An Awfully Big Adventure

The late afternoon sunlight was slanting across the heather when the "Mantis" came puffing round a bend of the river. Contrary to the established custom and traditions of British men-of-war, her crew maintained a breathless and high-spirited dialogue with the Captain, who seasoned it with shrill invective directed at a routed enemy, invisible and presumed to be in full flight amid the bracken. At the bend alluded to, the Captain of the "Mantis" turned and shouted encouragement to the "Moth," who, some hundred yards astern, was negotiating some rapids and presumably under heavy fire. "I say, do buck up!" he cried. "The Turks are retreating like anything!" "I can't buck up," wailed the Captain, officers and ship's company of the "Moth." "There's a bramble all caught up in my petticoat." "Take the beastly thing off then," commanded the Senior Officer, and turned to con his ship through the tortuous shallows of the Upper Reaches. The fir-clad and boulder-strewn slopes of the valley had given place to the open moor, where the stream abandoned its headlong course and broadened into wide pools and shelving beaches of gravel strewn with bleached twigs. The "Tarantula" was discernible still among the cataracts, while in the far distance the Main Army clambered deftly from boulder to boulder and fended off the onslaughts of flies with a frond of bracken. Although the fire of the enemy had perceptibly slackened, the casualties aboard the "Mantis" mounted steadily. Three times the Commanding Officer quitted his ship to wallow in his gore on the springy turf, only returning on each occasion to find the Quartermaster on his knees in the shallows, delivering valedictory rhetoric at his post as his life's blood ebbed. The barred and speckled trout fled up-stream like bronze flashes as the irresistible advance continued. The shrill bark of the "Mantis's" gun searched the hollows and peat bogs for the possibly lurking rearguard of the rout, and sent the shy kingfisher darting ahead of the bedraggled white ensign in the van of the pursuit. Finally the "Mantis" dropped anchor from sheer lack of breath and prepared to disembark a landing party. Her Captain, carrying the ensign and armed to the teeth, climbed on to a lichen-scarred boulder in quest of the remainder of the Naval Forces. "Come on!" he shouted, and the sound of his voice was swallowed by the vast solitude of the moor. The "Moth" had forsaken the waterways and from discreet glimpses afforded by a furze bush bordering the stream was proceeding in execution of previous orders. The "Tarantula"it was useless to disguise the inglorious factwas engaged in picking blackberries and sharing them with the Main Army. Far out of reach of hail or reproach, the advance guard of that historic force, hitherto invisible, was alone unquenched in spirit and energy, and rushed to and fro with wagging tail among the bewildering blend of scents left by the passage of rabbit, vole and otter. The Captain of the "Mantis" permitted his nostril to curl contemptuously. "Pouf!" he said, and addedfor the benefit of the officers and men of the landing party, desperadoes all"what can you expect from girls?" His fellow-desperadoes, presumably from motives of chivalry or disgust, vouched no reply, and their leader turned to sweep the path of the retreat through a pair of mother-of-pearl opera glasses, suspended from his neck by a piece of string. Then instinctively, like a wild animal surprised, all the supple grace of his young body stiffened tense and rigid. Not fifty yards up-stream sat a man nursing a rifle across his knees.

Dettagli