The old Skipper often came round, with "Blucher", to see if things were going all right, and generally stopped to have a yarn with me.
It was from him I learnt that poor old Hoffman had been killed.
"Jolly hard luck after all he’s done for us, sir," I had said; but the Skipper only growled "Umph!" and for some reason or other didn’t seem so sure.
He had managed to get a signal through to the _Vigilant_, and ordered her and the gunboats to shell the town and that six-inch gun which Whitmore had tried to destroy.
From my position, looking across the Chinese town and the little creek crowded with junks, I could see them steaming slowly inshore, and presently they began firing very deliberately. (Of course they had only a few seaman ratings left on board to man the guns.)
Their shells burst all over the town; but it takes a lot of shells to set fire to a house, and it was some time before they got a good fire going. A few shells which didn’t burst ricochetted over our heads, and one or two fell pretty close to the house; but the Skipper didn’t worry about them now. He had lowered little Sally down a shallow well, somewhere in the garden behind the house, and so long as she was safe, he didn’t worry about anyone else.
His idea was that if we set fire to the town, most of the people would go back there to try and extinguish the flames, and that then we would tramp back across the island to where we had landed last night.
Certainly a good number of fellows did go back, and except from that hill on the other side of the paddy fields, from where we had seen Ford’s signal, we were not much bothered with rifle fire.
It was at the back of the house, where the ground fell steeply towards the creek, and was covered with scrubby bushes, that the Chinese seemed now to be trying to force their way in. The lower slopes were simply swarming with them, and more kept moving up the creek in boats to assist them.
The Skipper came across to me. "Umph!" he growled. "You’re a soldier, aren’t you?" and when I had acknowledged the soft impeachment, "Umph! What would you do? I’m not a soldier. ’Old Lest’s’ not much good ashore except after ’birds’. How’d you get out of this mess! Ugh!" and he growled at me as if he would have liked to eat me, and so fiercely that old "Blucher" thought he was in for a row, and cleared off to have a yarn with his chums, the marines. He took me across, behind the house, to have a look at the state of affairs there.