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- Author: Charles John Cutcliffe Hyne
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Humanly speaking, it seemed as though all reasonable precautions had been taken to prevent the affair getting wind till the proper hour came for action. But it was evident (from the black night affair amongst the sand dunes of the Key) that the news of our business had leaked out somewhere, and our anxiety was not small as we awaited the arrival of the troops.
They were to be gleaned from three places in Bermuda, and from eight in the Bahamas; from nine points on the shallow coasts of the Carolinas and Florida; from Tampico, Greytown, and Panama. As an additional safeguard, the collecting steamer was (if possible) not to go inshore at any of these places. She was to lie off, signal, and let the men come off to her in boats.
From this programme it will be seen that Davis’s arrival at the White Tortuga was not a day to be predicted with any certainty. He had given us his own rough idea of the date, making it the I2th of September, and, being a man of the nicest accuracy, we had no fancy he would be very far out in his reckoning.
We looked out for him on the loth and nth; we expected him on the I2th; on the I4th we found occasion to tell one another repeatedly that we were not in the least anxious, and on the succeeding days we owned openly that anxiety was making us ill.
I do not think the General ever slept during that time of waiting. He had always before him a picture of his position if troops failed to arrive, and the ridiculousness of it seared him like a branding iron. The other way round would not have been a tenth so bad. One can conceive (in a time of desperation) of an army without arms taking some shore-town by surprise, wresting for itself weapons and stores, and proceeding to brilliant reckless conquests. But to sit over a shipload of the most modern requirements in mechanical war material and to command but two pairs of hands willing to handle it, was to be set on a pedestal of the cruellest derision.
The 2Oth of September came, the 2ist, the 25th; the month ended and October began. Still there was neither sign nor tidings, and a set, fixed look grew on the General’s face which there was no putting two translations on. In a half-scared way, at the commencement of the new month, I tried to suggest that even if this expedition failed through the troops notcomingto us, it was possible to get up a second. But my chief shook his head decisively. ” If,” he said, staring fixedly out over the blue Gulf waters, ” if I do not leave this place at the head of troops, I stay here for always. I could bear to go home, Birch, as a defeated man, but not as a man who set off full of brilliant hopes and then stopped and made no bid for success.”
“But,” I pleaded, ” the thing could be kept quiet. Or if a few words did leak out, the rumour would soon blow over and be forgotten.”
“I am selfish enough to consider myself first, Birch. I am the principal person who could not forget. I used,” he added plaintively, ” to think myself a brave man once. But I have not the pluck to face life carrying about with me the memory of such a fiasco. It would keep me in eternal thumbscrews. And, besides,” he added softly, ” I should lose something else eternally, something that is dearer to me than all else in the world. No,” he murmured, ” I know her too well. She could love success, she might even bear with failure, but this! I do not think she would even bend to put words to it. Just one look yes, I can picture that look and then, ‘ Away out of my sight, you! ‘ ‘
I let him think on for a while in silence, and then suggested quietly that Davis might come even yet.
“I shall give him time,” said the General, ” till the sixth. After that you will leave here in the Clarindella with Evans. I shall stay. There will be plenty of company for me,” he added,” under the sand.”
IT was in the greatest heat I ever remember that Davis came to us with those reckless English troops we had longed for so desperately. His steamer came in sight during a brazen midday on the fifth of October, the last burst of heat of the season. We lay panting under the mosquito bars in the tents, but when the word was passed, we rushed out into the merciless glare of the sun, and stood there trembling.
There was little certainty about it at first; we saw the ink of smoke staining the cobalt of the heavens where they rested on the western horizon; we took our glasses and found the masts of a steamer sprouting from the waters; and then we watched her with dumb longing as she slowly climbed up over the hill of the sea. She was heading straight for the channel, but closed with intolerable slowness. She showed no bunting; but a high, closed-in wheelhouse (beside other things) bespoke her as an American ship.
Anxiety bit into us like a plague. We guessed a thousand things. Only one matter we were sure about: Davis, when we parted from him, had chartered a British vessel to bring the men up to the White Tortuga Key.
Suddenly from the steamer’s upper bridge there fluttered up in tiny jerks a string of barbaric colours to the wire span between the masts.
“They are signalling,” the General said in a hard, strained voice. ” Four flags, Birch.”
“F. B. Q. C,” I read slowly through my glass as the bunting blew out.
