Chapter II: Part 2

“When the rooineks see our retreat they may all come into our kopjes together. If so, good. But it is tempting God to expect such a favour. _I_ think they will first send some men to scout.” He grinned broadly, using the English word. “Almighty! To scoot! They have none of that new sort of rooinek that they used at Sunnyside.” (Jan meant an incomprehensible animal from a place called Australia across the Southern seas who played what they knew of the war-game to kill.) “They have only some Mounted Infantry,”—again he used the English words. “They were once a Red-jacket regiment, so their scoots will stand up bravely to be shot at.”

“Good—good, we will shoot them,” said a youngster from Stellenbosch, who had come up on free pass as a Capetown excursionist just before the war to a farm on the border, where his aunt was taking care of his horse and rifle.

“But if you shoot their scoots I will sjambok you myself,” said Jan, amid roars of laughter. “We must let them _all_ come into the kopjes to look for us; and I pray God will not allow any of us to be tempted to shoot them. They will cross the ford in front of their camp. They will come along the road—so!” He imitated with ponderous arms the Army style of riding. “They will trot up the road this way and that way”—here he snaked his hard finger in the dust—“between kopjes, till they come here, where they can see the plain and all our cattle going away. Then they will _all_ come in close together. Perhaps they will even fix their bayonets. _We_ shall be up here behind the rock—there and there.” He pointed to two flat-topped kopjes, one on either side of the road, some eight hundred yards away. “That is our place. We will go there before sunrise. Remember we must be careful to let the very last of the rooineks pass before we begin shooting. They will come along a little careful at first. But we do not shoot. Then they will see our fires and the fresh horse-dung, so they will know we have gone on. They will run together and talk and point and shout in this nice open place. Then we begin shooting them from above.”

“Yes, uncle, but if the scouts see nothing and there are no shots and we let them go back quite quiet, they will think it was a trick. Perhaps the main body may never come here at all. Even rooineks learn in time—and so we may lose even the scouts.”

“I have thought of that too,” said Jan, with slow contempt, as the Stellenbosch boy delivered his shot. “If you had been _my_ son I should have sjamboked you more when you were a youngster. I shall put _you_ and four or five more on the Nek [the pass], where the road comes from their camp into these kopjes. You go there before it is light. Let the scoots pass in or I will sjambok you myself. When the scoots come back after seeing nothing here, then you may shoot them, but not till they have passed the Nek and are on the straight road to their camp again. Do you understand? Repeat what I have said, so that I shall know.”

The youth obediently repeated his orders.

“Kill their officers if you can. If not, no great matter, because the scoots will run to camp with the news that our kopjes are empty. Their helio-station will see your party trying to hold the Nek so hard—and all that time they will see our dust out yonder, and they will think you are the rear-guard, and they will think _we_ are escaping. They will be angry.”

“Yes—yes, uncle, we see,” from a dozen elderly voices.

“But this calf does not. Be silent! They will shoot at you, Niclaus, on the Nek, because they will think you are to cover our getting away. They will shell the Nek. They will miss. You will then ride away. All the rooineks will come after you, hot and in a hurry—perhaps, even, with their cannon. They will pass our fires and our fresh horse-dung. They will come here as their scoots came. They will see the plain so full of our dust. They will say, ‘The scoots spoke truth. It is a full retreat.’ _Then_ we up there on the rocks will shoot, and it will be like the fight at Stormberg in daytime. Do you understand _now_?”

Those of the commando directly interested lit new pipes and discussed the matter in detail till midnight.

Next morning the operations began with, if one may borrow the language of some official despatches—“the precision of well-oiled machinery.”

The helio-station reported the dust of the wagons and the movements of armed men in full flight across the plain beyond the kopjes. A Colonel, newly appointed from England, by reason of his seniority, sent forth a dozen Mounted Infantry under command of a Captain. Till a month ago they had been drilled by a cavalry instructor, who taught them “shock” tactics to the music of trumpets. They knew how to advance in echelon of squadrons, by cat’s cradle of troops, in quarter column of stable-litter, how to trot, to gallop, and above all to charge. They knew how to sit their horses unremittingly, so that at the day’s end they might boast how many hours they had been in the saddle without relief, and they learned to rejoice in the clatter and stamp of a troop moving as such, and therefore audible five miles away.

They trotted out two and two along the farm road, that trailed lazily through the wind-driven dust; across the half-dried ford to a nek between low stony hills leading into the debatable land. (Vrooman of Emmaus from his neatly bushed hole noted that one man carried a sporting Lee-Enfield rifle with a short fore-end. Vrooman of Emmaus argued that the owner of it was the officer to be killed on his return, and went to sleep.) They saw nothing except a small flock of sheep and a Kaffir herdsman who spoke broken English with curious fluency. He had heard that the Boers had decided to retreat on account of their sick and wounded. The Captain in charge of the detachment turned to look at the helio-station four miles away. “Hurry up,” said the dazzling flash. “Retreat apparently continues, but suggest you make sure. Quick.”

“Ye-es,” said the Captain, a shade bitterly, as he wiped the sweat from a sun-skinned nose. “You want me to come back and report all clear. If anything happens it will be my fault. If they get away it will be my fault for disregarding the signal. I love officers who suggest and advise, and want to make their reputations in twenty minutes.”

“’Don’t see much ’ere, sir,” said the sergeant, scanning the bare cup of the hollow where a dust-devil danced alone.

