The bulky figure of Eisenbeiss loomed up beside the cot. He put one hand on McCullum’s forehead and the other on his wrist.
“Take your hands off me!” snarled McCullum. “I’m busy.”
“You must not do too much,” said Eisenbeiss. “Excitement increases the morbid humours.”
“Morbid humours be damned!” exclaimed McCullum. “And you be damned, too.”
“Don’t be a fool, man,” said Hornblower, his patience exhausted. “He saved your life yesterday. Don’t you remember how sick you were? ‘It hurts. It hurts.’ That’s what you were saying.”
Hornblower found his voice piping in imitation of McCullum’s yesterday, and he turned his face feebly from side to side like McCullum’s on the pillow. He was aware that it was an effective bit of mimicry, and even McCullum was a trifle abashed by it.
“Sick I may have been,” he said, “but I’m well enough now.”
Hornblower looked across at Eisenbeiss.
“Let Mr. McCullum have five more minutes,” he said. “Now, Mr. McCullum, you were talking about leather fuse‑hoses. Will you please explain how they are used?”
Chapter XIV
Hornblower came forward to where the gunner and his mates were squatting on the deck at work upon the fuse‑hose in accordance with McCullum’s instructions.
“You are making a thorough job of those seams, I hope, Mr. Clout,” he said.
“Aye aye, sir,” said Clout.
They had an old sail spread out to sit on, for the purpose of saving the spotless deck from the warm pitch in the iron pot beside them.
“Five seconds to the foot, this quick match burns, sir. You said one foot of slow match, sir?”
“I did.”
Hornblower bent to look at the work. The leather hose was in irregular lengths, from three to five feet; it was typical of the cross‑grained ways of nature that animals could not provide longer pieces of leather than that. One of the gunner’s mates was at work with a slender wooden bodkin, dragging the end of a vast length of quick match through a section of hose. When the bodkin emerged he proceeded to slip the hose along the quick match until it joined the preceding section.
“Easy with that, now,” said Clout. “We don’t want a break in that match.”
The other gunner’s mate set to work with needle and palm to sew and double sew the new length to its neighbour. The joint completed, Clout proceeded to apply warm pitch liberally over the joint and down the seam of the new section. Eventually there would be a hundred and twenty feet of hose joined and pitched and with quick match threaded all the way through it.
“I’ve picked a couple of sound kegs, sir,” said Clout. “Fifty‑pound kegs, they are. I have bags of dry sand to fill ’em up.”
“Very well,” said Hornblower.
Thirty pounds of powder was what McCullum wanted for his explosive charge, no more and no less.
“I don’t want to shatter the wreck to pieces,” McCullum had said. “I only want to split her open.”
That was a part of McCullum’s special knowledge; Hornblower could not possibly have guessed how much powder, at a depth of a hundred feet would achieve this result. In a long nine‑pounder, he knew, three pounds of powder would throw the shot a mile and a half, random shooting, but this was something entirely different, and in the incompressible medium of water, too. With a fifty‑pound keg and only thirty pounds of powder it was necessary to have some indifferent substance like sand to fill the keg full.
“Send me word the moment you are ready,” said Hornblower, and turned back aft again.
Here was Turner, newly come from the shore, hovering about to attract his attention.
“Well, Mr. Turner?”
Turner kept his distance, his manner indicating that he had something very private to say. He spoke in a low voice when Hornblower walked over to him.
“Please, sir, it’s the Mudir. He wants to visit you. I can’t make him out, but there’s something he wants.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I said — I’m sorry, sir, but I didn’t know what else to do — I said you’d be delighted. There’s something fishy, I think. He said he’d come at once.”