The wind, too, had gone round to almost due north, so that Mr. Trevelyan couldn’t possibly get back for at least three days.
"That ass Trevelyan would put his head into a lion’s mouth, if he thought he could get any news there," he said, and swore angrily. "I’ll have to go and haul him out by the feet, and hope the pirates won’t have snapped his head off. If they haven’t, I will."
We had to go back with him, he couldn’t leave us there, and as soon as his people had set up some more rigging, and done a bit more to make our poop water-tight, and the stern as well, we had to follow the _Ringdove_ back again. It was a fair wind for us, and we didn’t delay her very much. Mr. Rashleigh had offered to let me sleep aboard his gunboat, in order that I could get a good rest; but I had had a jolly good feed in the ward room, and had had a bath, so this made me rather angry. "Just as you like; I don’t care a tuppenny biscuit," he said, and gave me another petty officer to take Scroggs’s place, so at last Sharpe was able to get a little sleep.
I must say that I felt frightened about Jim and Mr. Trevelyan, because neither of them would have thought twice of taking on all the pirates in the world; and they had already had nearly thirty hours to themselves, and I wondered what had been happening. By noon next day we were two miles off the islands, and the channel from which we had escaped; but we had heard or seen nothing of the _Ferret_, and thought that we might possibly have passed her beating back to the rendezvous during the night.
Presently someone shouted that they thought they had heard the noise of a gun. Everyone listened, and in a few minutes we could hear three sharp bangs. "That’s the _Ferret’s_ six-pounder," someone said, and we were all frightfully excited.
The _Ringdove_ signalled us to follow as fast as possible—she had heard them also—and shoved on for all she was worth.
She had all her little sails set, and smoke was pouring out of her funnel.
We saw her enter the channel, half a mile ahead of us, and just as she got into the mouth of it, two clouds of white smoke jumped out from the left-hand side, down by the water’s edge, we saw two great splashes of water leap up behind her stern, and then came the roar. If you’ve never heard the roar of a gun, it’s awfully difficult to describe it; but with cliffs all round, you can hear the noise smashing up against them with a crash, and rolling about and crashing again.