“No? We’ll go on.”

“If we get among these steep ’ills we lose touch of the ’elio.”

“Very likely. Trot.”

The rounded mounds grew to spiked kopjes, heart-breaking to climb under a hot sun at four thousand feet above sea level. This is where the scouts found their spurs peculiarly useful.

Jan van Staden had thoughtfully allowed the invading force a front of two rifle-shots or four thousand yards, and they kept a thousand yards within his estimate. Ten men strung over two miles feel that they have explored all the round earth.

They saw stony slopes combing over in scrub, narrow valleys clothed with stone, low ridges of splintered stone, and tufts of brittle-stemmed bush. An irritating wind, split up by many rocky barriers, cuffed them over the ears and slapped them in the face at every turn. They came upon an abandoned camp fire, a little fresh horse-dung, and an empty ammunition-box splintered up for fire-wood, an old boot, and a stale bandage.

A few hundred yards farther along the road a battered Mauser had been thrown into a bush. The glimmer of its barrel drew the scouts from the hillside, and here the road after passing between two flat-topped kopjes entered a valley nearly half a mile wide, rose slightly, and over the nek of a ridge gave clear view across the windy plain northward.

“They’re on the dead run, for sure,” said a trooper. “Here’s their fire and their litter and their guns, and that’s where they’re bolting to.” He pointed over the ridge to the bellying dust cloud a mile long. A vulture high overhead flickered down, steadied herself, and hung motionless.

“See!” said Jan van Staden from the rocks above the road, to his waiting commando. “It turns like a well-oiled wheel. They look where they need not look, but _here_, where they should look on both sides, they look at our retreat—straight before them. It is tempting our people too much. I pray God no one will shoot them.”

“That’s about the size of it,” said the Captain, rubbing the dust from his binoculars. “Boers on the run. I expect they find their main line of retreat to the north is threatened. We’ll get back and tell the camp.” He wheeled his pony and his eye traversed the flat-topped kopje commanding the road. The stones at its edge seemed to be piled with less than Nature’s carelessness.

“That ’ud be a dashed ugly place if it were occupied—and that other one, too. Those rocks aren’t five hundred yards from the road, either of ’em. Hold on, sergeant, I’ll light a pipe.” He bent over the bowl, and above his lighted match squinted at the kopje. A stone, a small roundish brown boulder on the lip of another one, seemed to move very slightly. The short hairs of his neck grated his collar. “I’ll have another squint at their retreat,” he cried to the sergeant, astonished at the steadiness of his own voice. He swept the plain, and, wheeling, let the glass rest for a moment on the kopje’s top. One cranny between the rocks was pinkish, where blue sky should have shown. His men, dotted down the valley, sat heavily on their horses—it never occurred to them to dismount. He could hear the squeak of the leathers as a man shifted. An impatient gust blew through the valley and rattled the bushes. On all sides the expectant hills stood still under the pale blue.

“And we passed within a quarter of a mile of ’em! We’re done!” The thumping heart slowed down, and the Captain began to think clearly—so clearly that the thoughts seemed solid things. “It’s Pretoria gaol for us all. Perhaps that man’s only a look-out, though. We’ll have to bolt! And I led ’em into it!... You fool,” said his other self, above the beat of the blood in his eardrums. “If they could snipe you all from up there, why haven’t they begun already? Because you’re the bait for the rest of the attack. They don’t want you _now_. You’re to go back and bring up the others to be killed. Go back! Don’t detach a man or they’ll suspect. Go back all together. Tell the sergeant you’re going. Some of them up there will understand English. Tell it aloud! Then back you go with the news—the real news.”

“The country’s all clear, sergeant,” he shouted. “We’ll go back and tell the Colonel.” With an idiotic giggle he added, “It’s a good road for guns, don’t you think?”

“Hear you that?” said Jan van Staden, gripping a burgher’s arm. “God is on our side to-day. They _will_ bring their little cannons after all!”

“Go easy. No good bucketing the horses to pieces. We’ll need ’em for the pursuit later,” said the Captain. “Hullo, there’s a vulture! How far would you make him?”

“Can’t tell, sir, in this dry air.”

The bird swooped towards the second flat-topped kopje, but suddenly shivered sideways, and wheeled off again, followed intently by the Captain’s glance.

“And that kopje’s simply full of ’em, too,” he said, flushing. “Perfectly confident they are, that we’d take this road—and then they’ll scupper the whole boiling of us! They’ll let us through to fetch up the others. But I mustn’t let ’em know we know. By Jove, they do _not_ think much of us! ’Don’t blame ’em.”

The cunning of the trap did not impress him until later.

Down the track jolted a dozen well-equipped men, laughing and talking—a mark to make a pious burgher’s mouth water. Thrice had their Captain explicitly said that they were to march easy, so a trooper began to hum a tune that he had picked up in Capetown streets:—

Vat jou goet en trek, Ferriera,
Vat jou goet en trek;
Jannie met de hoepel bein, Ferriera,
Jannie met de hoepel bein!

