There might be more guns hidden on the high land all round him. The cruisers might still oppose him valiantly, and there was but one hour of daylight remaining, yet he determined to make this last effort for entire success.
"Get back to the _Laird_ as fast as you can," he said to Toddles, the midshipman of the boat, who had been looking with wonder at the change which had come over him.
"Back starboard; give way port. Pull, men, for your lives;" and with bending oars they drove the boat out to sea again, out between the destroyers, and splashed through the heavy seas.
With their boat half-full of water, they pulled under the lee of the _Laird_, hooked on their boat's falls, and were hoisted up with a run.
"Belay those fifty men," Captain Helston told the First Lieutenant, who hurried up to receive him as he scrambled down on deck, "and go to quarters again. I'm going to take the whole squadron inside."
"Oh!" whistled the First Lieutenant, and rushed off.
The bugles blared; signals flew to the _Strong Arm_; men passed the word to the guns' crews that they were going right inside; men bellowed the news down the ammunition hoists, down the engine-room and stokehold gratings, and on deck and down below from the bowels of the ship cheer after cheer burst forth.
Now the _Strong Arm_ had the news, and her men too began to cheer as the two ships gathered way and made straight for the entrance.
As they passed between the two weather-beaten little destroyers, rolling gunwale under, with their funnels white with salt, the crews of the destroyers sprang to "attention" and then broke into cheers. The _Laird_ was right in the entrance now, her boats, swung out at the davits, almost grazed, to port and starboard, the rocky ledges in which the abandoned guns were mounted.
Grandly she answered her helm, swung round the bend in the channel, and steadied as she majestically moved past the deserted landing-stages. The _Strong Arm_, carefully handled by the First Lieutenant, followed her. "No. 2" and "No. 3" dashed in after them, and the whole of the squadron except the _Sylvia_ was inside the island harbour.
The sudden approach of these two ships to the attack had found the forts totally unprepared to make any effective resistance.