"What about yer hill wind now?" said the first one who had spoken, as Daisy went away, and they sat down again. "That will blooming well stop yer chawnce of going ashore and picking up a bit o' loot."
Old Mellins scrambled down to see me, and jolly glad I was. He is such a thoughtful chap, and had brought me some grub—a pot of pâté de foie gras and some bread and butter. Till I saw it I never realized how terribly hungry I was; and you should have seen me eating it, with Mellins standing over me, spreading great chunks of the pâté on thick slices of bread and butter, and telling me all that had happened.
"Our first run past those forts simply knocked the stuffing out of them. You couldn't see them for dust and the smoke of the shells, and when we turned round and went for them again they hardly fired a gun. We could see them tumbling over each other in their hurry to scramble out of the forts, and after we'd ceased firing someone hauled down their colours and hoisted a white flag as big as a sheet. It was simply ripping."
"How about the Commander?" I asked.
"He's going strong, and firing that big gun into the harbour every four or five minutes. 'No. 2' and 'No. 3' are right in under the forts, and Toddles has taken the Captain inshore to take possession of them, or what is left of them."
"Anybody killed?" I asked.
"We have one, poor Joe Connolly, the coxswain of my picket-boat," said Mellins sadly, "and the Strong Arm has three killed and nearly twenty pretty badly wounded. A 6-inch shell burst on her upper deck—in the battery."
Dr. Fox and his sick-berth steward came along then, and Mellins was sent away to get me some more clothes, as the ones I had on were torn and blood-stained. It wasn't all my blood, I think, for when Dr. Fox had ripped off my shirt he only found a clean cut along my ribs, and the wound in my leg was a nasty stab made, I expect, by one of those horrid boarding-pikes the Chinese were prodding me with.
This wound was much the more uncomfortable, and Dr. Fox took quite a long time probing and syringing it till it was quite clean.
It was very painful and smarted a good deal; and wasn't I jolly glad when he had finished and left me alone again, and Mellins had helped me into my clean things!