Then with a whistle:—

Zwaar draa—alle en de ein kant—

The Captain, thinking furiously, found his mind turn to a camp in the Karroo, months before; an engine that had halted in that waste, and a woman with brown hair, early grizzled—an extraordinary woman.... Yes, but as soon as they had dropped the flat-topped kopje behind its neighbour he must hurry back and report.... A woman with grey eyes and black eyelashes.... The Boers would probably be massed on those two kopjes. How soon dare he break into a canter?... A woman with a queer cadence in her speech.... It was not more than five miles home by the straight road—

“_Even when we were children we learned not to go back by the way we had come._”

The sentence came back to him, self-shouted, so clearly that he almost turned to see if the scouts had heard. The two flat-topped kopjes behind him were covered by a long ridge. The camp lay due south. He had only to follow the road to the Nek—a notch, unscouted as he recalled now, between the two hills.

He wheeled his men up a long valley.

“Excuse me, sir, that ain’t our road!” said the sergeant. “Once we get over this rise, straight on, we come into direct touch with the ’elio, on that flat bit o’ road there they ’elioed us goin’ out.”

“But we aren’t going to get in touch with them just now. Come along, and come quick.”

“What’s the meaning of this?” said a private in the rear. “What’s ’e doin’ this detour for? We shan’t get in for hours an’ hours.”

“Come on, men. Flog a canter out of your brutes, somehow,” the Captain called back.

For two throat-parched hours he held west by south, away from the Nek, puzzling over a compass already demented by the ironstone in the hills, and then turned southeast through an eruption of low hills that ran far into the re-entering bend of the river that circled the left bank of the camp.

Eight miles to eastward that student from Stellenbosch had wriggled out on the rocks above the Nek to have a word with Vrooman of Emmaus. The bottom seemed to have dropped out of at least one portion of their programme; for the scouting party were not to be seen.

“Jan is a clever man,” he said to his companion, “but he does not think that even rooineks may learn. Perhaps those scouts will have seen Jan’s commando, and perhaps they will come back to warn the rooineks. That is why I think he should have shot them _before_ they came to the Nek, and made quite sure that only one or two got away. It would have made the English angry, and they would have come out across the open in hundreds to be shot. Then when we ran away they would have come after us without thinking. If you can make the English hurry, they never think. Jan is wrong this time.”

“Lie down, and pray you have not shown yourself to their helio-station,” growled Vrooman of Emmaus. “You throw with your arms and kick with your legs like a rooinek. When we get back I will tell Jan and he will sjambok you. All will yet come right. They will go and warn the rest, and the rest will hurry out by this very nek. Then we can shoot. Now you lie still and wait.”

“’Ere’s a rummy picnic. We left camp, as it were, by the front door. ’E _’as_ given us a giddy-go-round, an’ no mistake,” said a dripping private as he dismounted behind the infantry lines.

“Did you see our helio?” This was the Colonel, hot from racing down from the helio-station. “There were a lot of Boers waiting for you on the Nek. We saw ’em. We tried to get at you with the helio, and tell you we were coming out to help you. Then we saw you didn’t come over that flat bit of road where we had signalled you going out, and we wondered why. We didn’t hear any shots.”

“I turned off, sir, and came in by another road,” said the Captain.

“By another road!” The Colonel lifted his eyebrows. “Perhaps you’re not aware, sir, that the Boers have been in full retreat for the last three hours, and that those men on the Nek were simply a rear-guard put out to delay us for a little. We could see that much from here. Your duty, sir, was to have taken them in the rear, and then we could have brushed them aside. The Boer retreat has been going on all morning, sir—all morning. You were despatched to see the front clear and to return at once. The whole camp has been under arms for three hours; and instead of doing your work you wander all about Africa with your scouts to avoid a handful of skulking Boers! You should have sent a man back at once—you should have——”

The Captain got off his horse stiffly.

“As a matter of fact,” said he, “I didn’t know for sure that there were any Boers on the Nek, but I went round it in case it was so. But I _do_ know that the kopjes beyond the Nek are simply crawling with Boers.”

“Nonsense. We can see the whole lot of ’em retreating out yonder.”

“Of course you can. That’s part of their game, sir. I saw ’em lying on the top of a couple of kopjes commanding the road, where it goes into the plain on the far side. They let us come in to see, and they let us go out to report the country clear and bring you up. Now they are waiting for _you_. The whole thing is a trap.”

“D’you expect any officer of my experience to believe that?”

“As you please, sir,” said the Captain hopelessly. “My responsibility ends with my report.”

AN UNQUALIFIED PILOT

_This tale is founded on something that happened a good many years ago in the Port of Calcutta, before wireless telegraphy was used on ships, and men and boys were less easy to catch when once they were in a ship. It is not meant to show that anybody who thinks he would like to become eminent in his business can do so at a moment’s notice; but it proves the old saying that if you want anything badly enough and are willing to pay the price for it, you generally get it. If you don’t get what you want it is a sign either that you did not seriously want it, or that you tried to bargain over the price._

Almost any pilot will tell you that his work is much more difficult than you imagine; but the Pilots of the Hugli know that they have one hundred miles of the most dangerous river on earth running through their hands—the Hugli between Calcutta and the Bay of Bengal—and they say nothing. Their service is picked and sifted as carefully as the bench of the Supreme Court, for a judge can only hang the wrong man, or pass a bad law; but a careless pilot can lose a ten-thousand-ton ship with crew and cargo in less time than it takes to reverse her engines.

