I was more lucky than Jim, because I did have something to do, and went with Mr. Trevelyan very early in the morning to bring off Mr. Hoffman’s Chinaman. We had to hang about near a big rock at the back of the island, and directly it was light "stand by" for a piece of red bunting to be waved from shore. We must have been there for more than an hour, and thought that he had either gone back to Mr. Whitmore in the steam cutter, or perhaps been collared by the pirates. When we did see it wave, we fetched him off pretty quickly, and shoved along back to the _Vig_ just as hard as we could go. You see, we were certain that he had good news, because Mr. Trevelyan drew pictures of a thin little man and a girl and showed them to him, and he seemed to understand, and nodded his head and pointed to the island. He kept on saying "Vely good" all the way off to the ship. I don’t think he knew any more English words.
On our way back we watched the six-inch gun firing, and dropping her shells or shot all over the place. Some of them fell very close to the _Vigilant_, and we wondered why Captain Lester didn’t reply.
"How would you like to be there?" Mr. Trevelyan asked.
"Ra—ther!" I told him, and he smiled. "It’s all right if you’re doing something yourself, but it’s a jolly different thing when you’re simply waiting for them," and that made me think of my horrible funk when those two shore guns had fired point blank at the _Sally_, and I was rather sorry I had spoken.
Mr. Trevelyan laughed when he saw them all falling in for "Divisions" on board the _Vig_. "That’s ’Old Lest’ all over," he said. "I bet he’s in a towering passion."
Jim told me afterwards that he didn’t like the shooting a little bit, and if they all hadn’t been so afraid of the Captain, they would have hated it all the more. That was the day we wrote our reports—the _Ringdove_ coming made the Commander remember about them—and I put it all down very clearly, how I had done my best to escape from the four junks, and why I had been obliged to run down through the middle of them. I told exactly how I and all those who were left of the _Sally’s_ crew had brought Mr. Travers off in the _Ringdove’s_ cutter, and put in a lot about Scroggs and Sharpe and all of them. You see, I wanted Captain Lester to get Scroggs’s wife as big a pension as possible, because of all the children.