"Can I get along here?" the Orphan asked. "I want to get to the maxims."
A rough Yorkshire voice told him the passage was full of people asleep. "You'd be doing better to go up along; keep away t'other side, it's safer so."
So the Orphan retreated, crossed the open deck in front of the mast and cargo winch, found the ladder leading to the superstructure, and was just going up it, to the shelter of the starboard side of the deck-house, when he saw a stooping figure bending over a stretcher, and Dr. O'Neill's harsh voice growled out: "Here, you! come and lend a hand. Lift that corner of the stretcher."
A wounded man lay on it, very heavily asleep; and as the Orphan lifted, the Doctor pulled free a blanket which had caught under the stretcher, and spread it over him.
He had not recognized the Orphan, who promptly darted up the ladder lest he should do so, and stop him going to find those maxims. He groped his way to the ladder, which he knew must lead down to the for'ard "well" deck; found it, climbed down, and then the fo'c'sle itself was in front of him, and an iron ladder to climb up. He was up it like a redshank, and at last found himself right in the bows of the _River Clyde_.
Two almost simultaneous glares from the field-guns lighted the clouds and showed up, for a moment, the high battlemented curtain-walls and the bastions of Sedd-el-Bahr castle, and showed the fo'c'sle he stood on, the cables, the capstan winch, some sand-bags piled up in the bows, some men standing behind them, and three box-shaped structures--two on the port side and one on the starboard.
The Orphan, holding his breath, crept forward to look over the sand-bags in the bows, treading on hundreds of empty cartridge-cases which rolled about the deck.
Another glare from the field-guns, and he saw that one of the men standing there, peering through his glasses into the gloom below, was an officer of the Royal Naval Division--the "R.N.D."--a Sub-lieutenant, wearing a naval cap with the silver anchor badge. (He actually belonged to the Armoured Car Section.)
"Hello! Who are you? Where've you sprung from?" this officer called out.
The Orphan told him, and, thirsting for information, asked what was happening. "What's going on, sir?"