There is very little chance of anything getting off again when once she touches in the furious Hugli current, loaded with all the fat silt of the fields of Bengal, where the soundings change two feet between tides, and new channels make and unmake themselves in one rainy season. Men have fought the Hugli for two hundred years, till now the river owns a huge building, with drawing, survey, and telegraph departments, devoted to its private service, as well as a body of wardens, who are called the Port Commissioners.

They and their officers govern everything that floats from the Hugli Bridge to the last buoy at Pilots Ridge, one hundred and forty miles away, far out in the Bay of Bengal, where the steamers first pick up the pilots from the pilot brig.

A Hugli pilot does not kindly bring papers aboard for the passengers, or scramble up the ship’s side by wet, swaying rope-ladders. He arrives in his best clothes, with a native servant or an assistant pilot to wait on him, and he behaves as a man should who can earn two or three thousand pounds a year after twenty years’ apprenticeship. He has beautiful rooms in the Port Office at Calcutta, and generally keeps himself to the society of his own profession, for though the telegraph reports the more important soundings of the river daily, there is much to be learned from brother pilots between each trip.

Some million tons of shipping must find their way to and from Calcutta each twelvemonth, and unless the Hugli were watched as closely as his keeper watches an elephant, there is a fear that it might silt up, as it has silted up round the old Dutch and Portuguese ports twenty and thirty miles behind Calcutta.

So the Port Office sounds and scours and dredges the river, and builds spurs and devices for coaxing currents, and labels all the buoys with their proper letters, and attends to the semaphores and the lights and the drum, ball and cone storm signals; and the pilots of the Hugli do the rest; but, in spite of all care and the very best attention, the Hugli swallows her ship or two every year. Even the coming of wireless telegraphy does not spoil her appetite.

When Martin Trevor had waited on the river from his boyhood; when he had risen to be a Senior Pilot, entitled to bring up to Calcutta the very biggest ships; when he had thought and talked of nothing but Hugli pilotage all his life to nobody except Hugli pilots, he was exceedingly surprised and indignant that his only son should decide to follow his father’s profession. Mrs. Trevor had died when the boy was a child, and as he grew older, Trevor, in the intervals of his business, noticed that the lad was very often by the river-side—no place, he said, for a nice boy. But, as he was not often at home, and as the aunt who looked after Jim naturally could not follow him to his chosen haunts, and as Jim had not the faintest intention of giving up old friends there, nothing but ineffectual growls came of the remark. Later, when Trevor once asked him if he could make anything out of the shipping on the water, Jim replied by reeling off the list of all the house-flags in sight at the moorings, together with supplementary information about their tonnage and captains.

“You’ll come to a bad end, Jim,” said Trevor. “Boys of your age haven’t any business to waste their time on these things.”

“Oh, Pedro at the Sailors’ Home says you can’t begin too early.”

“At what, please?”

“Piloting. I’m nearly fourteen now, and—and I know where most of the shipping in the river is, and I know what there was yesterday over the Mayapur Bar, and I’ve been down to Diamond Harbour—oh, a hundred times already, and I’ve——”

“You’ll go to school, son, and learn what they teach you, and you’ll turn out something better than a pilot,” said his father, who wanted Jim to enter the Subordinate Civil Service, but he might just as well have told a shovel-nosed porpoise of the river to come ashore and begin life as a hen. Jim held his tongue; he noticed that all the best pilots in the Port Office did that; and devoted his young attention and all his spare time to the river he loved. He had seen the nice young gentlemen in the Subordinate Civil Service, and he called them a rude native name for “clerks.”

He became as well known as the Bankshall itself; and the Port Police let him inspect their launches, and the tug-boat captains had always a place for him at their tables, and the mates of the big steam dredgers used to show him how the machinery worked, and there were certain native row-boats which Jim practically owned; and he extended his patronage to the railway that runs to Diamond Harbour, forty miles down the river. In the old days nearly all the East India Company’s ships used to discharge at Diamond Harbour, on account of the shoals above, but now ships go straight up to Calcutta, and they have only some moorings for vessels in distress there, and a telegraph service, and a harbour-master, who was one of Jim’s most intimate friends.

He would sit in the Office listening to the soundings of the shoals as they were reported every day, and attending to the movements of the steamers up and down (Jim always felt he had lost something irretrievable if a boat got in or out of the river without his knowing of it), and when the big liners with their rows of blazing portholes tied up in Diamond Harbour for the night, Jim would row from one ship to the other through the sticky hot air and the buzzing mosquitoes and listen respectfully as the pilots conferred together about the habits of steamers.

Once, for a treat, his father took him down clear out to the Sandheads and the pilot brig there, and Jim was happily sea-sick as she tossed and pitched in the Bay. The cream of life, though, was coming up in a tug or a police boat from Diamond Harbour to Calcutta, over the “James and Mary,” those terrible sands christened after a royal ship that they sunk two hundred years before. They are made by two rivers that enter the Hugli six miles apart and throw their own silt across the silt of the main stream, so that with each turn of weather and tide the sands shift and change under water like clouds in the sky. It was here (the tales sound much worse when they are told in the rush and growl of the muddy waters) that the _Countess of Stirling_, fifteen hundred tons, touched and capsized in ten minutes, and a two-thousand-ton steamer in two, and a pilgrim ship in five, and another steamer literally in one instant, holding down her men with the masts and shrouds as she lashed over. When a ship touches on the “James and Mary,” the river knocks her down and buries her, and the sands quiver all around her and reach out under water and take new shapes over the corpse.

