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- Author: Charles John Cutcliffe Hyne
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However, we were not given much time for sentimental inspection. We were received up the side with machine-made etiquette; we were conducted along decks clean as a dinner plate by an armed guard; and, in fact, underwent a reception which would have been equally appropriate for a pair of ambassadors or a brace of convicts. We were marched off to a quarter-deck and halted by a skylight, and an officer went and reported our presence to Meadey on the bridge, who then for the first time became officially aware of our exist, ence, though as a matter of fact he had been staring at our arrival for a good quarter of an hour.
He accepted his junior’s report I half wondered he did not ask for it in writing and walked down to us with short, quick steps. He was a stuffy little man with a great deal of uniform, clean shaved, and with a fine, plum-coloured complexion. His acknowledgment of us was guarded. I admired the amount of courteous chill he managed to throw into it. He looked at Fluellen with a distant glance of recognition, but without remark on a previous meeting, and Fluellen did not choose to claim acquaintanceship. And so there the three of us stood on those bleached deck planks of Her Majesty’s, as stiff and unbending a trio as you could wish to find.
Whether we two newcomers liked or disliked it, one could see that Meadey fairly revelled in this prim stiffness; thought it showed a proper deference to his service and himself, I suppose; and instantly checked any tendency towards a thaw, and as that was his mood we threw ice on his ice, and capped his dryness by still greater aridities.
It appeared that Carew, cruising at large along the coast, had come upon an English merchant steamer which suited his fancy more than the vessel which was then carrying him, and he had forthwith (according to Meadey) “pirated her.”
“Did he kill her people?” asked Fluellen.
“It was not reported to me that he did,” said Meadey.
“Did he set them ashore?”
“I have not been informed of it.”
“Then did he give them over his old steamer in exchange?”
“So I hear.”
“I suppose he would call that requisitioning. May I take it that he gave an order for payment?”
The captain of the Rabbit allowed himself a little smile of triumph. ” You may take it that he did, sir. He gave an order on the treasury at Los Angeles; the master of the captured steamer applied to me for protection; and I have come to help him cash the draft and secure damages.”
“I see,” said Fluellen. ” Then let me congratulate myself, Captain Meadey, on having warned you that you propose committing an act of rank piracy. You set yourself up as a policeman of the seas; well and good. You come across the tracks of this irresponsible ruffian, Carew, who gives a false address did it never occur to you, sir, that the address might be false? and here you are within an ace of levying your distraint at the wrong door.”
“I do not know officially that it was the wrong door.”
“I have the honour of telling you officially that it was. I have given you my credentials. You cannot avoid knowing officially my name and official position in this country. Incidentally I might venture that this man Carew is in rebellion against Sacaronduca, and my Government has put a price on his head.”
“Ah,” said Meadey, “and you are attached to the Government of?”
“General Don Esteban Puentos.”
“We do not recognise him. Officially, as far as England is concerned, Mr. Maxillo is President of Sacaronduca.”
“You are out of date,” said Fluellen. He looked significantly round the decks of the gunboat, and contemptuously at her masts. ” Somewhat dangerously out of date, I should say. You would find it advantageous, Captain Meadey, to keep somewhat more abreast of the times.”
The little stuffy man’s face deepened in tint. “Sir,” he said, “you wish to save the harbourdefences of your ar recently adopted country from destruction. Your arguments are ingenious and worthy of a man who has ar changed his nationality. But at the same time my clear duty is to secure compensation for the outrage on this British steamer. However, I am willing to offer you a compromise. If you and your Mr. Birch will come with me, and take this Carew whom you disown, and assist at his hanging as a common pirate, then I on my part am willing to forego my operations against Los Angeles, at any rate till the matter has been referred to my Government at home.” He looked at his watch. ” It is now eleven fifty-one. My ultimatum said twelve o’clock, and the cruiser has not yet been surrendered. ” If you do not agree to these new terms, I open fire in nine minutes.”
Fluellen had not relished the hint about being a renegade, and his answer contained a touch of acid. He said that personally he had no inclination to prevent Captain Meadey committing suicide; but had a kindness for his crew; and moreover took an archaeologist’s interest in the Rabbit. “It would be a pity,” he said, ” that such an interesting link in the naval architecture of the past should be wantonly destroyed. So, sir,” said he, “Mr. Birch and I have much pleasure in permitting you to carry out the work for which we ourselves have been detailed off by President Puentos; and until you have captured Sir William Carew, or satisfied yourself that the task is too big for you, we shall be pleased to stay here as your guests on the Rabbit.”
