Chapter IV: Part 4

It was very different with that stranded cutter. She was not more than six hundred yards away from the sand-hills, closer still to the foot of the cliffs, and almost immediately one of the three men still working her Maxim fell and was pushed aside or crawled away--I couldn't see which.

Griffiths came up with his rifle. "Go on, fire yourself!" I shouted, and he lay down and began potting at the people on the cliff, over our heads. The shooting now slackened from there, and I quickly understood why, for I saw fifty or sixty natives scampering down a cliff path and wading through the shallow mouth of the creek. By the time I had ordered a Maxim to swing round on them most of these had joined the others behind the sand-hills. We bagged two or three, however.

I knew that we were in a horrid mess, and didn't want Mr. Scarlett to come up to me--absolutely yellow in the face--and tell me so. Just as he was blurting and stuttering out something about a falling tide and getting that cutter afloat, people down below began shouting: "Look! Look!"

Griffiths, peering over his shoulder with frightened eyes, pointed, and I saw a regular horde of Afghans pouring over the tops of those sand-hills and racing down the beach, straight for the stranded cutter. I looked at her. Only one man was now working that Maxim, or trying to do so, and making a bad job of it. Something had gone wrong with the belt. He tried desperately to jerk it clear, failed, then gave it up, caught sight of the yelling Afghans charging down on him, and hid under the gunwale.

The six-pounder fired as rapidly as it could, and must have killed many, but one of our Maxims had jammed and the other would not bear. Mr. Scarlett's piercing voice was shrieking for me to turn the _Bunder Abbas_ round so that he could use the second Maxim. I gave the wheel a turn and rang down to the engine-room. Before I was able to turn her side farther towards the beach that fierce rush had reached the water's edge. Scores of wild Afghans were splashing through the sea. We could hear them yelling as they waded knee-deep--waist-deep--towards the cutter. Then we saw the two men still alive in her peer over the gunwale, and one seized a rifle and began firing, but the other crawled across the thwarts, let himself down over the stern, and commenced to swim towards the _Bunder Abbas_.

A six-pounder will not stop a rush: its shells are not deadly enough. I thought the Maxim would never fire. Looking at the dhow to see whether our people were safe, I saw rifles sticking out from under her poop railings, so knew that Popple Opstein and his men had climbed on board. They, too, were firing on the Afghans charging through the water. On these came; they were not thirty yards from the cutter; the man inside it had his face turned appealingly to us.

Then Mr. Scarlett started the Maxim. He found the range in a twinkling--he only had to follow the splash of the bullets till they fell amongst the natives, and then wobble the gun--and it was impossible to miss. Their shouts of triumph changed to wild shrieks of terror. It was just as if a scythe had swept over them. They subsided under the water--they disappeared--only a few, crouching till their heads hardly showed above the surface, regained the beach and the protection of the sand-hills.

There was no time for thinking of this sickening slaughter; my chum and his men had to be brought off, his cutter had to be refloated, and that dhow had still to be destroyed.

"Land and help him!" The thought did come into my head for a second, but it would have been idiotic. We should only be putting our heads into the same trap that he was in.

The Afghans had had such a terrible lesson that for a short time only a few ventured to the edge of the sand-hills to fire on us. The fire from the cliffs, whilst our Maxims were no longer keeping it down, became somewhat more vigorous, and I knew that now was my chum's chance to rush back along that beach and regain the cutter.

I shouted to the signal-man to semaphore across to him, but he must have also realized that this was his opportunity, for almost immediately we saw the bluejackets sliding down the dhow's side--two had to be helped down--and then they all--seven of them-- came back along the water's edge. Very slowly they came, for one man was being carried and my pal was limping badly, though managing without assistance. Only a few Afghans were firing at them, and these we stopped by mowing the edges of the sand-hills with Maxim bullets wherever a head showed.

They seemed to be taking hours. I found myself yelling to them to try to go faster. They kept on stopping to fire at the sand-hills. Then, at last, they began wading out, and we cheered as we saw them climb aboard the boat without further loss, get out their oars, and try to push off. Our joy died down when we saw that they could not move her. The tide had fallen, and the cutter was on top of a sandbank with not a foot of water covering it. They jumped out again into the shallows and strained and heaved, but not an inch could they shift her.

All this time the Afghans on the cliff were firing at them. They clambered back into the boat and replied to this fire with rifles: something had evidently gone wrong with their Maxim. Afghans now appeared over the sand-hills immediately behind the cutter, where we dare not fire for fear of hitting my chum's people. These, too, opened fire on the cutter, and the water all round it was alive with bullet splashes. Another man fell down in the boat and his rifle overboard.

Unless something was done very quickly they would all be killed. I yelled for volunteers to pull the dinghy across and take them a rope. Dobson, the leading seaman, and Webster, the corporal of marines, jumped into her first. "Take the wheel and don't go farther inshore," I called to Griffiths, and rushed down on deck to supervise the rope being passed into the dinghy and coiled down in her stern-sheets. On my way I saw Jaffa, standing at the foot of the ladder, aiming at the top of the cliffs with a rifle. He was as calm as ever.