Young Jim would lie up in the bows of the tug and watch the straining buoys kick and choke in the coffee-coloured current, while the semaphores and flags signalled from the bank how much water there was in the channel, till he learned that men who deal with men can afford to be careless, on the chance of their fellows being like them; but men who deal with things dare not relax for an instant. “And that’s the very reason,” old McEwan said to him once, “that the ‘James and Mary’ is the safest part of the river,” and he shoved the big black _Bandoorah_, that draws twenty-five feet, through the Eastern Gat, with a turban of white foam wrapped round her forefoot and her screw beating as steadily as his own heart.

If Jim could not get away to the river there was always the big, cool Port Office, where the soundings were worked out and the maps drawn; or the Pilots’ room, where he could lie in a long chair and listen quietly to the talk about the Hugli; and there was the library, where if you had money you could buy charts and books of directions against the time that you would actually have to steam over the places themselves. It was exceedingly hard for Jim to hold the list of Jewish Kings in his head, and he was more than uncertain as to the end of the verb _audio_ if you followed it far enough down the page, but he could keep the soundings of three channels distinct in his head, and, what is more confusing, the changes in the buoys from “Garden Reach” down to Saugor, as well as the greater part of the _Calcutta Telegraph_, the only paper he ever read.

Unluckily, you cannot peruse about the Hugli without money, even though you are the son of the best-known pilot on the river, and as soon as Trevor understood how his son was spending his time, he cut down his pocket money, of which Jim had a very generous allowance. In his extremity he took counsel with Pedro, the plum-coloured mulatto at the Sailors’ Home, and Pedro was a bad, designing man. He introduced Jim to a Chinaman in Muchuatollah, an unpleasing place in itself, and the Chinaman, who answered to the name of Erh-Tze, when he was not smoking opium, talked business in pigeon-English to Jim for an hour. Every bit of that business from first to last was flying in the face of every law on the river, but it interested Jim.

“S’pose you takee. Can do?” Erh-Tze said at last.

Jim considered his chances. A junk, he knew, would draw about eleven feet and the regular fee for a qualified pilot, outward to the Sandheads, would be two hundred rupees. On the one hand he was not qualified, so he dared not ask more than half. _But_, on the other hand, he was fully certain of the thrashing of his life from his father for piloting without license, let alone what the Port Authorities might do to him. So he asked one hundred and seventy-five rupees, and Erh-Tze beat him down to a hundred and twenty. The cargo of his junk was worth anything from seventy to a hundred and fifty thousand rupees, some of which he was getting as enormous freight on the coffins of thirty or forty dead Chinamen, whom he was taking to be buried in their native country.

Rich Chinamen will pay fancy prices for this service, and they have a superstition that the iron of steamships is bad for the spiritual health of their dead. Erh-Tze’s junk had crept up from Singapore, _via_ Penang and Rangoon, to Calcutta, where Erh-Tze had been staggered by the Pilot dues. This time he was going out at a reduction with Jim, who, as Pedro kept telling him, was just as good as a pilot, and a heap cheaper.

Jim knew something of the manners of junks, but he was not prepared, when he went down that night with his charts, for the confusion of cargo and coolies and coffins and clay-cooking places, and other things that littered her decks. He had sense enough to haul the rudder up a few feet, for he knew that a junk’s rudder goes far below the bottom, and he allowed a foot extra to Erh-Tze’s estimate of the junk’s depth. Then they staggered out into midstream very early, and never had the city of his birth looked so beautiful as when he feared he would not come back to see it. Going down “Garden Reach” he discovered that the junk would answer to her helm if you put it over far enough, and that she had a fair, though Chinese, notion of sailing. He took charge of the tiller by stationing three Chinese on each side of it, and standing a little forward, gathered their pigtails into his hands, three right and three left, as though they had been the yoke lines of a row-boat. Erh-Tze almost smiled at this; he felt he was getting good care for his money and took a neat little polished bamboo to keep the men attentive, for he said this was no time to teach the crew pigeon-English. The more way they could get on the junk the better would she steer, and as soon as he felt a little confidence in her, Jim ordered the stiff, rustling sails to be hauled up tighter and tighter. He did not know their names—at least any name that would be likely to interest a Chinaman—but Erh-Tze had not banged about the waters of the Malay Archipelago all his life for nothing. He rolled forward with his bamboo, and the things rose like Eastern incantations.

Early as they were on the river, a big American oil (but they called it kerosene in those days) ship was ahead of them in tow, and when Jim saw her through the lifted mist he was thankful. She would draw all of seventeen feet, and if he could steer by her they would be safe. It is easier to scurry up and down the “James and Mary” in a police boat that someone else is handling than to cram a hard-mouthed old junk across the same sands alone, with the certainty of a thrashing if you come out alive.

Jim glued his eyes to the American, and saw that at Fultah she dropped her tug and stood down the river under sail. He all but whooped aloud, for he knew that the number of pilots who preferred to work a ship through the “James and Mary” was strictly limited. “If it isn’t Father, it’s Dearsley,” said Jim, “and Dearsley went down yesterday with the _Bancoora_, so it’s Father. If I’d gone home last night instead of going to Pedro, I’d have met him. He must have got his ship quick, but—Father _is_ a very quick man.” Then Jim reflected that they kept a piece of knotted rope on the pilot brig that stung like a wasp; but this thought he dismissed as beneath the dignity of an officiating pilot, who needed only to nod his head to set Erh-Tze’s bamboo to work.

