"More power to his elbow," I said. "We all are, more or less."
We had left orders for the gunboats to follow us—left them with Macpherson the missionary, so felt sure that they would fetch up, sooner or later, even if the _Huan Min_ missed them.
The island for which we were now steering was right away in the SE. corner of the archipelago, one of a group marked on the chart as the Hector Group (it was so named after a transport which was wrecked there in 1851).
It was there that Hobbs and his daughter were reported to be by Hoffman, and it took the Skipper but a very few minutes to determine that he would go there first and leave Travers till later.
As it happened, by great good fortune, there was no necessity to regret his decision, because just after dark we sighted the lights of a steamer, flashed the "demand" from our masthead lamp, and it turned out to be the _Ringdove_ on the way back to Tinghai. I wasn’t on the bridge at the time, and had only just reached the deck after she was reported to me, when I heard men cheering, and a midshipman rushed up, "Mr. Travers is on board, sir, and well, sir! Isn’t that grand?"
It’s extraordinary how good—and bad—news comes in lumps together, and this seemed suddenly to make me feel ten years younger. I was up that bridge in a "brace of shakes". We had stopped our engines, and the _Ringdove_ was flashing across a long signal, and everyone bent eagerly forward to try and take it in, whilst the signalman wrote it down, and clicked the shutter of his hand lamp to show the _Ringdove_ that he had taken it in correctly.
Most of us were so much out of practice that we only got a word or a number here or there, but enough to know that she and her junks had lost a lot of men. At last the _Ringdove_ had finished, and the signalman brought his signal pad to the Captain.
"Read it out, Truscott; your eyes are younger than mine."
Someone held up a lantern, and I read: "Have rescued Lieutenant Travers uninjured from island of Chung-li Tao Group. No news of whereabouts of Hobbs or daughter. Tender _Sally_ sunk by gun fire; tender _Ferret_ wrecked and abandoned, guns saved. Losses—_Ringdove_, one man wounded, since dead, two wounded; _Sally_, four[#] men killed, Mid Morton, two men wounded; _Ferret_, two men killed, five wounded."