The dinghy was on our shore side, away from the cliffs and sheltered from fire. We coiled all the ropes we had into her stern, bending one to the end of the next. I rushed back to the wheel and moved the _Bunder Abbas_ in towards the cutter until my bows touched the sand. Then I gave the word to Dobson and Webster and they shot ahead of the bows, the rope uncoiling and paying out as they pulled.

Directly they had cleared our bows the whole of the rifle fire was turned on them, and they had not taken fifty strokes before Dobson was hit. He dropped his oar, but grabbed it again, pulling with one hand. A moment later he was struck a second time and fell forward.

Webster seized his oar and went on, but I shouted to him to come back, and with a brilliant thought he made fast the rope and we hauled him back. As the dinghy came near I saw that Dobson was dead. We lifted him out and Mr. Scarlett jumped in.

"I'm going, sir," he said, and I was so astonished that I could say nothing.

We laid Dobson on deck and jumped back to work our guns, whilst Mr. Scarlett and Webster pulled madly towards the cutter, paying out the rope and steering wildly. We yelled with delight when they reached the cutter and passed the rope inboard.

In a moment the cutter's crew had clambered into the water again to lighten the boat. They held up their hands to signal my rope made fast.

I gave the "_B.A._" a touch astern and stopped her engines, the rope tautened, the cutter's crew shoved and pushed and yelled that she was moving. In half a minute we had her afloat, her men scrambling in as she slid into deep water; in ten minutes we were out of range, and in half an hour she and the dinghy were both alongside, and I had dropped anchor two miles from the cliffs and out of sight of the dhow. The cutter was peppered with bullet holes, her gunwales, sides, and oars splintered and grooved in a hundred places. She leaked like a sieve, and water filled her to her thwarts.

She had one dead man on board--one of those left as boat-keepers--the one I had seen shot when working the Maxim; one man shot through the chest and leg; four others wounded (one with three bullet wounds through soft parts), besides Popple Opstein.

"It went clean through my calf muscles," he told me. "It's nothing."

Not until then did anyone remember the man who had started to swim back towards the _Bunder Abbas_ when those Afghans charged down. He had not been seen since, and must have been drowned, or perhaps killed by a bullet in the head. Two of the cutter's crew had been left on shore dead, so these made the cutter's total casualties three killed, one missing, and five wounded. Only four had escaped untouched.

The dead man and the wounded were all brought aboard the _Bunder Abbas_: the dead who might only have been wounded, the wounded who so easily might have been dead. A turn of the head, and a bullet which would have only grazed your ear blows out your brains; you drop a cartridge, stoop to pick it up, and a bullet which would have gone through your heart wings on its way without your knowing that it had ever come and gone.

Whenever one sees dead and wounded brought back by the untouched men who have been fighting alongside them, one cannot help thinking queer thoughts, and casting enquiring glances at the survivors to see what qualities they have which spared them. I must admit that I have never yet noticed anything particularly noble about those who have escaped. Since those gun-running days I have seen much fighting and many killed and wounded, and the untouched have generally been cursing something or somebody, giving relief to the strain on their nerves by cursing hard. Thoughts take longer to write than to think, so they don't, in actual practice, waste much time.

We were obliged to take every heavy weight out of the cutter to prevent her sinking, and then tried to stop the bullet holes below the water line.

Webster, the corporal of marines, was as handy with the medicine chest and its bandages as he was with anything else I ever saw him try his hands on. In half an hour he had made the wounded chaps as comfortable as it was possible for them to be. Percy, too, was in his element bringing them water, tinned milk, and coffee. He was like a dog in his admiration for white men. If he had had a tail he would have wagged it off that morning.

Until that cutter was safe I did not care how many rifles the Afghans took out of the dhow in our absence; but directly she was fairly watertight I left her at anchor with the dinghy, Moore, the timid Goanese carpenter, and a couple of hands, to carry on repairs, and steamed inshore again.

I kept wide of the cliffs (from which a terrific fire burst out) until the beach and the dhow herself came in full view.

The shore was again alive with Afghans and their camels. Through my glasses I could see sacks of rifles being thrown from the dhow on to the sand, snatched up by eager men, and rapidly packed on the camels' backs. A long string of heavily-laden camels was already disappearing behind the sand-hills.

But I was not going to worry about them or Afghans. I was going to set that dhow on fire with my shells.

At twelve hundred yards I opened fire.

"At the dhow!" I shouted to Mr. Scarlett. "Don't worry about people."

Her woodwork began flying, and I knew that the shells were bursting inside her. It was only a question of time--the people aboard and close to her had vanished at the first shell--and presently smoke began to pour from her hatches. We cheered at this--those of us on deck working the gun, Griffiths at the wheel, and poor old Popple Opstein supporting himself against the deck rails. The rest I had sent down below under cover.

We kept on firing at her, and soon there was a rush of black smoke, small explosions took place aboard her, her stern blew out, her masts came tumbling down, and she took fire fore and aft. Every other minute some ammunition must have exploded, scattering fragments of wood and broken rifles round her on the sand. It was courting death to go near her; but, even so, some Afghans now and then rushed towards her, seized a rifle, and rushed back again. What plucky fellows they were!

