“Captain Seymour reporting, sir. ‘E says to say the pirates ‘ave gorn to ground, sir. They’re in a cave, sir, right up in the cliff.”
“How far ahead of here?”
“Oh, not so very fur, sir.”
Hornblower could have expected no better answer, he realised.
“They was shooting at us, sir,” supplemented the messenger.
That defined the distance better, for they had heard no firing for a long time; the pirates’ lair must be farther than the sound could carry.
“Very well. Mr Sefton, carry on, if you please. I’m going ahead. Come along, Gerard.”
He set himself to climb and scramble along the river bank. On his left hand as he progressed he noticed the bank was growing steeper and loftier. Now it was really a cliff. Another stretch of rapids at a corner, and then he opened up a fresh vista. There it was, just as he remembered it, the lofty, overhanging cliff with the waterfall tumbling down it to join the river at its foot, and the long horizontal seam half way up the cliff; open grassland with a few trees on his right, and even the little group of mules on the narrow stretch of grass between, the cliff and the river. Red-coated marines were strung out over the grassland, in a wide semicircle whose centre was the cave.
Hornblower forgot his sweating fatigue and strode hastily, forward to where he could see Seymour standing among men gazing up at the cliff, Spendlove at his side. They came to meet him and saluted.
“There they are, My Lord,” said Seymour. “They took a few shots at us when we arrived.”
“Thank you, captain. How do you like the look of the place now, Spendlove?”
“As much as before, My Lord, but no more.”
“Spendlove’s Leap,” said Hornblower.
He was pressing forward along the river bank towards the cave, staring upwards.
“Have a care, My Lord,” said Spendlove, urgently.
A moment after he had spoken something whistled sharply just above Hornblower’s head; a puff of smoke appeared over the parapet of the cave, and a sharp ringing report came echoing from the cliff face. Then, made tiny by the distance, doll-like figures appeared over the parapet, waving their arms in defiance, and the yells they were uttering came faintly to their ears.
“Someone has a rifle up there, My Lord,” said Seymour.
“Indeed? Perhaps then it would be best to withdraw out of range before he can reload.”
The incident had made little impression on Hornblower until that moment. Now he suddenly realised that the almost legendary career of the great Lord Hornblower might have been terminated then and there, that his future biographer might have had to deplore the ironic chance which, after so many pitched battles, brought him death at the hands of an obscure criminal in an unknown corner of a West Indian island. He turned and walked away, the others at his side. He found he was holding his neck rigid, his muscles tense; it had been a long time since his life was last in danger. He strove to appear natural.
“Sefton will be up with the mortar before long,” he said, after casting about in his mind for something natural to say; and he hoped it did not sound as unnatural to the others as it did to him.
“Yes, My Lord.”
“Where shall we site it?” He swung round and looked about him, measuring ranges with his eye. “It had better be out of range of that rifle.”
His interest in what he was doing immediately erased the memory of his danger. Another puff of smoke from the parapet; another echoing report.
“Did anyone hear that bullet? No? Then we can assume we’re out of rifle shot here.”
“If you please, My Lord,” asked Spendlove. “What range can you expect with a boat mortar?”
“The encyclopedic Spendlove displaying ignorance! Seven hundred yards with a one-pound charge of powder, and a time of flight of fifteen seconds. But here we have to burst the shell sixty feet above the firing-point. A nice problem in ballistics.” Hornblower spoke with perfect indifference, confident that no one knew that at one o’clock that morning he had been studying those figures in the manual. “Those trees there will be useful when we come to sway the mortar up. And there’s level ground within twenty feet of them. Excellent.”