I couldn’t keep miserable very long, though, because we unmoored directly after dark, and at last I was really off to join the _Vigilant_, and in the excitement forgot about Jim. Boats had kept coming and going, and I hadn’t taken any notice of them, and they must have come over in the last boat, because just as we cast off someone banged me on the back, and there was Jim Rawlings, grinning all over his jolly ugly red face, and behind him was that ass Dicky Morton, the junior of the three cadets, with his silly little eyes almost sticking out of his head with excitement.
"We’re both sent to the _Vigilant_," he squeaked out.
Well, Jim coming too made me just completely happy, although it was a bit toned down by having Dicky Morton with us too. "He’s not a bad little chap when you get used to him," Jim told me, but that was Jim "all over". He was the most unselfish fellow you ever met in the world, would have given you his last shirt if you asked him, and was always standing by to give a leg up to silly idiots like Dicky.
He hadn’t the least idea why he’d been sent; he’d just been given an order, signed by the Commodore, and he hadn’t heard whether Captain Lester had telegraphed or not. We tried to think that our telegram had just done the trick, but then that did not explain why Dicky was here. We didn’t worry about anything, though, for long, and simply counted the minutes, and kept our eye on the cherub log all the time. You can imagine what we felt like when we ran into a fog, three days out, and had to crawl along at about five knots, rolling about in a swell on our starboard bow. Our navigator was much too wily a bird to try and make the Chusan group of islands from the south in that kind of weather, and that meant another twelve hours steaming; but at last the fog blew away, the sun came out long enough for him to take a sight, and away we went again.
The fifth day out from Hong-Kong we made the islands—you can bet your boots we were on deck—dodged in between several of them, and then the harbour of Tinghai suddenly opened out, and far away, under a hill, we could just see a white spot. "That’s your ship, the _Vigilant_," a signalman told us as he hoisted the _Tyne’s_ number. We got nearer and nearer; she got bigger and bigger. Presently the signalman hauled down the pendants, and we knew that the _Vigilant_ had seen us, and I wondered whether Captain Lester would be frightfully angry or not. I was really in a funk at meeting him, chiefly because of that telegram.