By half-past ten o'clock there was no doubt that not a round of ammunition remained in her, nor a rifle that was not entirely useless; so, with a parting shot dropped behind the sand-hills, I went back to the cutter and dinghy, running the gauntlet of the cliffs without receiving any damage.

Hoisting in the dinghy, and taking the empty, waterlogged cutter in tow, I steamed very slowly seawards to find the _Intrepid_ and Nicholson.

Four men killed, one missing, and five wounded among the cutter's crew, one man killed and one wounded aboard the _Bunder Abbas_, was the price of that Sunday morning's work.

As we left Sheikh Hill behind us reaction set in, and we were very depressed.

The edge of civilization! I could not help thinking of that. At home people were just getting out of bed, wondering what Sunday clothes they should wear. I wished that some of them could have seen how we had spent that morning. If only I could have got hold of the people, English, French, or Germans--I didn't know and I didn't care--who had manufactured those rifles or sent them out there, I should have enjoyed torturing them.

Poor old Popple Opstein sat moodily outside my cabin under the awning, with his elbows on the table and his face buried in his hands. If I had been in his place I know that I should have done exactly as he had done; but, poor old chap, he knew as well as I did that he had bungled the whole affair, that we might have destroyed the dhow and the rifles without landing or losing a single man. He was suffering the tortures of the damned.

I put my hand on his shoulder and squeezed it. Nothing I could say would do him any good, and nothing did either of us say.

I dared not ask him if he was certain that those two men who had been left on the beach were actually killed; the thought of them having fallen alive into the hands of the Afghans was too horrible. Instead, I asked one of his men, and, thank God! he was certain that they were both dead. The one who had dropped halfway along the beach had been shot through the head, and the other, the one shot whilst lying half in the water under the dhow's stern, had been lying next to him, and his head was under the water all the time they were there.

The only touch of humour about the whole tragic business came from Percy. Dressed in his best, and looking very important, he had come up to me as we were in the middle of destroying that dhow and asked, pointing to my chum: "Master have guest to breakfast?" I had laughed like a fool, till I hurt myself.

As we were eating the food he had prepared for us--on the way back to the _Intrepid_ that was--I turned to the gunner. "Mr. Scarlett," I said, "if you are a coward you are the bravest coward I have ever heard of."

"I do things like that just to try and beat it down, sir," he mumbled; "but it's just as bad when the next show comes along. I can't help it, sir; I really can't. I know I look frightened; but I don't look half as frightened as I really am."

Percy looked upon him as a demigod--that was very evident.

*CHAPTER VII*

*The Battle of the Paraffin Can*

We were only able to tow that waterlogged cutter very slowly, so we did not sight the _Intrepid_ until three o'clock that afternoon. Half an hour later we crawled alongside, and my chum and I went on board to report. He looked as if he was going to his execution, and though I did my best to make him "buck up", and tried to hammer it into his head that we had done our best, and could do no more, he seemed more "down in the mouth" than ever.

Commander Duckworth made us tell him all that had happened, and I thought afterwards that if only people at home--just coming out of church they should have been at that hour--could have peered down into that luxuriously-furnished cabin of the _Intrepid_ in the middle of the Straits of Ormuz, could have heard the story which my chum told, and seen the agony in his face as he told it, how it would have impressed them!

Cool, grey-green silk curtains kept out the glare from the port-holes and skylight; green-silk lampshades on the tables fluttered in the grateful breeze from the electric fans; pictures of English scenery, old naval prints, photographs of beautiful women in evening and Court dress, and photograph groups of polo teams and their ponies covered the white bulkheads. From photographs in silver frames, standing on the tables between silver cups and trinkets, more delicate women looked out with smiling sympathetic eyes, whilst backwards and forwards past them paced the commander in his spotless white uniform. The Baron and I were sitting on a dainty, silk-covered sofa, digging our bare feet and toes into a soft Persian rug. We had no clothes on except dirty, open cotton shirts (the sleeves rolled up), and a pair of dirty duck "shorts" halfway up our thighs. Our bare legs and knees, our sunburnt chests and arms, looked very much out of place among the luxurious surroundings. Tied below his left knee Popple Opstein had a blood-stained handkerchief, and on my head and forehead was the dressing which Nicholson had put there three days ago.

My chum still wore his revolver belt and holster, and, for once, the dirty lanyard was round his neck.

"I made a fool of myself, sir," he blurted out; "I'd never had a chance before, and I went straight for her." His face was drawn with pain and shame at his want of discretion.

"You both want a brandy-and-soda," was all Commander Duckworth said when he had heard our tale.

He made us drink one--it was iced, and it was grand--and said not a word of reproof for our foolhardiness. If he had stormed and cursed us, I do not know what we should have done.

I dreaded terribly that my chum would not be allowed to take his cutter away again on account of his wound--if for no other reason--but I think that the commander realized his distressed state of mind, and I breathed freely when he quietly told us to repair all damages, that fresh men would be sent to replace casualties (my chum winced), and that we were to report as soon as we were ready to return to our stations.

I saw Popple Opstein's face flush with gratitude. He said, tremblingly: "Thank you, sir!" and limped out.