“My hostages, if you please,” said Meadey. “Kindly send away your launch, and then, if you please, come below and give me your statement of the case in writing.”
IT turned out we were in touch with old friends or perhaps I should say old acquaintances. We had given a few hurried messages to the Texan lieutenant, and he had carried them off in the naphtha launch in Los Angeles Harbour; Meadey had pronounced his formal stilted orders for the Rabbit to get under weigh for her new cruise, and when these orders had passed through about fifteen hands they came into effect; and whilst the bustle of unarming ship was going on overhead Fluellen and I had gone below under the chaperonage of a sub-lieutenant.
The sub-lieutenant, a cheerful irresponsible creature, after the manner of his kind, suggested a drink, belauding the Rabbit’s cocktails, which we presently sampled; and in the first minute of talk frankly stated his relief at our arrival. “The skipper,” said this ingenious youth, ” got let in from a promise to get the Clarindella paid for, and he’d have had his try if your batteries had been as strong as Cronstadt.”
“They are pretty nearly as strong,” said Fluellen.
“Well, any way they are strong enough to, settle our hash without much argument, and I don’t want to get killed just yet without a show for my money. I say, doesn’t our steward make good cocktails here?”
“Fine,” said Fluellen. ” What was that you were saying about the Clarindella? She’s not out in these seas now, is she?”
“She is, unless this Carew man’s sunk her. She was tramping for cargo when he took her over, and she’d her owner on board, and it was the owner who came across us and kicked up all the fuss. By Jove, to hear him talk, you’d think that half the British Empire had been looted. But I think he knew what he was up to pitching his yarn that way. He quite got over our skipper. I say, though, do you fellows know the Clarindella? What’s she like?”
“We ought to. Birch ought to know her owner pretty thoroughly, too, for that ‘matter, if she hasn’t been sold recently. You’ve heard of our reforming expedition to Sacaronduca?”
“Who -hasn’t? By Jove, I say, you have been envied. But they talk of you as filibusters, though, for all that, and say you have just been hired by Holsteins for the job.”
“Very likely. I don’t suppose our doings and objects have been very accurately reported. For instance, you don’t appear to know that the whole of the war material for the expedition was carried out in this same Clarindella which you were talking about.”
“By Jove,” said our entertainer, ” here is her owner. I’ll leave you fellows to compare notes with him. You must excuse me now; I’ve got to go on deck again. Steward, bring these gentlemen three more cocktails.”
The owner of the Clarindella greeted me almost tearfully, and when I introduced Fluellen I thought he would have wept over his hand. ” I shall never forget the business I did with you, Mr. Birch. It was most profitable to me. I am proud to know any friend of yours. Ah, sir, but I’ve had sad losses since that day you and I signed our names across an honest sixpenny charterparty stamp.”
He was the same small, stuffy creature, with the stutter and the perpetual perspiration, that he had been when I dealt with him before, and his heart was still wrapped up in the welfare of this same middle-class steamboat.
“If it had been one of my other vessels, Mr. Birch, I should not have minded so much; but the Clarindella ” he broke off again and passed a tremulous hand across his eyes. ” I am out here trying to make a regular line of my boats, calling at fixed ports, you understand, and running so far as might be on scheduled time. That was my ambition. But cargo is very hard to find, and the landings are bad roadsteads and surf beaches for the most part. And then this man, this pirate, this Carew comes up and has taken the ship before I knew what he was doing. He runs up from astern with a signal flying that-he wanted to speak, and brings to slap across our* bows. He’d his boats in the water before you could say knife; and his men across and on our decks before I could stop ‘em. ‘ You’ve no right here,’ says I, ‘ I’m a British subject.’
“‘If you were a Chinese subject or a Liberian it would give me equal concern/ says he.
“‘It will be piracy to take this ship against my will,’ says I. ‘ I defy you to do it.’
“‘You may defy me till you’re black in the face,’ says he. ‘ If you don’t get over the side peaceably, you’ll be put.’”
Fluellen smiled grimly. ” I can imagine Carew saying it.”
“We’d no show for resistance. He’d a hundred ruffians at his heels, and all told we were only seventeen on the Clarindella, so I had to take the promise to pay which he offered, and row across to the old steamer he’d got tired of. I’d only a dozen hands to work her. He openly offered big bribes for anyone who’d volunteer to join him, and five of my beauties stayed. ” I hope,” he added with heavy viciousness, “they cut his
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