As the American came round, just before the Fultah Sands, Jim raked her with his spy-glass, and saw his father on the poop, an unlighted cigar between his teeth. That cigar, Jim knew, would be smoked on the other side of the “James and Mary,” and Jim felt so entirely safe and happy that he lit a cigar on his own account. This kind of piloting was child’s play. His father could not make a mistake if he tried; and Jim, with his six obedient pigtails in his two hands, had leisure to admire the perfect style in which the American was handled—how she would point her bowsprit jeeringly at a hidden bank, as much as to say, “Not to-day, thank you, dear,” and bow down lovingly to a buoy as much as to say, “_You_’re a gentleman, at any rate,” and come round sharp on her heel with a flutter and a rustle, and a slow, steady swing something like a well-dressed woman staring all round the theatre through opera-glasses.

It was hard work to keep the junk near her, though Erh-Tze set everything that was by any means settable, and used his bamboo most generously. When they were nearly under her counter, and a little to her left, Jim, hidden behind a sail, would feel warm and happy all over, thinking of the thousand nautical and piloting things that he knew. When they fell more than half a mile behind, he was cold and miserable thinking of all the million things he did not know or was not quite sure of. And so they went down, Jim steering by his father, turn for turn, over the Mayapur Bar, with the semaphores on each bank duly signalling the depth of water, through the Western Gat, and round Makoaputti Lumps, and in and out of twenty places, each more exciting than the last, and Jim nearly pulled the six pigtails out for pure joy when the last of the “James and Mary” had gone astern, and they were walking through Diamond Harbour.

From there to the mouth of the Hugli things are not so bad—at least, that was what Jim thought, and held on till the swell from the Bay of Bengal made the old junk heave and snort, and the river broadened into the inland sea, with islands only a foot or two high scattered about it. The American walked away from the junk as soon as they were beyond Kedgeree, and the night came on and the river looked very big and desolate, so Jim promptly anchored somewhere in grey water, with the Saugor Light away off toward the east. He had a great respect for the Hugli to the last yard of her, and had no desire whatever to find himself on the Gasper Sand or any other little shoal. Erh-Tze and the crew highly approved of this piece of seamanship. They set no watch, lit no lights, and at once went to sleep.

Jim lay down between a red-and-black lacquer coffin and a little live pig in a basket. As soon as it was light he began studying his chart of the Hugli mouth, and trying to find out where in the river he might be. He decided to be on the safe side and wait for another sailing-ship and follow her out. So he made an enormous breakfast of rice and boiled fish, while Erh-Tze lit firecrackers and burned gilt paper to the Joss who had saved them so far. Then they heaved up their rough-and-tumble anchor, and made after a big, fat, iron four-masted sailing-ship, heavy as a hay-wain.

The junk, which was really a very weatherly boat, and might have begun life as a private pirate in Annam forty years before, followed under easy sail; for the four-master would run no risks. She was in old McEwan’s hands, and she waddled about like a broody hen, giving each shoal wide allowances. All this happened near the outer Floating Light, some hundred and twenty miles from Calcutta, and apparently in the open sea.

Jim knew old McEwan’s appetite, and often heard him pride himself on getting his ship to the pilot brig close upon meal hours, so he argued that if the pilot brig was get-at-able (and Jim himself had not the ghost of a notion where she would lie), McEwan would find her before one o’clock.

It was a blazing hot day, and McEwan fidgeted the four-master down to “Pilots Ridge” with what little wind remained, and sure enough there lay the pilot brig, and Jim felt shivers up his back as Erh-Tze paid him his hundred and twenty rupees and he went over-side in the junk’s one crazy dinghy. McEwan was leaving the four-master in a long, slashing whale-boat that looked very spruce and pretty, and Jim could see that there was a certain amount of excitement among the pilots on the brig. There was his father too. The ragged Chinese boatmen gave way in a most ragged fashion, and Jim felt very unwashen and disreputable when he heard the click of McEwan’s oars alongside, and McEwan saying, “James Trevor, I’ll trouble you to lay alongside me.”

Jim obeyed, and from the corner of one eye watched McEwan’s angry whiskers stand up all round his face, which turned purple.

“An’ how is it you break the regulations o’ the Porrt o’ Calcutta? Are ye aware o’ the penalties and impreesonments ye’ve laid yourself open to?” McEwan began.

Jim said nothing. There was not very much to say just then; and McEwan roared aloud: “Man, ye’ve perrsonated a Hugli pilot, an’ that’s as much as to say ye’ve perrsonated _ME_! What did yon heathen give ye for honorarium?”

“’Hundred and twenty,” said Jim.

“’An’ by what manner o’ means did ye get through the ‘James and Mary’?”

“Father,” was the answer. “He went down the same tide and I—we—steered by him.”

McEwan whistled and choked, perhaps it was with anger. “Ye’ve made a stalkin’-horse o’ your father, then? Jim, laddie, he’ll make an example o’ you.”

The boat hooked on to the brig’s chains, and McEwan said, as he set foot on deck before Jim could speak, “Yon’s an enterprising cub o’ yours, Trevor. Ye’d better enter him in the regular business, or one o’ these fine days he’ll be acting as pilot before he’s qualified, and sinkin’ junks in the Fairway. He fetched yon junk down last night. If ye’ve no other designs I’m thinkin’ I’ll take him as my cub, for there’s no denying he’s a resourceful lad—for all he’s an unlicked whelp.”

