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They are getting the stinkpots ready for us, I suppose." "Yes, that's it, sir. Do you think it necessary to have the hose ready in case of fire?" "No; if any come on board, the firemen can be called up from the stokehole with their shovels. I think we'll go now upon the bridge. You can come too, Mr Herrick. I may want you to take an order or two."
The air became thick with flying arrows, and with the smoke of grenades and stinkpots flung down upon the boarders out of the enemy's tops; while swords and pikes flashed in the sun, pistols popped, and men shouted and execrated as they cut and slashed at each other; and the glorious tropic morning was filled with the sounds of deadly strife.
But a heavy smoke was gathering over us and the junks, two were indistinct, though they were close aboard of us. Then, as the Teaser glided astern, I saw that the third was smoking, while crash, crash, the others struck our sides, and their crews grappled, hurled their stinkpots on board, and began to swarm over the bulwarks.
Finally, it was loaded with more kinds of missiles, in the way of what Augustine Birrell has called literary stinkpots, than were ever before rammed home in a single charge. It was an audacious move to reverse the initiative and go after a whole race of critics, scribblers and reviewers, who had been badgering honest folks, and blow 'em into kingdom come.
His men succeeded in throwing two pontoons across the ditch, twenty yards wide, and some of his officers reached the wall; but the Taepings met them boldly with a terrific storm of fire-balls, bags of powder, stinkpots, and even showers of bricks.
"Did they?" said Smith eagerly. "Yes, that was plain enough," I said; "and they must have fought it out there till the pirates got the upper hand." "I bet tuppence the beggars pitched stinkpots down through the cabin skylight, and half-smothered them," said Barkins excitedly. "I daresay they did," I replied thoughtfully, "for I did see one of the lockers all scorched and burned just by the deck.
At any rate, this time he was to have such a one as even Captain Kettle might have envied; he was to be chased by a pirate junk, a Cantonese Comanting, with a painted eye in the bow, so that she might find her prey, with a high stern bristling with rifles and cutlasses, so that she might destroy it when found, and with stinkpots at her mastheads and boarding-nets hung round her.
In the course of the argument cannonballs, scimitars, boomerangs, blunderbusses, stinkpots, meatchoppers, umbrellas, catapults, knuckledusters, sandbags, lumps of pig iron were resorted to and blows were freely exchanged.
"They will wipe us off the face of the earth!" he lamented. "There won't be an Englishman left in America! they'll come close in upon us! they'll batter down the fort with their culverins; they'll turn all their swivels, sakers, and falcons upon us; they'll throw into our midst stinkpots and grenades; they'll mow us down with chain shot! Their gunners never miss!"
"I'll teach you to empty your stinkpots on me," cried she, "you pitiful hop-o'-my-thumb coxcomb. What, I warrant you're jealous, you man of lath. Was it for this I condescended to take you to my bed, you poor, withered, sapless twig?" The noise occasioned by this adventure had brought the master of the waggon and me to the door, where we overheard all that passed with great satisfaction.
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