That was their hope. They were still in the English Channel, which is the main street of Northern Europe. Here the traffic is usually thick. But for the moment there was no sign of smoke or sail.
Clifford turned to the purser.
“Whether we escape or not, I owe you something, my friend,” he said, and Haki smiled broadly.
“We ought to have got away before,” he said, “but the captain was scared. But the radio made him skip!”
“The radio?”
The purser put his hand in his pocket and took out a soiled scrap of paper.
“I got this last night,” he said, and Clifford read the scribbled words with difficulty:
Get away from ship before seven o’clock. Take with you anybody who value lives. If Miss Bray aboard take her with you. Admiralty sending destroyer Sunbright to overhaul you. Soldier.
“That’s the Major—we called him ‘Soldier,’” explained the purser. “But the Sunbright mightn’t catch us—and if they did, Fing-Su wouldn’t leave anybody alive who could tell on him.”
Clifford had been puzzled as to what the captain meant by ‘ha-ha gun,’ but very soon came an unpleasant explanation.
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
They had brought a maxim-gun into action. The bullets threw up a cloud of spray a little ahead of them, and the skipper pushed over the helm and went about on another tack. They were less than five hundred yards from the ship’s side, Cliff realized, which meant that it would be a comparatively simple matter, once the light grew stronger—and it was improving every second—to riddle the boat with shots. Fing-Su would leave no trace of the men in whose hands was his very life.
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
This time the aim was high; the bullets smacked through the canvas of the sail. One sent a splinter of wood flying from the mast.
“Keep down!” yelled the purser, waving frantically.
For the third time since they escaped he looked at his big silver watch.
The Umveli had increased speed and was now running abreast and bearing in upon them. Again the Negro captain tacked and came round in a circle, running back on his own course. Individual marksmen were now firing, and the bullets were coming uncomfortably close. And above the ‘click-clock’ of rifles came the boom of a heavier weapon.
“Seven-pounder,” said Joe Bray laconically, and even as he spoke something smacked against the mast.
There was a crackling and tearing sound, and mast and sail went limply over the side.
“Now we’re finished, I think,” said the purser, and with great sang-froid took his revolver from the holster at his waist and turned the cylinder.
They were lowering boats now from the Umveli. Three, one after the other, struck the water. She had reduced speed and was going astern. But the captain was by no means beaten. With the aid of one of his sailors he had flung mast and sail overboard, and in another instant the oars rattled into rowlocks.
“All mans pull!” he roared, and Clifford obeyed the injunction.
But the whale-boat was big and cumbersome compared with the light cutters that were pursuing them.
“We want a miracle,” said Cliff, and as he spoke the miracle happened.
Two boats were already pushing off from the ship; the third was filling with sailors, when from the lower deck came a brilliant flame and the deafening crash of an explosion; it was followed almost instantly by a second and louder explosion.
For a second there was silence, and then a pandemonium of whistles sounded. The two boats which had already pulled off turned and headed for the ship. Smoke poured along the decks so dense that it obscured a view of her funnel in the early morning light.
“She blow up what for?” asked the black skipper huskily, and then: “Pull, you mans!”
And the oars rose and fell. Then, of a sudden:
“She’s sinking,” gasped Joe Bray, and he spoke the truth.
Half a hundredweight of the most powerful explosive, which the ingenious Major Spedwell had timed to explode twenty-four hours after the ship had sailed, had not only blown a hole through the deck, but had ignited the munitions stored in the hold. The Umveli lay over on her side like something grown suddenly weary. Dense masses of smoke poured out of the exposed hatches; they saw the gleam of flames, and then a wild scramble for the boats. In their amazement they rested on their oars, watching the strange sight, until the purser’s voice uttered a warning.
“We’d better get as far away from the ship as we can,” he cried.
A few seconds after he spoke there was a third explosion, and the Umveli broke in half and went jaggedly out of sight in a wild confusion of foaming waters.
There were four boats afloat, and they were heading in their direction.
“Row!” yelled the skipper, and again they gripped the oars.
But their effort was not to be sustained. Turning his head, Clifford Lynne saw a black billow of smoke on the right side of the horizon, and could just distinguish in the dawn light a long grey shape…
They reached His Britannic Majesty’s destroyer Sunbright twenty-five minutes before the remnant of a fear-maddened crew came to the destroyer’s side, throwing their rifles in the water, offering everything for safety.
Fing-Su was not amongst the party, and when Clifford interviewed one of the shivering officers he learnt of the Emperor’s fate in a few pungent words.
“Fing-Su…I saw his head…and his body…a little piece here, a little piece there.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Eight months later, Mr Joe Bray brought a bride to his quaint house on the hills above Siangtan. In the marriage register he had been described as ‘Joseph Henry Bray, bachelor,
“And I might tell you,” said Clifford ominously, “that men have got penal servitude in this country for making false statements on their marriage certificates.”
To his orphaned bride Joe suggested a cause for Clifford Lynne’s implacable hostility.
“Me being so young makes him look old,” he suggested; and Mabel was in complete agreement, for she had spent that particular morning in the Rue de la Paix and had gathered to herself many wonderful possessions that only a millionaire can bestow upon his wife.
“The difference,” said Joe complacently, as he drew through a straw the luscious drink with which a waiter (privately instructed) had provided him—“the difference between our marriage and his is this, Mabel: ours is a love match, and his is, so to speak—well–-“
“He would never have married Joan but you told him to,” said Mabel scornfully. “I hope Joan will be happy. I have my doubts, but I hope she will be.”
Mabel went to Siangtan, and had a reception from the European inhabitants of that noble town that was due to one who bore a family relationship with the Concession. And, curiously enough, she liked Siangtan, for it is better to be a great person in a small place than a nobody in Sunningdale.
One day there came to them a letter from Joan which suggested that the unhappiness of marriage was an experience to be indefinitely postponed. Mabel read the letter and sniffed, not uncharitably.
“‘Carrying on the line’? What does she mean by that?” she asked, having her suspicions.
Joe coughed and explained.
“That was my idea too,” he said modestly.
THE END
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