Hornblower 10 - Hornblower in the West Indies by Forester C. S

Author:Forester, C. S.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sphere

Hornblower 10 - Hornblower in the West Indies

“He missed me, My Lord,” he said.

“Thank God,” said Hornblower. “Gunner, fire.”

The wind may have shifted a little, or the powder was not consistent. The shell burst in the air just below the level of the cave — so that the fuse must have been efficient — but some considerable distance from the cliff.

“Fire again,” said Hornblower.

There it was. A burst of smoke, a fountain of fragments, right in the cave. Horrible to think of what was happening there.

“Fire again.”

Another burst right in the cave.

“Fire again — No! Wait.”

Figures were appearing on the parapet — there had been some survivors, then, from those two bursts. Two figures — tiny dolls in the field of the telescope — seemed to hang in the air as they leaped. The telescope followed them down. One struck water in a fountain of spray. The other fell on the rocky shore, broken and horrible. He raised the telescope again. There was the ladder being thrown over from the parapet. There was a figure — and another figure — climbing down. Hornblower shut the telescope with a snap.

“Captain Seymour! Send a party forward to secure the prisoners.”

He did not have to see the horrors of the cave, the mutilated dead and the screaming wounded. He could see them in his mind's eye when Seymour made his report of what he found when he ascended the ladder. It was done, finished. The wounded could be bandaged and carried down to the beach on litters to the death that awaited them, the unwounded driven along with them with their wrists bound. A courier could be sent off to the Governor to say that the pirate horde had been wiped out, so that the patrols could be called in and the militia sent home. He did not have to set eyes on the wretched people he had conquered. The excitement of the hunt was over. He had set himself a task to do, a problem to solve, just as he might work out a longitude from lunar observations, and he had achieved success. But the measure of that success could be expressed in hangings, in dead and in wounded, in that shattered, broken-​backed figure lying on the rocks, and he had undertaken the task merely on a point of pride, to re-​establish his self-​esteem after the indignity of being kidnapped. It was no comfort to argue with himself — as he did — that what he had done would otherwise have been done by others, at great cost in disease and in economic disturbance. That only made him sneer at himself as a hair-​splitting casuist. There were few occasions when Hornblower could do what was right in Hornblower's eyes.

Yet there was some cynical pleasure to be derived from his lofty rank, to be able to leave all this after curt orders to Sefton and Seymour to bring the landing party back to the shore with the least delay and the shortest exposure

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