Naturally the side of the ship was lined with every idler who could find a place there. The preparation of the charge and the fuse had excited gossip throughout the ship.
Hornblower changed his mind about awaiting the explosion in the gig and mounted to the deck.
“Mr. Jones!” he bellowed. “Is this a rareeshow? Keep the hands at work, if you please.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
He very much wanted to see the explosion himself, but he feared to display curiosity inconsonant with his dignity. And there was the chance—a likely chance, according to McCullum—that there would be no explosion at all. A glance at his watch showed him that it was by now overdue. With an appearance of the utmost indifference he strolled forward to McCullum’s bedside, where McCullum was listening to the reports of his divers.
“Nothing as yet?” said McCullum.
“Nothing.”
“I never trust a fusehose beyond five fathoms,” said McCullum, “even when I handle it myself.”
Hornblower kept back an irritated answer, and gazed out towards the scene of his recent activities. In the choppy water he could just perceive at intervals the dark spot which was the keg that floated the end of the fusehose. He glanced at his watch again.
“Long overdue,” he said.
“Water’s in that hose. You’ll have to use a flyingfuse after all.”
“The sooner the better,” said Hornblower. “How do I set about it?” He was glad for the sake of his precious dignity that he had not waited in sight of the men.
Chapter XV
This time so many men were wanted for the operation that Hornblower was using the launch instead of the gig. As usual the three Ceylonese divers were huddled in the bows, but next to them in the bottom of the boat stood an iron pot of melted pitch, and beside it squatted a sailmaker’s mate, and Mr. Clout, the gunner, sat amidships with the powder keg between his legs. The canvas covering to the keg was incompletely sewn, gaping wide at the upper end. They dropped the grapnel and the launch rode on the little waves beside the little keg that floated with the end of the useless fusehose, a monument to the previous failure.
“Carry on, Mr. Clout,” said Hornblower.
This was something more than exciting. This was dangerous. The divers stripped themselves for their work, and sat up to begin their exercises of inflating and deflating their lungs. There would not be any time to spare later. Clout took the tinderbox and proceeded to strike a spark upon the tinder, crouching low to shelter it from the small breeze which blew over the surface of the Bay. He caught fire upon the slow match, brought it to a glow, and looked over at Hornblower.
“Carry on, I said,” said Hornblower.
Clout dabbed the slow match upon the fuse that protruded through a hole in the end of the powder keg. Hornblower could hear the faint irregular hissing of the fuse as Clout waited for it to burn down into the hole. Among them now, in the middle of the boat, fire was creeping towards thirty pounds of gunpowder. If there were a few powder grains out of place, if the fuse were the least faulty, there would come a sudden crashing explosion which would blow them and the boat to fragments. There was not a sound in the boat save the hissing of the fuse. The spark crept down into the hole. The powder keg at this upper end had a double head, the result of the most careful work by the ship’s cooper. In the space between the two heads was coiled the fuse, whose farther end penetrated the inner head to rest amid the powder. Along that coil stapled to the inner head the fire was now moving unseen, creeping round on its way to dive down along its final length through the inner head.
Clout took from his pocket the canvascovered stopper, and dipped it into the warm pitch.
“Make sure of it, Mr. Clout,” said Hornblower.
Clout rammed the stopper into the hole in the outer head. The action cut off the sound of the hissing fuse, but everyone in the boat knew that the fire was still pursuing its inexorable way inside. Clout smeared pitch thickly about the stopper and then moved out of the way.
“Now, my hearty,” he said to the sailmaker’s mate.
This last needed no urging. Needle and palm in hand, he took Clout’s place and sewed up the canvas cover over the top of the keg.
“Keep those stitches small,” said Hornblower; the sailmaker’s mate, crouching over instant death, was not unnaturally nervous. So was Hornblower, but the irritation caused by the previous failure made him anxious that the work should be well done.
The sailmaker’s mate finished the last stitch, oversewed it, and, whipping out his sheath knife, cut the twine. There could be hardly anything more harmless in appearance than that canvascovered keg. It looked a stupid, a brainless object, standing there in the boat. Rout was already daubing pitch over the newlysewn end; the sides and the other end had been thickly pitched before the keg was put into the launch.
“Now the line,” said Hornblower.
As on the previous occasion a loop of line attached to the keg was passed round the mooring line of the buoy and secured to the keg again.
“Hoist it, you two. Lower away. Handsomely.”
The keg sank below the surface, dangling on the lowering line as the men let it down hand over hand. There was a sudden relief from tension in the boat, marked by a sudden babble of talk.
“Silence!” said Hornblower.
Even though the thing was invisible now, sinking down to the bottom of the Bay, it was still deadly—the men did not understand that. One of the divers was already sitting on the gunwale, a cannonball in his hands—that was a ridiculous moment for Hornblower to remember that he had not carried out his earlier resolution to get in a store of rocks for that purpose—and his chest expanding and contracting. Hornblower would have liked to tell him to make certain to place the powder keg to the best advantage, but that was impossible owing to the difficulties of language. He had to content himself with a glance, half encouragement and half threat.
“Bottom, sir,” announced the seaman at the lowering line.
The diver slipped from the gunwale and vanished under the surface. Down there with the powder charge and the glowing fuse he was in worse peril even than before. “They’ve seen one of their mates blown to bits using a flying fuse off Cuddalore,” McCullum had said. Hornblower wanted nothing like that to happen now. It occurred to him that if it were to happen the launch, with him in it, would be on top of the explosion and turmoil, and he wondered what was the mysterious force that always drove him into voluntarily taking part in dangerous adventures. He thought it must be curiosity, and then he realized that it was a sense of shame as well; and it never occurred to him that a sense of duty had something to do with it too.
The second diver was sitting on the gunwale, cannonball in hand and breathing deeply, and the moment the first diver’s head broke water he let himself ship down and vanished. “I’ve put the fear of God into ‘em,” McCullum had said. “I’ve told ‘em that if the charge explodes without being properly placed they’ll all get two dozen. An’ I’ve said we’re here to stay. No matter how long we try to get the money up. So you can rely on ‘em. They’ll do their best.”
And they certainly were doing their best. Looney was waiting on the gunwale now, and down he went as soon as the second diver appeared. They wanted to waste no time at all. Not for the first time Hornblower peered overside in the attempt to see down through the water, unsuccessfully again. It was clear, and the loveliest deep green, but there was just sufficient lop and commotion on the surface to make it impossible to see down. Hornblower had to take it for granted that deep down below, in semidarkness at least, and amid paralysing cold, Looney was dragging the powder charge towards the wreck and shoving it under the break of the poop. That powder keg under water could weigh little enough, thanks to the upthrust that Archimedes discovered, twenty centuries ago.