“That,” said Trevor, reaching for Jim’s left ear, “is something we can remedy,” and he led him below.

The little knotted rope that they keep for general purposes on the pilot brig did its duty, but when it was all over Jim was unlicked no longer. He was McEwan’s property to be registered under the laws of the Port of Calcutta, and a week later, when the _Ellora_ came along, he bundled over the pilot brig’s side with McEwan’s enamelled leather hand-bag and a roll of charts and a little bag of his own, and he dropped into the sternsheets of the pilot gig with a very creditable imitation of McEwan’s slow, swaying sit-down and hump of the shoulders.

THE JUNK AND DHOW

Once a pair of savages found a stranded tree.
(_One-piecee stick-pidgin—two-piecee man.
Straddle-um—paddle-um—push-um off to sea.
That way Foleign Devil-boat began._[4])
But before and before, and ever so long before
Any shape of sailing-craft was known,
The Junk and Dhow had a stern and a bow,
And a mast and a sail of their own—alone, alone!
As they crashed across the Oceans on their own!

Once there was a pirate-ship, being blown ashore—
(_Plitty soon pilum up, s’posee no can tack.
Seven-piecee stlong man pullum sta’boa’d oar.
That way bling her head alound and sailo back._)
But before, and before, and ever so long before
Grand Commander Noah took the wheel,
The Junk and the Dhow, though they look like anyhow,
Had rudders reaching deep below their keel—akeel—akeel!
As they laid the Eastern Seas beneath their keel!

Once there was a galliot yawing in a tide.
(_Too much foolee side-slip. How can stop?
Man catchee tea-box lid—lasha longaside.
That way make her plenty glip and sail first-chop._)
But before, and before, and ever so long before
Any such contrivances were used,
The whole Confucian sea-board had standardized the lee-board,
And hauled it up or dropped it as they choosed—or chose—or choosed!
According to the weather, when they cruised!

Once there was a caravel in beam-sea roll—
(_Cargo shiftee—alla dliftee—no can livee long.
S’posum’ nailo boa’d acloss—makee ploper hol’?
That way, cargo sittum still, an’ ship mo’ stlong._)
But before, and before, and ever so long before
Any square-rigged vessel hove in sight
The Canton deep-sea craft carried bulkheads fore and aft,
And took good care to keep ’em water-tight—atite—atite!
From Amboyna to the Great Australian Bight!

Once there was a sailor-man singing just this way—
(_Too muchee yowl-o, sickum best flend!
Singee all-same pullee lope—haul and belay.
Hully up and coilum down an’—bite off end!_)
But before, and before, and ever so long before
Any sort of chanty crossed our lips,
The Junk and the Dhow, though they look like anyhow,
Were the Mother and the Father of all Ships—ahoy!—aships!
And of half the new inventions in our Ships!
From Tarifa to Formosa of our Ships!
From Socotra to Sel_ank_hor of the windlass and the anchor,
And the Navigators’ Compass on our Ships—ahoy!—our Ships
(_O, hully up and coilum down and bite off end!_)

HIS GIFT

His Scoutmaster and his comrades, who disagreed on several points, were united in one conviction—that William Glasse Sawyer was, without exception, the most unprofitable person, not merely in the Pelican Troop, who lived in the wilderness of the 47th Postal District, London S. E., but in the whole body of Boy Scouts throughout the world.

No one, except a ferocious uncle who was also a French-polisher, seemed responsible for his beginnings. There was a legend that he had been entered as a Wolf-Cub at the age of eight, under Miss Doughty, whom the uncle had either bribed or terrorized to accept him; and that after six months Miss Doughty confessed that she could make nothing of him and retired to teach school in the Yorkshire moors. There is also a red-headed ex-cub of that troop (he is now in a shipping-office) who asserts proudly that he used to bite William Glasse Sawyer on the leg in the hope of waking him up, and takes most of the credit for William’s present success. But when William moved into the larger life of the Pelicans, who were gay birds, he was not what you might call alert. In shape he resembled the ace of diamonds; in colour he was an oily sallow.

He could accomplish nothing that required one glimmer of reason, thought or commonsense. He cleaned himself only under bitter compulsion; he lost his bearings equally in town or country after a five-minutes’ stroll. He could track nothing smaller than a tram-car on a single line, and that only if there were no traffic. He could neither hammer a nail, carry an order, tie a knot, light a fire, notice any natural object, except food, or use any edged tool except a table knife. To crown all, his innumerable errors and omissions were not even funny.

But it is an old law of human nature that if you hold to one known course of conduct—good or evil—you end by becoming an institution; and when he was fifteen or thereabouts William achieved that position. The Pelicans gradually took pride in the notorious fact that they possessed the only Sealed Pattern, Mark A, Ass—an unique jewel, so to speak, of Absolute, Unalterable Incapacity. The poet of a neighbouring troop used to write verses about him, and recite them from public places, such as the tops of passing trams. William made no comment, but wrapped himself up in long silences that he seldom broke till the juniors of the Troop (the elders had given it up long before) tried to do him good turns with their scout-staves.

