No Banners, No Bugles by Ellsberg Edward

Author:Ellsberg, Edward [Ellsberg, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781480493773
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-06-24T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

22

ON MY WAY BACK IN MY BOAT TO the King Salvor, I passed close aboard in the darkness her other boat going in the opposite direction, laboring heavily through the seas, deeply loaded down with the ex-fire party, their lieutenant in the sternsheets alongside the coxswain. Silently the two boats passed each other in the night.

I had salvaged a little of the situation in a final compromise with the Laforey’s skipper, but not much. I had persuaded him this time not to order the trawlers to cut the Strathallan adrift again; they were to keep on towing her, even though we could no longer fight the fire. If the King Salvor’s men ever recuperated enough, we’d tackle it again by ourselves when we could. And if they never did, the Strathallan was to be towed anyway till we got to Oran where I could get help from ashore to fight what of course by then would be a far worse fire even than we had first encountered. We would save what then was left of the burning troopship.

Wan and worn in body but far sicker even at heart, I sheered my boat in alongside the port counter of the King Salvor. Captain Harding himself caught the painter the engineer tossed aboard, made it fast. I clambered wearily up over the low rail. I had left for the Laforey an hour before confident of victory; I returned wholly crushed. I had lost, we had lost. Danger, DANGER, DANGER! Run away from it, keep away from it! What, I wondered, was danger anyway? Harding and all his seamen on the King Salvor were apparently too stupid to discern what all sensible men, like the skipper of the Strathallan and that lieutenant off the Laforey, recognized instantly they saw it, even from a distance.

I looked up from the King Salvor’s low fantail to the high side of the Strathallan against which, as usual, the King Salvor’s superstructure was pounding heavily. Everything was about as I had left it an hour before, including, to my astonishment, those twelve hard-as-iron fire hoses still writhing continuously as the King Salvor’s engine room pumps pounded the water at high pressure through them to the Strathallan.

“How come, skipper?” I questioned, pointing to the hoses. “What’s the good of pumping more water through those hoses? We’re just wasting fuel. Shut down and salvage the abandoned hoses if you can. The Laforey’s men who were manning those nozzles last must be just about boarding their own ship by now.”

“Those hoses ain’t abandoned, Captain; they’re still manned with my own men still hanging to ’em! There never was a Laforey man on a single one o’ those hoses. They never touched ’em an’ they none of ’em ever got near the fire!”

“They never manned the hoses? Why, I personally ordered their lieutenant to do exactly that the minute he got aboard here; that’s all we needed ’em for! What, for Christ’s sake, did he do then with all those men all

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