Commander Duckworth stopped me. "I don't know whether I am doing wisely or not in allowing him to go away again. Just have a look at him every daybreak, and, if that wound goes wrong, bring him back. Tell Nicholson to report to me what he thinks of it before he does go, and--and--just let him know how things stand."

"Very good, sir. Thank you, sir, very much! He's rather a strange old chap, fearfully sensitive, and he'd break his heart if you stopped him going."

The cutter was hoisted to the davits, and, whilst all the carpenters and ship-wrights in the ship were repairing her, the _Intrepid_ slowly steamed inshore, towing my launch astern. Nicholson found time to look at the wounds in my scalp and forehead. He told me that they had healed splendidly; but when I saw them in a looking-glass--a great red line across my forehead and another on the side of my head across a patch of half-grown hair--I could not help making a grimace.

"It won't show in a month's time," he said, laughing. "Don't you worry about your beauty being spoilt; the girls will like you all the better for it."

Strangely enough, I did happen to be thinking that perhaps if that little, yellow-haired lady saw me now, her mocking grey eyes might look a little serious--for once. At any rate she could not possibly treat me as an infant. I grew quite red--though that I should have done so was perfectly absurd, because I scarcely knew her, had only spoken to her once or twice, and then she had treated me as if I were a midshipman or a mere child.

Nicholson read my thoughts--or thought he did--and chaffed me till I grew more red than ever, and wanted to kick him.

Five miles off Sheikh Hill the _Intrepid_ lowered the repaired cutter, the _Bunder Abbas_ came alongside for me and to take in more ammunition, my chum and an entirely fresh crew manned his boat, and I towed him back to his old billet. He looked so sad and "rigid" as the cliffs opened out and he saw the blackened mass of woodwork, all that remained of the dhow which had caused that tragedy of the morning, that I felt very nervous to leave him alone for the night. It was quite dark when I yelled "good night" to him and steamed away down the coast to Kuh-i-Mubarak, to try to find Evans.

We found him surely enough--or rather he found us. He mistook the "_B.A._" in the darkness for a dhow, and fired twenty or thirty rounds from his Maxim before he saw my flashing lamp.

He was awfully apologetic; though, as no damage had been done, it did not matter. He had not seen a suspicion of a dhow, nor had he heard the noise of our firing, so went nearly "off his head" with excitement when I told him what had happened.

Having found that he was safe and sound, I went back to my patrolling line.

For several weeks everything went on extremely quietly. Every morning I would hail old Popple Opstein, and find how things were going with him; sometimes, when there was no hurry, he even came aboard for a cup of coffee. Every morning I visited Evans, and these two events were about the only excitement we had; except, of course, the weekly Thursday afternoon alongside the _Intrepid_.

The weather was monotonously fine, and it really was monotonous work. Neither was Mr. Scarlett exactly the type of man I should have chosen to live with. We agreed very well, indeed, but he was of a morbid disposition, never laughed except cynically, and seldom talked much unless something or other stimulated his rather brooding, sluggish mind. Then, as you already know, it was difficult to make him stop.

I liked talking at meals--he didn't; and, as a matter of actual fact, I, being a cheerful kind of chap, found him rather a "damper".

Wiggins had returned to the _Bunder Abbas_, and a leading seaman named Ellis, a sturdy, hard-working, little man, rather opinionated and fond of "gassing", had taken Dobson's place. He and Moore, the petty officer, did not "get on" at all well together. Moore was jealous of him, and was for ever coming to me complaining that "that 'ere Ellis took too much on 'isself."

Several times Moore brought him up to my platform deck (which we used as a quarter-deck) and reported him for disrespect. Precious little sympathy did he get from me, however. Still, in such a tiny little ship it was unpleasant to know that they were not on friendly terms. The jealousy first started, I fancy, when we had a "sing-song" one night. Both of them had sung songs, and Ellis had been more often "encored" than Moore. The reason seems perfectly inane, but full-grown men, under conditions such as these were, often behave in the most childish way possible.

During these first weeks Mr. Scarlett and Jaffa, between them, put me up to all the tricks of the gun-running business. What one didn't know of the Arabs' dodges for concealing rifles the other did; so I became quite an expert, theoretically.

One evening when it was fairly cool--after a regular furnace of a day--Mr. Scarlett became communicative. We had been speaking of boarding suspected dhows.

"Now take the case, sir, of a dhow flying the Turkish flag. You steam up to her; down goes her sail; over you bob to her in the dinghy with Jaffa, and tell the nakhoda to show his papers. You dare not board until you have seen them. He hands them down to you. You look through them--written in Turkish, English, and Hindustani; all three probably--and so long as they are in order, whether you know for certain that she's brim-full of rifles or whether you only suspect that she is, you dare not board and search her.

"I remember," he said, "running up against a fine dhow one morning--I was away in the old _Pigeon's_ cutter then--a long time since. We ran her down, headed her off till she couldn't get away, felt sure that she was going to be a fair prize, and yelled "Hallib! Hallib!" until she lowered her sails. And that reminds me, sir; never go alongside any dhow until she's lowered her sail. They Arabs have a nasty trick of waiting for you to come alongside, and then lowering the sail so that it and its big yard drops into the boat and smothers it. I've known 'em carry away a cutter's mast that way. Whilst you are helpless under the sail they pot at you, hoist it up again, and sail away. I've been 'had' like that myself once.