“What’s that mean?” the General asked.
“We must hunt it out in the signal book, and that’s on board.”
“Then why the devil/’ he shouted irritably, “haven’t you got it here, sir?” He started running, halted on the lip of the beach, and hailed the Clarindella. The second mate, paint brush in hand, answered him.
“What are the letters?”
“F. B. Q. C.,” the General roared back.
The man turned doubtingly, read the flags for himself, and went into the chart-house. It seemed half an hour before he came out again, with the paint brush between his teeth, and the book in the fork of a dirty fist. He turned over the pages slowly, found the one he wanted, and ran a finger most deliberately down the column.
“F. B. Q. C., says he’s got ‘ troops on board.’ ‘ “Ah,” said the General, and that was all. He did not utter another word; he did not even turn to acknowledge my congratulations; he stood there with the wavelets tinkling beside his feet like a man just released from the twistings of an ugly dream.
The steamer came nearer at speed, wasting coal lavishly. Someone was pressing her to the top of her speed, and I guessed the name of that man to be Davis. A yellow ball was run up to her foremast truck, and when she opened the neck of the outer channel, and steered on the first two marks, they broke it out a sulphur-coloured flag with a crimson volcano erased in the fly; the new State ensign of Sacaronduca.
We had a boat on the beach, and the crew were standing by. ” Won’t you go out, sir, and meet them?” I asked.
He nodded and went with me to the boat, taking the tiller himself. The American steamer was coming with slow care down the zigzag channel, her rails lined with men’s faces under every kind of headgear. An accommodation ladder came down from its davit with squeaks and jerks, and the steamer slowed up to a halt astern of the Clarindella. As the anchor plunged out of the hause hole, we hooked on alongside.
The men, seeing for the first time the leader they were to serve under, greeted him with wild booming cheers. Davis, hat in hand, stood in the gangway to receive him, got up ” en grand tenue.*’ Davis was very much master of the ceremonies.
Briggs halted at the gangway and made them a sixty-word speech, addressing them as gentlemen (a title which the majority of them had earned by birth) and complimenting them on their businesslike appearance. ” I had looked for good men,” he said, ” but you, gentlemen, appear for my purpose to be of the very best. I cannot promise you a long campaign. I can see that you will bring our enterprise to a brilliant climax before worse troops would have opened the first parallels. And afterwards there will be peace and pleasure for all, and healthiness and prosperity such as few of us have known before.”
“Three more big cheers, boys,” someone sang out, and the hats swirled in the air and the cheers were roared with a fine enthusiasm.
Orders were given to disembark at once. Coffin and Carew were near the gangway already; Fluellen came down from the upper bridge where he had been listlessly smoking cigarettes, and these three superintended the movement.
Davis the General took aside to the chart-house for an obvious reason, and I went with them.
“There can be no two questions about what you wish to hear first, sir,” said Davis as we sat down, ” and I tell you from the beginning it is not to my credit that we are here at all. A miracle was necessary to bring us, and it took someone else to work it. A lady, I think, was the person, or, at any rate, a young woman.”
“Eh?” said the General, leaning over the table with a flush springing up on his face. ” How could she how could anyone, I mean—Look here, Davis, I don’t understand. Hadn’t you better give me your report fully?”
“Certainly, sir. I picked up the steamer as arranged, called with her at all the places mentioned in this paper marked F, and picked up at each the number of men mentioned in the margin. Only one man had failed to appear at his rendezvous, and he was a British Columbian, who got shot in a train riot (of his own raising) on the C. P. R. I had with me by that time Mr. Fluellen, Mr. Coffin, and most of the men, and it only remained for me to pick up Sir William and forty others and come straight on here with (as I reckoned) two days’ margin inside the appointed time. My next place of call was the little village of Santa Clara, on the Mexican Gulf coast. We steamed up there after dark, lying about three miles out on account of shoal water, and made the night signal. It was answered from the beach. An hour afterwards a launch came out a naphtha launch, painted slate colour.”
The General tapped the table thoughtfully. ” I wonder if that was our friend,” he murmured.
“The launch came quickly up with us, making, as it seemed, for the accommodation ladder. I noticed she carried over her bows a spar with what seemed like an oil drum on the end of it; but (and here my culpability, sir, comes in) it never occurred to me to be suspicious of anything wrong.”
Davis paused. ” From what you have said,” the General remarked, ”
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