In private life he assisted his uncle at the mystery of French-polishing, which, he said, was “boiling up things in pots and rubbing down bits of wood.” The boiling-up, he said, he did not mind so much. The rubbing down he hated. Once, too, he volunteered that his uncle and only relative had been in the Navy, and “did not like to be played with”; and the vision of William playing with any human being upset even his Scoutmaster.

Now it happened, upon a certain summer that was really a summer with heat to it, the Pelicans had been lent a dream of a summer camp in a dream of a park, which offered opportunities for every form of diversion, including bridging muddy-banked streams, and unlimited cutting into young alders and undergrowth at large. A convenient village lay just outside the Park wall, and the ferny slopes round the camp were rich in rabbits, not to mention hedgehogs and other fascinating vermin. It was reached—Mr. Hale their Scoutmaster saw to that—after two days’ hard labour, with the Troop push-cart, along sunny roads.

William’s share in the affair was—what it had always been. First he lost most of his kit; next his uncle talked to him after the fashion of the Navy of ’96 before refitting him; thirdly he went lame behind the push-cart by reason of a stone in his shoe, and on arrival in camp dropped—not for the first, second or third time—into his unhonoured office as Camp Orderly, and was placed at the disposal of The Prawn, whose light blue eyes stuck out from his freckled face, and whose long narrow chest was covered with badges. From that point on, the procedure was as usual. Once again did The Prawn assure his Scoutmaster that he would take enormous care of William and give him work suited to his capacity and intelligence. Once again did William grunt and wriggle at the news, and once again in the silence of the deserted camp next morning, while the rest of the Pelicans were joyously mucking themselves up to their young bills at bridging brooks, did he bow his neck to The Prawn’s many orders. For The Prawn was a born organizer. He set William to unpack the push-cart and then to neatly and exactly replace all parcels, bags, tins, and boxes. He despatched him thrice in the forenoon across the hot Park to fetch water from a distant well equipped with a stiff-necked windlass and a split handle that pinched William’s fat palms. He bade him collect sticks, thorny for choice, out of the flanks of a hedge full of ripe nettles against which Scout uniforms offer small protection. He then made him lay them in the camp cooking-place, carefully rejecting the green ones, for most sticks were alike to William; and when everything else failed, he set him to pick up stray papers and rubbish the length and breadth of the camp. All that while, he not only chased him with comments but expected that William would show gratitude to him for forming his young mind.

“’Tisn’t everyone ’ud take this amount o’ trouble with you, Mug,” said The Prawn virtuously, when even his energetic soul could make no further work for his vassal. “Now you open that bully-beef tin and we’ll have something to eat, and then you’re off duty—for a bit. I shall try my hand at a little camp-cooking.”

William found the tin—at the very bottom, of course, of the push-cart; cut himself generously over the knuckles in opening it (till The Prawn showed him how this should be done), and in due course, being full of bread and bully, withdrew towards a grateful clump of high fern that he had had his eye on for some time, wriggled deep into it, and on a little rabbit-browsed clearing of turf, stretched out and slept the sleep of the weary who have been up and under strict orders since six A.M. Till that hour of that day, be it remembered, William had given no proof either of intelligence or initiative in any direction.

He waked, slowly as was his habit, and noticed that the shadows were stretching a little, even as he stretched himself. Then he heard The Prawn clanking pot-lids, between soft bursts of song. William sniffed. The Prawn was cooking—was probably qualifying for something or other; The Prawn did nothing but qualify for badges. On reflection William discovered that he loved The Prawn even less this camp than the last, or the one before that. Then he heard the voice of a stranger.

“Yes,” was The Prawn’s reply. “I’m in charge of the camp. Would you like to look at it, sir?”

“Seen ’em—seen heaps of ’em,” said the unknown. “My son was in ’em once—Buffaloes, out Hendon-way. What are _you_?”

“Well, just now I’m a sort of temporary Cook,” said The Prawn, whose manners were far better than William’s.

“Temp’ry! Temp’ry!” the stranger puffed. “Can’t be a temp’ry cook any more’n you can be a temp’ry Parson. Not so much. Cookin’s cookin’. Let’s see _your_ notions of cookin’.”

William had never heard any one address The Prawn in these tones, and somehow it cheered him. In the silence that followed he turned on his face and wriggled unostentatiously through the fern, as a Scout should, till he could see that bold man without attracting The Prawn’s notice. And this, too, was the first time that William had ever profited by the instruction of his Scoutmaster or the example of his comrades.

Heavenly sights rewarded him. The Prawn, visibly ill at ease, was shifting from one sinewy leg to the other, while an enormously fat little man with a pointed grey beard and arms like the fins of a fish investigated a couple of pots that hung on properly crutched sticks over the small fire that William had lighted in the cooking-place. He did not seem to approve of what he saw or smelt. And yet it was the impeccable Prawn’s own cookery!

“Lor!” said he at last after more sniffs of contempt, as he replaced the lid. “If you hot up things in tins, _that_ ain’t cookery. That’s vittles—mere vittles! And the way you’ve set that pot on, you’re drawing all the nesty wood-smoke into the water. The spuds won’t take much harm of it, but you’ve ruined the meat. That _is_ meat, ain’t it? Get me a fork.”

William hugged himself. The Prawn, looking exactly like his namesake well-boiled, fetched a big fork. The little man prodded into the pot.

“It’s stew!” The Prawn explained, but his voice shook.