"Just you see that sail properly lowered and then make them hold up the halyards to show you that they are 'unbent', because they are as nippy as sharks a-hoisting it again.

"Well, as I was saying, we were as keen as mosquitoes over that 'ere dhow, but, as we caught hold of her with our boat-hooks, she hoisted Turkish colours and we dared not board her. The nakhoda, grinning at us, leant over her side and handed down his papers. These were in perfect order, so we no more dared board her than we dared stop the mail-steamer. What riled us chiefly was the brazen-faced way they did things. The cargo was put down as one hundred cases of champagne, consigned to a dirty little Persian village of about twenty miserable fishing-huts. We knew it well, we did, before--and after. We felt jolly well 'had'. We were as certain as 'eggs is eggs' that she was chock-full of rifles and ammunition, but they were as safe where they were as if they'd been on top of the Eiffel Tower.

"The lieutenant in charge of us cursed the Arab nakhoda, and called his ancestors dogs and sons of dogs, hoping he knew enough Hindustani to understand. Then off we had to shove.

"Our only chance was to catch those rifles on their way to the beach whilst the dhow was unloading, or when they once got there. All we could do was to pull off again and follow her, and it was about all we could do to keep up with her until she reached her blessed village just before dark.

"We'd been there a week before--for water--so we knew what it was like. If there had been thirty half-starved fishermen then I'd be overshooting the mark; now the beach was crowded with rascally Afghans and their camels, and no sooner did the dhow drop her anchor, close in to the beach, than those cases of champagne--about five feet long they were, each holding a dozen fat rifles we felt sure--were bundled into boats.

"We had a Gardner machine-gun in our bows, and opened fire with that and our old Martin Henrys; but there must have been a couple of hundred Afghans letting rip at us, so we had to pull out of range and watch those cases of champagne being lashed on the camels' backs until it was too dark to see anything more. At any rate, all those rifles got ashore, and you can guess what they were used for later on--for potting at British Tommies trying to keep order on the Indian frontier.

"Don't you go away with the idea that we English don't have a hand in the game," Mr. Scarlett continued gloomily. "Why, sir, many's the time I've seen captured rifles with the old 'Tower' mark on them, showing that they'd been made in England--old-fashioned Army rifles some of them, others not. And the tricks they're up to! My word, they are as artful as a bagful of monkeys! I've helped search a couple of hundred dhows or more in my time, and that's taught me a thing or two."

"The first dodge as I remember bowling out--and the simplest of 'em," Mr. Scarlett told me another evening, as he sipped his tot of rum--for it was not until Percy had brought along his rum and he had taken several "sips", when the crew had "piped down" and everything was quiet, that he generally started his "talking machine"--"they built double bottoms in their dhows, made 'em so cleverly that we used to think they were the real inner skin. But we happened to have emptied one of her cargo, and walking about inside her she sounded hollow under our feet, so we ripped up a board and found a snug little collection of rifles lying there. Of course the nakhoda swore he knew nothing about them; he and his crew called upon Allah and most of the minor prophets to testify to that, but it didn't prevent them doing their five months 'chokey' or losing their dhow. A nice little haul that was, and the word was passed along to 'sound' the bottoms of all the dhows we overhauled. We used to bang 'em with the butts of our rifles. They gave up that dodge after a while and invented something 'cuter' still. They'd fasten ten or twelve long ropes to the keel, outside her, bringing them over the side on deck, and they'd lash the free ends to sacks of rifles. If they sighted a gunboat or a launch, or any of our people, and there was a risk of being caught and searched, they'd simply drop them overboard and let them hang down in the water suspended from the keel. Along we would come, and find nothing wrong; search her high and low, and let her go, with our blessing or the other thing. Then one of our launches happened to come upon a dhow unexpectedly, and caught them doing it, heaving the sacks of rifles overboard--took her by surprise--and that game was 'up'. Never you leave a dhow, sir, till you've 'underrun' her.[#] You'd be surprised how many rifles we picked up that way.

[#] Underrun = drop a bight or loop of rope over the bows and haul it along under her keel.

"Then there's another dodge they have round about these coasts. All along the Arabian side there are plenty of mangrove trees, and a great trade in firewood is carried on with the Persian coast. So what was easier for a dhow than to stow a dozen or more rifles at the bottom of the hold and fill up with firewood on the top of them? They'd chance us getting tired of unloading them; a cutter cruising by herself couldn't do it, because you daren't throw any of the stuff overboard, and there wasn't room on the dhow's deck for all the wood stowed below. Why, sir, I've seen the whole of the _Pigeon's_ upper deck on both sides full up to the level of the 'nettings' with chunks of firewood. Just imagine the amount of work that meant--five or six hours in the horrid heat--every chap feeling as limp as putty with the climate and the monotony. A cutter cruising by herself either had to let her go or stand by the dhow, wasting perhaps three or four days, till her gunboat came along to victual her.

