“I’m out of my reckoning, now,” said Harry; “but Donald thinks it must be the top of Macpherson’s Hill, on the Cornwallis Road; anyhow, Macpherson’s inn has gone.”
“Give way, lads,” cried the sergeant; and he steered the long police-boat towards the spot his young passengers had pointed out. It was a long hard pull, and the boat took up other passengers before she got to the end of it. She took off a man from a shea-oak, and a woman and two children he had lashed to branches higher up. The man had been made quite stupid by the terrible time he had had. It was as much as two policemen could do to drag him off the branch to which he clung, and then he tumbled into the boat like a sack of sand. When the poor scratching, screaming woman was got into it, she had to be tied again, because she had gone mad. About half a mile farther on, the boat came to a hut flooded up to the eaves; and “Whisht!” cried Donald (as if the rain and wind and chopping waves would mind him), “there’s a body in there.”
Nobody else had heard anything to show it, but the sergeant steered the boat alongside the roof, and then they all heard thumps against it, and muffled shouts of “Holy murther! Hooroo! Bad luck to ye!” They pulled the sheets of sodden bark off, and pulled out an old Irish shepherd, who had been bumping up against the rafters, astride upon a box, with a rum-bottle in his fist, like the publican’s Bacchus on his barrel.
The water shoaled as the boat neared the top of Macpherson’s Hill. On the sloppy ground a score or two of men, women, and children had congregated and had managed to light a fire. They had two or three pannikins and some bottles and quart pots amongst them, and were drinking and handing one another tea and grog in a strange, stupefiedly tranquil fashion. There were snakes on the little island also, but they were too scared to bite; and drenched native cats, and quail, and bush-rats, and swamp-parrots, and bandicoots, and diamond-sparrows, and lizards, and spiders, and scorpions, and green and yellow frogs, and centipedes, and praying Mantises, were muddled up in a very miserable “happy family.”
As soon as the people on the little island saw that the boat grounded within a couple of yards of its brink, they woke up from their trance, and rushed into the water, clamorously demanding that either themselves, or somebody they cared for more than they did for themselves, should be carried off first. The sergeant had to make his men back water, and threaten to carry nobody, before he could quiet the poor bewildered creatures, made drunk by sudden hope. Then they, together with the Irish shepherd, were carried over by instalments to a point of undrowned land nearer than what remained above water of Jerry’s Town (Harry and Donald meanwhile staying on the island, and tucking into the tea and stale damper given them, for they were as hungry and thirsty as hunters). Then the boat at last came back, and carried them to Jerry’s Town, with the man and woman, and two scared shivering little children that had been taken off the shea-oak.