“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.”

“Here they come, My Lord.”

The first of the main body appeared round the distant corner of the cliff, hurrying along the river bank. As they took in the situation they broke into a yell and a run, leaping and scrambling over the broken ground; Hornblower was reminded of hounds rushing up clamouring at sight of their quarry at bay.

“Silence, there!” he roared. “You midshipman, there, can’t you keep your men under control? Mark their names for punishment, and I’ll mention yours to Mr. Sefton.”

Abashed, the seamen formed up quietly. Here came the punts, gliding like fate along the silent pool, towed by working parties scrambling along the bank.

“Orders, My Lord?” asked Sefton.

Hornblower glanced finally round the terrain before issuing them. The sun was long past its zenith as eager men clambered up the trees to fix the tackles; soon the mortar hung dangling from a stout limb while the mortar bed was hoisted out and settled in a smooth spot, the gunner fussing over it with a spirit level to make sure it was horizontal. Then, with violent manual labour, the mortar was swung over and finally heaved up into position, and the gunner drove the keys through the eye-bolts.

“Shall I open fire, My Lord?” asked Sefton.

Hornblower looked over at the distant seam in the face of the s cliff across the river. The pirates there would be watchingthem. Had they recognised this squat object, inconsiderable in size, undistinguished in shape, which meant death to them? They might well not know what it was; they were probably peering over the parapet trying to make out what it was that had occupied the attention of so considerable a body of men.

“What’s your elevation, gunner?”

“Sixty degrees, sir—My Lord.”

“Try a shot with a fifteen-second fuse.”

The gunner went carefully through the processes of loading, measuring the powder charge and wadding it down into the chamber, clearing the touch-hole with the priming iron and, then filling it with fine-grain powder from the horn. He took his bradawl and drove it carefully into the wooden stem of the fuse at the selected point—these were very new-fangled fuses, graduated with ink lines to mark the time of burning—and screwed it into the shell. He lowered the shell down upon the wad.

“Linstocks,” he said.

Someone had been chipping away with flint and steel to catch a spark upon the slow match. He transferred the glow to a second linstock which he handed to the gunner. The gunner, stooping, checked the pointing of the weapon.

“Fuse!” he said. His assistant touched his linstock down, and the fuse spluttered. Then the gunner thrust his glowing match upon the touch-hole. A roar and a billow of powder smoke.

Standing far back from the mortar Hornblower already had his face turned to the sky to track the shell in its flight. Against that light blue there was nothing to be seen—no, there at the height of the trajectory there was a brief black streak, instantly invisible again. A further wait; an inevitable thought that the fuse had failed, and then a distant explosion and a fountain of smoke, down at the base of the cliff somewhat to the right of the cave. There was a groan from the watching seamen.

“Silence, there!” bellowed Sefton.

“Try again, gunner,” said Hornblower.

The mortar was trained round a trifle on its bed. Its bore was sponged out and when the charge had been put in the gunner took a gill measure from his pocket and added a measure of powder to the charge. He pierced the fuse again, lowered the shell into the bore, gave his final order, and fired. A wait; and then a bold puff of smoke hung in the air, seemingly right in line with the seam in the cliff. The wretched people there were watching their fate creeping up on them.

“Fuse a little short,” said Hornblower.

“Range short, I fancy, My Lord,” said the gunner.

At the next shot there was a cloud of dust and a small avalanche from the cliff face high above the seam, and instantly afterwards the burst of the shell on the ground at the near edge of the river where it had fallen.

“Better,” said Hornblower. He had seen the principles of ranging with a mortar—a huge thirteen-inch one—at the siege of Riga nearly twenty years before.