"However, we did search them, and we did find rifles, which meant 'Good-bye' for that dhow and 'chokey' for her crew. They found that trick not worth the risk, these people being generally law-abiding people (more or less), simply tempted every now and then to make a larger profit by carrying a few rifles. They weren't what you might call reg'lar hands at the business.

"And there's another thing they do, sir; on top of the firewood they often load a small cargo of their dried fish, thinking the British sailor won't stomach the smell of it. Ugh! the stink from some of those dhows! Why, we sometimes never got rid of the smell of it for weeks.

"You never heard about the mail-steamers--the Royal British Mail--carrying rifles themselves, I suppose, sir?" he asked, a little less gloomily as the incongruity of it appealed to him. "Why, sir, for one whole six months the mail-steamer brought up regular consignments of sugar from Karachi to Bushire and landed them there for a respectable firm of merchants. One fine day a careless chap at a winch, who was lowering a cask of sugar into a lighter, let it drop. The cask was stove in, and instead of sugar they found half a dozen rifles stowed in pieces, packed in saw-dust. That was an eye-opener, I can tell you. The mail-steamers don't carry so many casks of sugar now as they did then," Mr. Scarlett finished, smiling sardonically.

Another night he became talkative and began:

"You remember that chap who fired at us--the first time we shoved our nose under the cliffs at Sheikh Hill? I told you for certain he was an Afghan and couldn't possibly help firing his rifle at a white man. Well, sir, they often send one or two of these fellows across to the Arabian coast in the empty dhows, just to see that the rifles are brought to the proper place. You can always tell if there's one of these chaps aboard a dhow when you come along to search her, because he'll fire at you for a dead 'cert'. What we did was to make the crew line the side nearest us, after they'd lowered the sail and unbent the halyards. Our sportsman, the Afghan (or Afghans) dar'n't fire then for fear of hitting his friends, or had to climb up where we could see him, which didn't give him much of a chance, we being standing by waiting for him. Still, he didn't mind being riddled with bullets so long as he got in a shot at us English, more especially if he'd hit any of us.

"The only thing in this world he does fear and does mind is the sea. If there's a bit of a lop running you may bet your life that Mr. Afghan is as sea-sick as a dog, and you'll find him coiled up like a cat somewhere under the poop, without a kick left in him. He'd give anyone, white man or no white man, all he possessed, if he'd only kill him right out--that's when he's sea-sick.

"He's a terrible bad sailor, is the Afghan!" Mr. Scarlett said reflectively; "that's the only good point about him except being such a born fighter."

Mr. Scarlett, as you know, would talk about gun-running occasionally, but never once in those weeks did he mention that bracelet snake of his. It was covered with a bandage which he used to replace very carefully every morning; sometimes I happened to catch him doing this and saw it, but as he never referred to it neither did I.

Percy, I am sure, was very inquisitive to know what was the matter with his arm, because, as I said before, everything about Mr. Scarlett was of absorbing interest to him; though, after he had been kicked out of the cabin once or twice when Mr. Scarlett was dressing, he never ventured near it again until he was called.

Things went on like this for three weeks--three weeks of calm, intensely hot weather. Popple Opstein's wound had healed without anything going wrong with it; my scars were becoming less marked. Jones, the private of marines, was well--as were all the other wounded. Popple Opstein was quite himself again, and in fact everything was going on very comfortably if monotonously. It certainly was monotonous, because during all that time we never sighted one single dhow, and although the _Intrepid_ had stopped and searched a few farther out at sea she had not found a single rifle over and above the proper number a dhow is allowed to carry for her own protection.

Then, to vary the tedium, it began to blow. A shamel got up very quickly, and blew steadily for eight or nine days. It was not so bad that the _Bunder Abbas_ couldn't keep the sea and do her patrolling, but the two cutters had to hug tight at anchor in their two little creeks.

However, Evans grew restless after the third day, and put to sea one morning, leaving the shelter of Kuh-i-Mubarak and beating into the shamel long after he ought to have run back again. A squall carried away his foremast when he was already to leeward of it, and he rapidly began to drift farther to the south. Fortunately I happened to sight him, went down to help him, and took him in tow. Towing him back into shelter against a heavy head sea strained some of the planks in the bows, below the water-lines, and the boat began leaking badly. We had only left the _Intrepid_ four days previously, so that she would not be coming inshore to revictual us for another three; and, as it would have been foolish to attempt to tow the cutter right out to sea to find her and repair damages, we decided to beach her, do a little amateur caulking, and try to repair the foremast if that was possible.

There was a jolly little sandy beach about half a mile up the creek, so we beached her there after Evans had transferred his Maxim, ammunition, and stores to the _Bunder Abbas_. I anchored close by, in case he was attacked. There was little chance of that, however, because the village of Sudab lay more than three miles away behind the sand-hills, not a single living soul was in sight, and none could approach without being seen for at least a mile.

