son through the gap). Across his knees he had one of the rifles we had given him—each man in the boat had one—and he was treating it as if it was a baby or something alive. When he stepped on board, all smiles and friendliness, he brought it with him, and kept on patting it affectionately, shaking a bag slung from his shoulder by a piece of coarse string, and smiling like a big baby when the cartridges inside it rattled.