His men were soon busy working and skylarking, stretching their legs on the strip of sand, and thoroughly enjoying themselves. Not a sign of an Arab or an Afghan, not even of a miserable Baluchi, did we see all that day. In fact, things seemed so safe and pleasant that I landed most of my fellows too, and we got up a cricket match, with an empty paraffin tin for a wicket, a ball made of "spun yarn", and a bat made out of a broken oar. We equalized numbers with my lascars, and had a most exciting game, the _Bunder Abbas_ winning the championship of Kuh-i-Mubarak just before the "spun-yarn" ball was worn out completely.

The work on the boat had been finished, the seams recaulked, and the mast repaired; but Evans decided, as it was going to be a perfect moonlight night, to stay there until next morning, in order that his men might have a change from the cramped cutter and get a good night's sleep.

At sunset I took all my people back to the _Bunder Abbas_, leaving the cutter's crew playing football with that paraffin tin, with their bare feet, until they grew tired of that, and kicked it into the edge of the sea. They then made themselves snug for the night, lying down on the crest of the beach with their rifles by their sides, in case they were attacked, and with one man doing "sentry go", to give warning if necessary.

When the moon rose I could see them all lying comfortably there, one sleepy-looking figure sitting up among them, and some way along the sand the cutter, with the sea--it was just about high water--lapping against her stern-post. Having seen my own "look-out" man "standing by" with a loaded belt in the Maxim, in case he was needed, I lay down on the deck, outside my cabin, and slept gloriously.

I was awakened by a rifle shot, and jumped up. More rifle shots spluttered out. I looked ashore and saw the cutter's crew lying flat on their chests firing along the strip of beach--showing up in the moonlight as clearly as if it was daytime--and heard Evans shouting out excited orders by the dozen. (I told you what a "nervy" chap he was.) One of his men came crawling down towards us, yelling to us to open fire. It did not want his shouts to alarm us; my fellows were already on deck, looking wildly up and down the creek to see who was attacking. Not a sign of an enemy could I see, and it was light enough to see half a mile; but the hummocks of sand stretching inland and along the beach cast such very dark shadows that whoever was attacking could lie there absolutely hidden.

To judge by the amount of ammunition the cutter's crew were expending, Evans was evidently certain of his enemy. Spurts of sand were flying up just in front of his men, although I could not see any flashes coming from out of those dark shadows. I admit that I felt considerably flustered; Mr. Scarlett's face looked ghastly in the moonlight, and I wished with all my heart that I had not allowed Evans to sleep ashore. I could not help thinking of how Popple Opstein had been caught, and was very fearful that something of the same kind was going to happen again.

If we could only have seen something to fire at it would have been less frightening, but there was nothing.

Then Evans himself came rushing down to where the cutter lay, and yelled to me to open fire whilst his men shoved her off.

I thought he could not possibly have made a mistake, so banged away with a Maxim at those shadows. "There, sir, there! Look there, sir!" Moore suddenly rushed at me, pointing excitedly to a dark object apparently crawling along just by the water's edge not a hundred yards away.

The cutter's crew had seen it too, their bullets were spurting close to it, but Evans shrieked for them to come down and shove off the cutter, so I started the Maxim. We saw our bullets splashing all round, ceased fire, and waited for anything else to appear. Whatever that was, it never moved again.

By this time Evans had got the cutter afloat, and had come alongside the _Bunder Abbas_.

"Arabs crawling along the beach!" he shouted. "The sentry saw them first, fired at them--we've all fired at them--we've not seen any more since."

"Were they firing at you?" I called down, when he left off shouting at me.

He didn't know--he was not certain of anything except that his fellows had managed to kill at least one man.

At any rate, whatever had happened, no one was attacking us now. I stopped the Maxim, and together we waited on the qui vive all night, in case we were attacked again.

When the moon sank, an hour and a half before the sun was due to take her place, it became extremely dark, which made it most trying and nervous work waiting for daylight. Instead of the good night's sleep we had all promised ourselves, not a soul among us so much as closed his eyes after the alarm.

At daybreak not a sign of any living thing could be seen on those desolate sand-hills or on the beach, so we ventured ashore to pick up the cutter's masts and sails, which had been left behind in the panic.

I went too, to have a look at the chap we had shot, and guess what we found--fifty yards along the beach--that paraffin tin! just where we had thought we had seen the enemy crawling along to attack us--simply riddled with bullets. It was like a nutmeg grater, and the sand all round it was scored and tossed about by hundreds more.

I simply sat down and laughed and laughed till I thought something would crack. The whole thing was so obvious. It was high water when the men went to sleep; as the tide fell it left that tin high and dry: the sentry, suddenly catching sight of it and its shadow, lost his head, thought it was someone crawling along the beach, let off his rifle at it, woke the others, and in their excitement they fired at every shadow they saw.

"You killed him, sure enough," I roared, holding up the perforated tin; "the attack was repulsed with great slaughter."

It was not until we had walked behind the sand-hills, and found not a single trace of footsteps, that Evans would allow that the whole thing had been a false alarm.

"Your Maxim fired at it too," he said angrily. "You've made a fool of yourself as well."

Evans never heard the last of his paraffin tin, nor did his boat's crew; and, later on, when the yarn (with additions) spread aboard the _Intrepid_, we all came in for a great deal of chaff. For months afterwards, a messmate hankering after a black eye had only to ask a man belonging to that cutter's crew, or to the _Bunder Abbas_, what kind of an Afghan a paraffin tin was most like, and he got one.

However, we had made the cutter watertight and mended the foremast (after a fashion), though it was not strong enough to "look at" the shamel still blowing; so, leaving Evans to wait until it had blown itself out, I struggled up to wind'ard to have a look at Popple Opstein and find out how he had fared.

I found him snugly anchored under the lee of Sheikh Hill. He was so close inshore that when I poked in to have a yarn, the "_B.A._" could not get within half a mile of his cutter.

I pulled across in the dinghy.

"Has no one fired at you?" I asked him, seeing that he was within easy range of the shore and even of those high cliffs.

"Not a soul," he told me. "I've not seen a man, woman, or child these five days. Just look at those palm trees!" pointing in the direction where Bungi village lay. "They seem to have changed colour: they're browner than they were; and we cannot see anyone moving about among the sand-hills, not even from the top of the mast. I can't make it out."

I had to tell him the yarn of last night's brilliant little battle with the paraffin tin, and left him and his crew intensely amused.

When I went back to the _Bunder Abbas_ I climbed her mast (much higher it was than the cutter's masts), and through my glasses very carefully searched the flats behind those sand-hills. Not a single living, moving thing did I see, although I watched for quite a quarter of an hour.

I sent Jaffa up to the masthead, and he came down puzzled, wanting me to land him so that he could find out what had happened.

He smiled when I suggested danger. "You wait, sir," he said, and disappeared down below.

My chum began making a signal to me, asking if I could spare any matches, so I forgot about Jaffa until, going back to the cabin, I came across him rigged out as a coast Persian or Baluchi--I didn't know anything of the different tribes, and I don't now--a regular low-caste, unkempt, miserable creature, dirtier than the dirtiest. The only thing remaining of the immaculate Jaffa was his dignified smile.

"You send me shore, sir, when dark comes. I go Bungi; find out things; come back to-morrow night--same time."

Mr. Scarlett told me that no self-respecting Afghan would waste a cartridge or blunt a knife on him in that rig, and that he would run very little risk; so, after sunset, and before the moon rose, I took him ashore myself in the dinghy, feeling rather ashamed to let him disappear behind the sand-hills alone, and promising to be there for him the next night.

At sunrise next morning, just as we were preparing to go to sea for the day, he was seen strolling calmly over the sand-hills, not even deigning to wave his arms to attract attention. One thing was certain: he could not be in any danger.

I stopped heaving in the cable, lowered the dinghy, and pulled ashore myself, jolly glad to get some exercise.

"What's the news?" I called out, as the dinghy took the ground.

"Bungi all gone--houses burnt--men and old women lying all round--killed--no one else there--no young women--no children--only dogs and some goats--no Baluchis--no camels--no Afghans--all nothing."

"What's the meaning of that?" I asked in horror and astonishment.

He shrugged his shoulders.

"Afghan take revenge--lose many fighting men--cannot have rifles so take young women and children--take them to mountains--come and see."

I was only too keen to go, and followed him over those same sand-hills from behind which the Afghans had fired at Popple Opstein that horrid Sunday morning. We walked nearly a mile across the sandy wastes--very hot they were to my bare feet--and as we neared the clumps of palm trees which showed where Bungi had stood I saw why they had changed their colour--nearly all had been scorched by the heat from the burning thatched roofs. Their big leaves, red and yellow and black, hung low, mournfully.

The whole village was destroyed and the scene was too horrible to describe, but I saw enough to know that Jaffa was right.

Some half-jackal half-wolf dogs went yelping away when we disturbed them; nothing else lived.

The cruel Afghans had not even been satisfied with this. It was plain that they had driven their herd of camels up and down the patches of cultivated ground until not a trace of them existed. Jaffa explained this, and pointed out the innumerable hoof-marks.

The one well was heaped with dead bodies.

He said, in his quaint way, that that was a proof that "the Afghans had been very angry"!

Then he took me out of the village and showed me the broad track of camel marks leading across the ford towards the mountains.

The sooner the captain of the _Intrepid_ knew of this the better; so back to the dinghy and the _Bunder Abbas_ we went. I signalled across to tell Popple Opstein (we now knew why he had not been fired at) and went to sea, steaming down to Kuh-i-Mubarak. The shamel was still blowing strongly, so Evans was taking shelter in the creek close to the site of the "battle of the paraffin can". As we passed him I shouted out to tell him the news, and that I was going to find out whether Sudab had met the same fate.

I steamed up until the lagoon opened out and the water became too shallow to go farther. Then, landing with Jaffa, Webster, the corporal of marines, and two privates, all armed, we advanced very cautiously inland towards those palm trees under which I had seen the camels many weeks ago. Long before we reached them we knew by the burnt leaves and the sickening smell which pervaded everything that Sudab had met the same fate as Bungi. Even the fishing-boats had been smashed or burnt. We were very glad to get away from it, tramping back through the hot sand, and meeting Evans on his way to explore on his own account. I tried to dissuade him from going, but he was too excited to listen.

"I'm going along to find the _Intrepid_" I shouted after him.

"I'll come along too, directly the shamel has finished," he called back.